Harness collective intelligence

“Smarketing” is an unassuming portmanteau that describes the incredibly powerful combination of sales and marketing.  

In order to create effective material that attracts new leads and earns loyalty from existing customers, your marketing team needs audience insights that only your sales team can earn.  

It’s crucial that these two teams are in sync, but there’s a good reason (besides labour laws) why they’re separate. Marketers can’t do what salespeople do, and salespeople can’t do what marketers do. Each of these teams holds a specific set of traits that make them experts in their roles.

Here are five traits that you need in your teams:

Collaborative 

We’re living in a demand generation. That means your sales team needs to generate demand for your product over your competitors. 

Your sales team needs to communicate customer insights to your marketing team so that your marketing materials inspire demand. Your sales team needs tools from your marketing team, too. 

Access to quality brand resources will ensure every individual across both teams is on the same page. When everyone involved in your sales journey understands your products, your branding, and your current goals, there is no chance for the disconnect that could frustrate your prospects or harm the perception of your brand.  

Emotional

Salespeople who can confidently channel their own emotions invite your customers to do the same. And this is how you can uncover each customer’s needs, wants, and fears.

The customer’s needs are the qualities they deem essential. These are usually measurable factors, while the customer’s wants are the feelings and goals they are hoping to achieve by purchasing your product. The customer’s fears are all the things that would happen if they didn’t get what they wanted. 

By understanding these three factors, your sales team can create impactful narratives that are designed for this specific audience. With these narratives, it’s their job to convince your customer that your product is the resolution to any conflict. Your product is their happily ever after. 

It’s important that your salespeople believe the story they’re telling. To pen a believable story, a writer must write what they know. If your salespeople can draw on their own emotions and what your product/service means to them, they can offer a more memorable and impactful solution. 

Resourceful

By exercising empathy and crafting emotional stories, your salespeople will be able to gain your customer’s trust and uncover invaluable customer insights. 

Resourceful salespeople know how to use their relationship with your customers to gain as much data as possible. 

A great salesperson should be armed with a great social media account, too. Your marketing team can then leverage this account and incorporate their persona into your brand’s social content plan. 

With Instagram polls, question stickers, and Instagram Lives, they can connect with a large and eager audience. And, since people trust real people more than they trust brands, your salespeople could earn feedback that your brand’s account can’t. 

Organized

If this customer insight is going to make it to your marketing team, your salespeople need to be exceptionally organized. 

Organization will also help your salespeople deliver a more personalized experience for each customer. This personalization adds immense value to your offering and positions your salespeople as trusted and irreplaceable advisors. 

Adaptive

Any great salesperson knows that the definition of great is always changing, and they continually grow their skill sets and adapt their methods to meet that new definition. 

This attitude will help your marketing team maintain an always-on mentality. This means that, instead of launching a campaign and forgetting about it as it runs its course, they can continually test, tweak, and learn from their past efforts to improve tomorrow’s content. This allows for more efficient lead generation and improved processes. 

You Can Build Skills

With a great sales team, you can improve your marketing, grow your company, and become leaders in your industry. If your current team isn’t showcasing these traits, don’t fret. These traits are all learnable skills. Our VantagePoint™ Workshops harness collective intelligence through collaboration to empower people to make a bigger impact. Contact us today to learn more!