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Sales and marketing are often seen as two things that just naturally fit together, like peanut butter and jelly. It’s true these two teams have complementary roles and that close alignment of sales and marketing is critical to business success. However, it’s also important to recognize that sales and marketing functions have some fundamental differences, and these teams bring different skills to the table when it comes to helping the business generate revenue.
So, forget about PB&J. A volleyball analogy is more useful when explaining how sales and marketing actually “fit” together. Think of marketing as the setter, the player with a delicate touch whose sole job is to tee the ball up for an attacking player to score. Sales is the outside hitter, the lead attacker who typically receives the set and “spikes” the ball to score a point.
Both the setter and hitter are critical to the success of the team, but they are very different players. That’s marketing and sales. Marketing builds awareness of your brand and tees up leads; sales take those leads and, hopefully, converts them into paying customers. And to perform their jobs well, they need different skills and strategies.
In this post, we’ll look at the differences between sales and marketing strategies and consider best practices that both sales and marketing can use to be fully effective.
A sales strategy is a plan that details the sales team’s core objectives and the steps for sales success. It outlines how the business will sell its products or services, assigns key responsibilities to team members throughout the sales funnel, and sets sales goals and reporting. Sales strategies focus on building and nurturing customer relationships, moving customers through the sales funnel, and closing deals.
Sales teams use various approaches to engage prospects and win their business. These techniques can range from passive to proactive.
A passive strategy relies on potential customers finding and engaging with the company on their own. This approach often depends on inbound marketing efforts, such as content marketing, SEO, social media, and organic referrals, where customers initiate contact when they are ready to learn more. Passive strategies are generally less aggressive and focus on building a brand presence that attracts customers over time.
Passive sales strategies emphasize empathy and focus on building customer relationships and demonstrating product value. An example of a passive sales strategy is offering a free trial for a service or product before asking for the sale. This could be in the form of a customized demo, a two-week trial, or an invitation to beta-test a product. The goal is to get the customer hooked on the product so they will be motivated to make a longer-term commitment.
With proactive sales strategies, the sales team actively seeks out leads, initiates conversations, and takes deliberate actions to engage potential customers. This can include cold calling, direct outreach, personalized follow-ups, and targeted campaigns. Proactive strategies are typically assertive and aim to drive the sales process forward, helping the team to expand their reach, increase customer acquisition, and potentially accelerate sales cycles.
One proactive sales strategy is to play on a customer’s fear of missing out (FOMO!). For example, when a customer tries to book a hotel room or airline ticket online, they might see a message like this pop up in their search results on the booking website: “Only 1 left at this price!” Another tactic is to assume the customer is going to purchase and then take actions to help drive momentum toward the sale. Sales agents taking this approach focus on cues in conversations with potential buyers to set up a date for a job, an installation, or delivery.
A marketing strategy is a high-level guide a business uses to instruct the marketing team on how to build the brand, promote the business and its products, attract potential customers, and generate leads that the sales team will be tasked with converting into actual customers.
A marketing strategy is built on data from market and customer research and awareness of the target audience. It can be used to help inform and shape marketing plans.
How marketing teams structure their efforts to reach and engage with target audiences depends largely on resources. Bigger marketing organizations often create smaller teams to focus on specific points in the customer journey, such as awareness, research and consideration, and purchase. Smaller organizations may ask their marketing team to cover the entire journey.
Whatever the size of the team, they will deploy an array of strategies to engage customers and generate high-quality leads that can be passed along to sales. Email marketing is an example of a strategy. It includes sending personalized, targeted emails to customers, promoting products, updates, or offers, and nurturing leads by keeping them engaged with the brand.
Content creation is another marketing strategy, and it can be a big part of a modern marketing team’s job. Creating useful, informative content helps build trust with customers and encourages them to explore a company’s products and services. Examples of marketing content can include blogs, social media posts, email campaigns, and e-books. The information used to develop content can be shaped by customer data collected through online activity or from phone conversations at scale using conversation analytics.
The key differences between sales and marketing strategies relate to focus and goals, the time horizon for achieving objectives, and how to approach and interact with customers. Here’s a quick overview of these differences:
Marketing strategies focus on building brand awareness, generating interest, and educating the market about products or services. The goal of a marketing strategy is to create demand and attract potential customers by communicating value.
