Sales & Marketing The Perfect Partners for Growth eGuide

Sales & marketing: the perfect partners for growth

How to achieve a SMART way to work together

Success starts with clear commercial objectives

Determining your commercial objectives involves two crucial steps: market research and business introspection. These are the bedrock of your business and inform your commercial decisions. Your team needs clear goals to build and grow your business.

Step 1: Market Analysis

Examine your market to determine your ideal position and image. Evaluate your competition by looking at their product prices, service agreements, assortment size, and specialisation levels. Organise the data in a benchmarking map to identify your direct competition and market gaps.

Step 2: Business Introspection

Consider what type of company you want to be and how you want to achieve your goals. For example, decide if you wish to be a discounter or a specialist in a product category. The answers will help you determine your place in the market and inform your strategies.

Why is it important to align marketing and sales?

Synchronising your marketing and sales activities is essential to achieve your pipeline requirements and commercial goals.

Coordinating marketing and sales activities also improves the effective use of your resources. As a result, you can focus efforts on the most valuable opportunities driving up revenue and driving down costs and benefiting the company’s bottom line.

Ultimately, creating a culture where marketing and sales work together helps to achieve your business goals by ensuring that everyone’s efforts contribute towards the company’s overall strategy. By working together, marketing and sales can drive better results and help the company achieve its goals more effectively and efficiently.

Commercial objectives are the driving force behind the decisions and strategies of a successful business. They provide a clear direction for your company, help to prioritise resources, and guide the development of action plans to achieve success. Your commercial objectives are a foundation for each department and staff member’s specific, measurable, and attainable goals. A well-defined set of commercial objectives is essential for your success as it helps to focus efforts, allocate resources, and measure progress towards achieving desired outcomes.

Setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals

Many businesses use the SMART framework to increase the chances of successfully achieving their goals and improving organisational performance. This is because SMART goals provide a structured approach to goal setting, which helps to ensure that goals are well-defined, realistic, and attainable. SMARTIE goals are the modified version of the traditional SMART goals we recommend for your commercial objectives.

SMARTIE stands for:

Specific Measurable Accepted Realistic Real-Time Individual Equitable

SMARTIE goals help you define your business objectives and to ensure that the goals are well understood, monitored, and accepted by your employees.

Why are SMARTIE Goals Important?

Having specific goals that serve a clear purpose makes it easier for the team to understand and work towards them. A specific goal answers questions like:

» What exactly needs to be accomplished?

» Who is responsible for crossing the finish line?

» What steps do they need to take to get there?

Measurable goals allow for monitoring and tracking progress, while goals accepted by employees have a more motivating effect. Realistic goals are also crucial for employee motivation, and goals tracked in real time provide a clear picture of progress.

Individualising goals helps to increase acceptance and a sense of fairness, while scalable goals should be regularly reviewed to ensure they remain relevant and motivating over time.

By incorporating the SMARTIE framework into goal setting, your business can improve its chances of success and ensure that your goals are well-defined and attainable.

Business goals underpin marketing execution and sales by providing a clear direction and focus for these teams. Having clear commercial objectives helps managers prioritise resources, guide the development of strategies and tactics, and measure the success of initiatives.

By aligning marketing and sales efforts with commercial objectives, you can ensure that you are using your resources effectively to drive business growth and achieve commercial success.

Sales and marketing alignment

Overcoming the sales and marketing gap

Bringing your sales and marketing teams into alignment and unlocking business growth requires policy-led leadership and practical action across strategy, process, content and culture.

Strategy

Measuring is the key to aligning strategy. Agreeing to unify how strategies are measured across sales and marketing will help departments better understand each other.

Process

Customers buy from businesses they trust, and consistent messaging is critical to establishing trust. So your sales and marketing messages need to match for confidence to grow. A customer might make a one-time purchase based on any single factor like price, but repeat business comes from a trusted relationship built over all the customer touch points.

The need for trust is true across B2B and B2C markets. B2B has become an unhelpful misnomer in many ways. We never sell to a business; we always sell to the people within a business. Every sale is to an individual, so every communication they receive from your sales and marketing teams must feel aligned with your consistent messaging and brand values.

LinkedIn research in 2020 revealed that 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth (LinkedIn). Still, at the same time, 9 out of 10 sales and marketing professionals say they are misaligned in strategy, process, content and culture despite a perception that they are working together. There’s a gap between perception and reality that business leaders need to bridge.

