I recently read a blog by Jason Piasecki, Partner & CEO at Revel; a local B2B Marketing provider here in Muskegon. In his blog, Jason highlights how businesses tend to prioritize sales over marketing, and often try to combine the two roles into a single position, usually with an emphasis on sales. (You can read his blog here) I’ve personally found that -especially within the SMB market- many business-development and account managers must rely on their own marketing strategies to build and maintain their line of business. In the cases where a dedicated marketing manager or team does exist, there can easily be a disconnect between the two departments. The truth is that when your sales and marketing are fully aligned, more businesses is won.
While there are many transferrable skills between marketing and sales specialists, it’s important to remember that a degree in marketing exists for a reason. Like teaching or information technology, marketing is not a skill you simply pick up without any education.
“…I’ve worked with some amazing VPs of sales that happen to have ‘marketing’ in their titles. Very few are great marketers.”Jason Piasecki, Partner & CEO at Revel
So, what does a synchronized sales and marketing effort look like? Personally, I like to picture it as the process of presenting a children’s book. To read the story, someone must first write it, then typically another person will present it to an audience. In our analogy, your marketing team are the “authors” while your sales team are the “presenters” of our story.
Your marketing team should support sales efforts with well-branded, organized content that is specifically designed to drive a response; and that involves more than a power-point with some logos on it. Marketing content is designed with lots of considerations in mind, so it goes without saying that it shouldn’t be something that’s thrown together haphazardly. This is especially the case if compliance is involved in those considerations. In return, your account managers are providing your marketing team with insight:
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What messaging is working and what isn’t
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What questions are usually being asked by clients and prospects?
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What problems are clients and prospects facing that we can address?
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How have current events affected those we are reaching out to?
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Do we need to adjust our approach?
The more field-intelligence your marketing team is receiving, the more capable they are of designing content that will impress your prospects and clients!
So how does OneMob’s platform address the sales and marketing gap? It starts with acknowledging the importance of bringing content to the forefront of your outreach, rather than simple text. Video is a hook, but a hook is only as useful as the line and rod it’s connected to. We encourage our OneMobbers to use their video to drive viewers towards the additional content they have added to their customized microsite; content that is designed by -you guessed it- a marketing team!
We continue by making it easy for marketing teams to share and control content. Any media uploaded to OneMob by an administrator (typically a marketing manager) can immediately be shared to specific individuals, teams, or the entire organization. We take it one step further by giving administrators the ability to approve content before it is sent to prospects. (This is especially useful when compliance is involved).
Finally, we top it off with our analytics. Everything on OneMob is trackable; meaning that sales and marketing can see how often their content is being viewed and by whom. This is the field-intelligence that allows marketing and sales to adjust their strategies to better align with trends in the market.
OneMob was designed with a unified marketing and sales strategy in mind. We built our platform to serve both the author and presenter of our story. Give it a shot and bridge the gap with us!