Sales strategies, on the other hand, aim to close deals and generate revenue. The sales strategy focuses on converting qualified leads into customers through direct engagement and relationship-building.
Marketing strategy is often more long-term and involves planning campaigns that build brand perception and audience engagement over time. It’s about setting up a foundation for future sales by consistently delivering a message and nurturing customer relationships.
Sales strategy is more short-term and tactical, with a primary focus on meeting immediate quotas and targets. Sales strategies are action-oriented, seeking to turn the interest generated by marketing into actual transactions in the short term.
Marketing strategy uses a broader approach, targeting large segments of the market through channels like digital advertising, social media, content marketing, and events. It focuses on reaching as many potential customers as possible.
Sales strategy involves personalized and one-on-one interactions, often with specific prospects who have shown an intent to buy. Sales teams tailor their approach based on the unique needs of each lead, aiming to address specific concerns and objections to close the deal.
When sales and marketing teams do collaborate effectively, it can be a beautiful thing to behold.
Content marketing, for example, provides a perfect complement to sales. Content teams focus on developing a new audience for a brand, product, or service by raising awareness and then nurturing that audience to feed the sales funnel. The sales team’s goal is then to convert those leads into paying customers.
The collaboration doesn’t end there. Sales can help marketing improve and refine their work product by providing feedback on the quality of leads they are receiving as well as what content resonates most with the leads. Sales can also share data analytics, such as conversation intelligence gathered from outbound sales calls, to help the content team optimize future assets.
A sales and marketing strategy is an integrated approach that aligns both teams so that they work in unison to drive business growth and realize the company’s objectives. Sales and marketing alignment helps teams achieve those goals by working together efficiently.
A disconnected sales and marketing strategy leads to poor revenue execution. A unified strategy does the opposite. By sharing tools and data and improving communication between both teams, businesses can improve ROI and increase revenue.
Any successful strategy depends on careful planning and following best practices. The six best practices outlined below can help you develop an effective sales and marketing strategy, one that can drive growth and revenue.
AI is still an emerging technology. However, it is already powering tools to optimize sales and marketing strategies. AI can collect and collate large datasets and then analyze and communicate that information to deliver key insights far faster and much more efficiently than a human ever could. So, digital data from a consumer’s online activity, such as website or ad clicks, cookies, and submission forms, can be quickly and easily analyzed to provide sales and marketing with insights into customer behavior.
AI’s capacity to help build a sales and marketing strategy doesn’t end there. Even offline activity, such as a consumer making a phone call to a customer service center or help desk or responding to a marketing pitch, can be digitized and analyzed using AI.
With a tool like Invoca, for example, sales and marketing teams can capture every inbound or outbound call and add the true voice of the customer to their analysis to gain deeper perspectives for their strategy and forward planning. So, if seven in 10 callers responding to a localized digital ad for home insurance said they were moved to call because the ad mentioned the inclusion of coverage for flooding, this could be a sign that a larger ad campaign highlighting flood coverage may pay dividends for the insurer.
Conversation analytics provides sales and marketing teams with a more complete picture of customer preferences and trends than they could glean by capturing online activity only.
Mistrust between marketing and sales is too common. According to our own research, only 19% of marketing teams are confident that sales can convert their leads. That feeling is mutual: Barely 22% of sales teams believe the leads they get from marketing are of high quality. It’s this finger-pointing that erodes trust, making it much harder for these two teams to work together effectively to drive revenue.
You can overcome this issue by taking steps to build a culture of collaboration, promoting regular communication between sales and marketing teams, and ensuring they are closely aligned on goals and strategies. It could be as simple as setting up a group meal once a fortnight or an occasional team-building exercise so that both teams mix outside of work.
You can also encourage alignment in the workplace by having marketing and sales share key performance indicators (KPIs) or by establishing unified workflows to create accountability and encourage teams to work in harmony toward common objectives.