Sales and marketing teams often use different processes and systems. Using the same systems can increase understanding across the teams and enable them to collaborate more effectively.

Content and messaging

If sales and marketing don’t see each other’s content, this can result in mixed messaging to customers. Reaching across the sales and marketing silos to create and review content together will streamline your output and create a more unified singular experience for the customer.

Culture

Building a shared culture underpins a healthy business, but it needs leadership to grow. A solid internal comms plan breaks down silos and builds relationships. You can encourage your departments to establish cross-departmental teams, attend each other’s meetings, and share successes.

The power and value of trust

The importance of a strong marketing plan

Even with a strong sales team, a company needs a robust marketing plan to support its sales efforts and drive business success. A marketing plan helps to:

» Create awareness

» Build the brand

» Differentiate from competitors

» Gain customer insights

» Ensure consistency in messaging and tactics

To achieve these benefits, your marketing plan needs three crucial elements: a clear target audience, defined messaging and distinctive brand positioning.

Successful marketing begins with identifying your business goals and working backwards to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Start by taking a step back to consider the big picture and determine your overarching business goals. From there, pinpoint specific marketing goals that align with your overall objectives.

Once you clearly understand your goals, define your target audience to ensure that your marketing efforts are aimed at the right people. Next, create a budget for your marketing efforts and allocate resources appropriately.

Research the market to understand the current landscape, identify trends and analyse your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Finally, develop a marketing strategy incorporating your goals, target audience, budget, and market research.

To ensure success, test your ideas and evaluate the results to continually refine your approach and optimise your marketing efforts.

Defining your target audience

By defining a target audience, your company can tailor its marketing and sales efforts towards the customers who are most likely to benefit from your products and services, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your actions. Researching your customers, identifying their pain points and finding out what they want should form the basis of your differentiated marketing plan. This can be achieved through customer personas, account-based marketing or segmentation. Successful companies recognise that their target market is dynamic and can change over time as their offerings and customer needs evolve. By regularly re-evaluating and refining your target market, your business can ensure that it remains relevant and well-positioned in the marketplace.

Messaging

Your messaging answers the question, “What problem does our product or service solve for our customers?” and explains why a customer should choose your company’s offering over your competitors.

It is essential to differentiate your company by clearly defining its unique competitive advantage. With a solid, well-defined message, marketing efforts won’t become indistinct and lost in the crowded marketplace, avoiding wasted resources and opportunities.

Brand positioning

How do you want customers to think of your brand? Brand positioning is the unique place a brand occupies in the minds of its target market.

Creating your distinct brand position involves defining your brand’s key benefits and attributes, and communicating them in a way that will set it apart from its competitors and resonate with your target audience. Market research and competitor analysis are crucial to developing your unique position as you create a memorable image for your brand in the mind of your target audience.

The marketing mix

Effective marketing tactics for sales success

Digital marketing A-Z

Digital marketing puts your business in front of potential customers when they want to find you. By identifying your target audience and establishing your messaging and brand positioning, you can narrow down which strategies and channels to use. Here is an A-Z overview of your digital marketing options.

Advertising

Digital advertising is a key element of today’s marketing landscape. You can choose from various online platforms to display advertisements to target audiences. Examples include display ads on blogs, websites or forums, social media advertising, and video.

Content marketing

A strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience.

Content marketing can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and other forms of content designed to educate, engage, and build brand awareness. These assets can be leveraged through organic and paid search as part of your sales pipeline.

Email marketing

A direct marketing channel that uses email to communicate with segmented customers and prospects. Email offers businesses a highly targeted and measurable way to build relationships and drive sales.

Email marketing can include promotional messages, newsletters, and transactional messages that target customers’ needs and interests. It’s ideal for e-commerce and forms a critical element of account-based marketing.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing allows businesses to reach customers on the go and deliver personalised, timely messages.

Mobile marketing includes mobile apps, SMS, mobile web advertisements, mobile-first website optimisation, landing pages and emails. Mobile view is increasingly important, with the Hubspot State of Inbound Marketing report 2022 revealing that mobile website views outpace desktop by 41% to 38%, with the gap only likely to grow.

Paid search

Paid search allows you to reach customers when they are searching for products or services related to your business. This type of digital advertising enables businesses to display ads in search engine results for specific keywords. It’s highly targeted and measurable advertising with the potential for high ROI.

