I got an email recently from a client with a great question. It came from a webinar about content marketing. This client wanted to know how she could create a smooth flow of information between marketing and sales. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, so I dug a little deeper and got to the bottom of it.
It’s end of year and 90 percent of our clients’ marketing teams have reached out for guidance on their 2017 marketing and sales budgets. This one question in particular struck me as outside the box. She was looking for a way to actually show her dealer owner that the sales team needed to be a greater part of her inbound marketing initiatives in order to generate more inbound leads. This is the actual reply.
Note #3. In every inbound marketing workshop I hold with our copier dealer clients, I tell them that the sales team MUST BCC the marketing team on their email replies to customers and prospects who have asked a question. Why? Because it turns into a great blog post.
So here you go – the answer to: How can I create a smooth flow of information between marketing and sales at my office technology dealership?
- Marketing team attends AND PARTICIPATES in every sales meeting. Be active – when they’re sharing stories from the field (I hope they do that), ask questions and write down the story to see what kind of content you can create from it. Then share that with them in the next sales meeting via a PowerPoint presentation.
- Set a quarterly meeting where you get to take over the sales meeting and present all the collateral and blogs that have been created. Then walk them through how to share it on LinkedIn. You’ll have to do that multiple times before they remember how to do it.
- Push them on the BCC concept. That’s where every time they are answering a client question, they BCC you so you can potentially turn it into a blog post.
- You can also share landing pages with them. Remind them that they need to link to the landing page and send to prospects and clients to get them to download info. They forget. No matter how many times you tell them, you need to put the landing page on a screen and show them again. Follow up with an email. I would set up an internal workflow — nothing fancy, just something that triggers content to them every week or so to remind them that they have materials they should be emailing directly to clients and prospects. Be sure that you have one for them to send to the clients and one that has cookies turned off so that the rep can actually register his or her customer. If the rep completes the regular landing page, they’ll screw up the contact record IP and it will get messy in the database.
- Show them the data. Bring up their analytics and show them where leads have come in through the website, how organic traffic has grown, how many folks are coming in via social channels….. context is great for reps. If one rep is sharing socially and actually getting folks to come to the site, call them out as a rock star.
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the ProspectBuilder website.