You can provide your sales and marketing strategy with a huge incentive to collaborate by collecting all the data at your disposal and delivering the best insights possible on your target audience. Creating clear, consistent, and detailed buyer personas will help sales and marketing deliver the results you are asking for by inspiring greater teamwork.
Here’s where capturing conversation data from contact center phone conversations can pay huge dividends. You can use conversation analytics to convert phone conversations into rich data that adds to online data insights to create even better buyer personas. The more your teams know about the typical buyer, the more efficiently they will be able to move those buyers through your sales funnel.
Consistency between sales and marketing should extend to messaging. Showing customers a unified brand experience is crucial. So, both teams must “read from the same page” when developing marketing campaigns and sales pitches. After all, marketing shouldn’t be going overboard to generate leads with enticing discount offers when the data shows that sales may convert leads simply by offering a superior customer experience.
You can guide this alignment by encouraging your teams to collaborate on content creation to ensure that marketing materials directly support the sales process and speak to your target audience’s needs and pain points. Use data insights gained from online and offline consumer activity to create consistent messaging across sales scripts and marketing materials.
Another surefire way to bring sales and marketing together is to have the teams use shared metrics and data to evaluate the success of their efforts. After all, it isn’t easy for marketing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sales when sales metrics can be directly tied to revenue.
Attribution is a bit of a gray area for marketing teams. While it’s relatively easy to track the online leads generated by digital ads, email blasts, and other online campaigns, it has historically been almost impossible to get attribution for phone leads.
AI has changed that. AI-powered conversation analytics can capture digital insights from every phone call, making it possible to determine which campaigns drive phone call conversions. This gives marketing a complete view of their ROI. When you have a complete picture of online and offline customer interactions, you end up with a single source of truth for the entire customer journey that sales and marketing can use to measure performance.
Also, be sure to conduct regular collaborative reviews of KPIs for campaigns and strategies and make data-driven adjustments that optimize future performance for both sales and marketing.
Customer journeys are typically very fragmented. A consumer might do initial research on a brand or product on their smartphone while traveling to work on a bus. They might pick up their research later that day by reading reviews while sitting at their computer at home or during a break at work. A few days later, they may pick up the phone and speak to a sales agent because they have questions.
We know from our own research that almost a third of consumers prefer to use the phone when making high-stakes purchases, even if they do their research online.
Streamlining the customer journey and creating a seamless transition between online and offline activity is essential to drive sales. Customers will quickly lose interest in your brand if there is no continuity between channels. So, in addition to using tools like conversation analytics to gather data insights and bridge the gap between online and offline activity, you can also use Invoca’s intelligent call routing and PreSense to remove friction from the customer journey and heighten their experience.
ICR works by gathering privacy-friendly data points from a customer’s activity on a website using Invoca’s tag. At the same time, a dynamic number insertion code presents a unique phone number for the consumer. If the customer uses the number, Invoca uses insight from the data points to forward the call to the right agent or department at the first time of asking.
PreSense smooths the journey even further by passing along data insights the agent can use to personalize the interaction, including the caller’s name as well as why they might be calling, which pages of the website interested them most, and if they have already made a purchase.
Your sales agents and marketing experts work in different functions, have different roles, different immediate objectives, and different skill sets. All that is true. But for your company to succeed at driving sales, your sales and marketing departments must act as if they are one team. Marketing must be the setter, and sales must be the hitter.
The right technology can enhance your sales and marketing strategy by providing insights that help align sales and marketing efforts. Invoca’s AI conversation analytics tools, for example, are part of a revenue execution platform that enhances collaboration between sales and marketing and can improve overall performance.
Invoca’s ability to capture customer data at scale from offline interactions, like phone calls, and complement your online data gathering creates a huge dataset for your teams to work from. By using AI to analyze this data, you can provide sales and marketing teams with a single source of truth, so they can collaborate to correct inefficiencies in the conversion funnel. This removes fingerpointing from the process and helps both teams maximize their impact on revenue generation.
Want to know more about sales and marketing strategies and the benefits of aligning your sales and marketing functions? Check out these additional resources from Invoca:
To explore how Invoca’s AI-driven solutions can help boost your sales and marketing strategy and enhance team collaboration to improve overall performance, contact us today for a customized demo.