There are two main types of paid search advertising — pay per click (PPC) and cost per mile (CPM). With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. With CPM, you pay per 1000 impressions.

Google Adwords is the most widely used paid search advertising platform; however, other search engines like Bing also have paid programs.

Programmatic advertising

An automated form of digital advertising that uses software to purchase and place ads in real time. It’s efficient and cost-effective and enables precise targeting and measurement capabilities.

Reputation marketing

Reputation marketing is a strategic approach to managing and improving a company’s online reputation, as reading online reviews can influence customer buying decisions. Reputation marketing can include online reviews, customer feedback, and brand management. A reputation marketing strategy offers businesses the ability to enhance their brand image and build customer trust. Additionally, many review sites offer native advertising that allows you to place ads on competitor profiles.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO offers businesses a chance to reach customers looking for their services. SEO improves search engine visibility and drives organic traffic to their website. SEO can include on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation, and keyword research.

Google, Bing and other popular search engines strive to deliver the most relevant results to their users. As a result, their algorithms are constantly being updated to promote the freshest, most relevant content and suppress low-quality web pages.

Plagiarism and keyword stuffing will not help you succeed in 2023. Instead, most experts agree that original expert content with crosslinks, backlinks and natural use of keywords is crucial in getting to the top.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing leverages platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and YouTube to promote your company and its products or services. Your use will depend on your market research, target audience and brand positioning.

Social media campaigns can include social media advertising, social media posts, and influencer marketing. You can reach a large, engaged audience and build brand awareness through social media marketing.

Video marketing

Video marketing is an entertaining and attentiongrabbing tool with high engagement and conversion. Video marketing traditionally includes product demos, explainer videos, and customer testimonials on channels like YouTube and Vimeo. TikTok is a novel social channel that increasingly offers businesses brand-building opportunities. Additionally, video ads are available on free apps like games and tools, which swap free mobile gaming for consumer data to help you target.

Web analytics

Every business needs to understand its website traffic and user behaviour. Capturing, measuring, analysing and reporting online user activity is essential to understanding and optimising all forms of digital marketing.

Web analytics can include page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, and other key metrics. The most widely used tool for analysing website traffic is Google Analytics. However, other tools include Adobe Analytics, Semrush, Moz and more.

Webinars

You can reach a large, geographically dispersed audience and deliver a rich, interactive experience with a webinar. Webinars took off in 2020 and remain popular as an effective way to deliver demonstrations or seminars to an interested audience. They enable you to interact directly with your customers, establish yourself as an expert, capture consumer data like emails, phone numbers and roles, and build on existing relationships.

Social selling

Social selling is a modern approach to sales that uses social media to reach prospects, build relationships, and engage with potential leads. It replaces traditional methods such as cold calling and is not to be confused with social media marketing or advertising.

Social selling involves making meaningful connections with prospects, so it is important to approach social selling to build trust and loyalty rather than bombard prospects with unwanted messages. Finding and connecting with prospective clients on channels like LinkedIn can deliver incredible results if done correctly.

Social selling is a valuable element of a successful ABM&S strategy (see opposite).

Event marketing

Event marketing promotes a product, service, or brand through live events, such as trade shows, product launches, and conferences. These events serve as a platform to connect with potential customers and create a positive, memorable experience. You can host an event, attend an event or sponsor an event.

Event marketing is important because it allows companies to build trusted client relationships. You can meaningfully engage with customers and establish your brand image at events. It also provides the opportunity to collect valuable feedback and customer insights, which can inform future marketing strategies. As a result, companies can increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales by participating in events.

Event marketing is highly effective because it is face-to-face and interactive, allowing customers to engage with the brand in a dynamic and immersive way. In addition, it creates a positive experience that customers will associate with the brand long after the event has ended.

Event marketing also provides an opportunity to reach a targeted audience, as attendees are often pre-qualified and interested in the products or services offered.

Event marketing can increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and sales.

Account-based marketing and sales

Account-Based Marketing and Sales (ABM&S) is a targeted marketing approach focusing on individual accounts rather than entire markets. The goal of ABM&S is to personalise the marketing message to a specific set of high-value accounts and build deeper relationships with the people in those accounts.

ABM&S is effective because it allows you to:

» Focus your resources on the accounts that matter most

» Create tailored experiences for each account that speaks directly to their unique needs

» Collaborate across sales and marketing teams to drive more effective campaigns.

