Summary: In today’s podcast episode, Stephen Halasnik and CJ Terral discuss the importance between sales and marketing alignment. As a business owner with a sales and marketing team, it is crucial to have an environment that encourages communication between all teams within a business. In order to enhance customer relationships with a business, all teams including sales and marketing need to be in alignment. Ensuring that your sales strategy and marketing strategy complement each other will help generate more leads, improve the timeline of your sales cycles, retain more customers, and make better predictions for the future.

Why Marketing and Sales Alignment Is Important

Typically, small businesses rely on salespeople to generate leads and close deals. However, your salespeople should really serve as your closers, and you should be generating the leads for them. If you take the first approach, this can lead to high turnover rates and unhappy employees. So what does this mean? This really emphasizes how important marketing efforts are. Where the real work comes in is through marketing, and that is how you can generate the most beneficial leads for your industry.

Marketing efforts allow your business to be able to connect and understand your customers and build better relationships. Marketing alignment in relationship to your salespeople is so crucial to generating qualified leads and having your business run in a collaborative environment. When the sales reps and your marketing departments are all on the same page, it will actually enable you to have higher conversion rates.

How Proper “Smarketing” Can Pay Dividends

When a business is mainly focussing its resources on sales, its marketing teams tend to lose their spot in terms of budget and metrics. On the other hand, if your marketing strategy is mainly only content-based, it doesn’t allow proper room for your salespeople to build proper relationships and can create a misalignment of goals within different teams. In terms of content marketing, it is important for both teams to be in alignment with the overall content strategy, when and how to use the content, where to find the content, how to assess content effectiveness, and how it relates back to their shared goal.

Shared goals are crucial for a business to thrive. Consider having regular meetings for sales enablement possibly on a weekly basis. What this will do will allow your sales reps to go through their sales process and sales funnel (sales calls, messaging, etc.) while keeping marketing content in mind. In addition to that, your salespeople will learn how to nurture and follow up on your leads more effectively based on content marketing, and the common goals of both parties.

Further, being able to determine what is an MQL (marketing qualified lead) for your company and what SQL (sales qualified leads) look for you. By looking at metrics and benchmarks, your company will be able to have better revenue growth, identify pain points, have more effective retention, and allow team members to see what works and what doesn’t.

Business Growth in Relation to Marketing Efforts

If you don’t have proper marketing put in place, an amazing place to start is using a channel of marketing that will create trust between you and your customers. A popular and effective method to do so is through affiliate marketing efforts. Marketers use affiliate marketing to reach individuals of all types and can create a plethora of benefits.

Some of the main benefits that come from affiliate marketing include performance-based benefits, broadening your audience, can help improve your reputation, can quickly scale sales and marketing, and also increase scalability in a cost-effective manner. Through these efforts, you can reach more potential customers, generate high-quality leads, attract ideal customers, and enhance the customer experience.

Furthermore, combining SEO and SEM (search engine optimizations and search engine marketing) will help drive sales but can be at a slower rate. It can sometimes take two years to see improvement. This combines organic traffic and paid ads. An example of organic traffic can include having articles on your website or including keywords that Google favors on your website. Including paid ads can also be risky depending on your size and what route you take. Depending on what your goals are and how fast you want to get there, you may want to look into different streams of marketing.

If you’re a business owner and feel as though all your efforts are focussed on sales, start with affiliate marketing. Due to the fact that it is cheaper, easier, and quicker, you are likely to see more significant results. However, you can try SEO and SEM as well, but they do require a more skilled approach, as there is more to lose with SEO and SEM.

Seven Steps to Ensuring Alignment

A simple process that will allow the sales team and your marketing team to be on the same page and allow them to try out what works and what may need some refinement. Creating a service level agreement (SLA) or a template of expectations between teams can also allow for a more effective blend of ideas. Establishing guidelines and expectations between teams are also going to allow both teams to feel as though their needs and wants are heard by their teammates. CJ Terral breaks this process down into seven steps.

1. Lead Generation

2. Qualification Session

3. Discover Session

4. Demo

5. Solution Review

6. Contract Negotiation

7. Finance Verification

Once you complete step seven, your team can start over again from step one.

Final Take-Away

At the end of the day, in order to enhance the buying process or whatever your company offers to your clientele is all about the relationships on the inside. Having everyone on the same page. If your marketing team isn’t in alignment with m, your salespeople can feel like they aren’t being brought the proper leads. If your salespeople are not communicating with your marketing team, your marketers may feel like the salespeople are not nurturing their leads enough. Through a collaborative effort, you are likely to generate higher win rates.

Conclusion:

I would like to thank you so very much CJ for coming onto today’s Podcast. If you like today’s podcast, please feel free to share it with a friend and also subscribe on your favorite podcasting app of course, if you are looking for a Line of Credit for your business, you can call us at 862-207-4118 or visit our website at www.fscreditline.com. CJ, if anyone wants to get in touch with you how can they reach you? http://www.cjterral.com

Thank you for listening and remember:  Figuring out your marketing, or lead generation is the key to you having a great company.

About the Guest, CJ Terral

CJ is an entrepreneur and speaker. Business campaigns that he has launched and led have generated 100s of thousands of customers across several dozen countries. Recognized as a growth marketing authority, he has presented at conferences from Silicon Valley to South Korea. Enterprising by nature, CJ strives to help people connect deeper. This motto is advocated through the products he names and the content he creates. Among other accolades, his work has been exhibited to a filled event stadium, used by sales teams to pitch two billion-dollar product lines, praised by several eminent social media figures, and endorsed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

About the Host, Stephen Halasnik, Financing Solutions

Welcome, everyone. My name is Stephen Halasnik and I am a CoFounder and Managing Partner of Financing Solution. Financing Solutions is a leading provider of Lines of Credit to small businesses. Our Line of credit program is fast, easy, inexpensive, and costs nothing to set up making it a great cash backup plan for your business. If you would like to learn more about our line of credit program, please visit us at www.fscreditline.com or give us a call at 862-207-4118.

About Financing Solutions Business Line of Credit

Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.

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