Some critical steps to implementing an ABM&S strategy include:

» Identifying target accounts based on company size, industry, and other relevant factors

» Creating customised content and messaging specifically for each target account

» Leveraging a variety of channels, including email, social media, and direct mail, to reach target accounts

» Measuring and analysing results to continually refine and improve the ABM approach.

ABM&S can be highly effective in industries where complex sales cycles and high-value deals are the norm. You can build stronger relationships with your most valuable prospects and customers by focusing on individual accounts and personalising the marketing message.

Refining your marketing approach for greater success

Refining your approach based on results

Refining your marketing based on metrics is important because it allows your team to make data-driven decisions about their marketing efforts. By tracking and analysing metrics, sales and marketing managers can identify areas of strength and improvement and make informed decisions about optimising their marketing strategies.

For example, if a marketing campaign has a low conversion rate, marketers can analyse the data to determine why. They may discover that the messaging needs to resonate better with their target audience, the targeting needs to be corrected, or the offer needs to be more compelling. Based on these insights, they can refine their marketing by adjusting the messaging, targeting, or offer to better align with the needs of their audience.

Similarly, if a campaign has a high customer acquisition cost, the sales director can analyse the data to determine why and make changes to reduce that cost. For example, they may realise that they are targeting a broad audience that is not a good fit for the product and can refine their targeting to focus on a more specific, high-value audience.

Key metrics for tracking marketing success

Tracking metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in marketing is vital because it allows you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and strategies. By tracking metrics, sales and marketing managers can gain insights into what works well and what does not, leading to data-driven decisions about optimising their efforts.

The top five marketing metrics to track are:

1. Conversion rate

The percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.

2. Lead generation

The number of leads generated through marketing efforts.

3. Customer acquisition cost

The cost of acquiring a new customer, including all marketing and sales expenses.

4. Return on investment (ROI)

The return on marketing investment; calculated by dividing the revenue generated by the cost of marketing.

5. Website traffic

The number of website visitors provides insight into the effectiveness of online marketing efforts and can indicate areas for improvement.

By tracking these metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of the results of your marketing efforts and make informed decisions about optimising your strategies and improving your return on investment.

Why sales needs marketing

Marketing plays a key role in supporting the sales pipeline. Well-executed marketing strategies can:

» Generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert

» Speed up the sales cycle by providing prospects with the information they need to make a purchasing decision

» Increase the number of sales opportunities by reaching a wider audience

» Improve the close rate by providing a consistent and compelling brand message throughout the sales process

Effective marketing helps build brand awareness, create interest in a product or service, and ultimately drive sales. Marketing also helps establish your company’s position in the market and differentiate your products or services from your competitors.

In addition, marketing can help companies achieve their commercial objectives by:

» Increasing brand recognition and building brand equity

» Driving customer loyalty and repeat business

» Supporting product launches and new product adoption

» Attracting and retaining talent through employer branding efforts

Bringing your sales and marketing teams together so they coordinate their efforts and appreciate each other’s goals, content plans and relationships with the customers can only result in better results. Overall, marketing is critical in achieving your company’s sales and commercial objectives because it attracts and nurtures leads, builds brand recognition, and drives customer loyalty.

We are YOUR marketing team that delivers the growth and scale that YOU need. Our marketing teams are experts in delivering marketing for scale-up businesses.

Equals Five’s broad and deep range of marketing experts means that we can deliver fully integrated sales and marketing strategies and programmes that are more than the sum of their parts.

All of our marketing specialists and experts are highly qualified and experienced, we only recruit the best, and our success is intrinsically linked to yours.

Whether your aim is to generate sales pipeline, build your brand reputation, open up new routes to market or to better exploit your existing customer base, your marketing team from Equals Five will help you to build and execute those marketing strategies and programmes that meet those goals, and deliver tangible business results for your company.

» We understand that marketing is a science, and not an art.

» We are your own dedicated marketing team, at a fraction of the cost.

» We provide all the marketing specialists, and experts, that you need to help you grow and scale your business. The big difference is that all these experts work for you part-time, under contract, so you only pay for these marketing specialists when you need them.

» We really get to know your business because we are part of your business! We are part of your team. We work for you, we are committed, focused and dedicated.

Imagine having an experienced, and complete, marketing team for the same cost as a fully weighted, full-time, senior marketing manager!*