The blurred lines of sales and marketing

November 16, 2015 by Joanna Harrison

IThe blurred lines of sales and marketing

As a business, blending Sales and Marketing seems an obvious way to streamline your operation.

This can be achieved through frequent, direct communication between sales and marketing teams. If you’re running a small business, you may not have teams dedicated to each function - in fact you may even handle both jobs yourself.

A typical day for you might involve updating your Twitter feed, uploading a shot of your new logo designs to Instagram, possibly arranging some flyers and then following up on some potential interest on your Facebook wall with a number of direct sales enquiries.

If that is you, you’re already blurring the lines between sales and marketing. It therefor makes sense to combine the two roles and rebuild them into something better suited to the way your business operates.

In today’s business environment, the role of a sales team is much reduced compared to 15 or 20 years ago. Instead of gentle persuasion from knowledgeable sales people, buyers now rely on readily available information on the internet, white papers, or referrals.

In larger companies, a combined strategy would involve sales and marketing teams agreeing on a number of steps. First, identifying target demographics and how a product can satisfy their needs. Second, determining buyer personas and agreeing on the definitions of a lead. By getting buy-in from both teams at the beginning of the process, the traditional blame game – ‘marketing are generating bad leads’, ‘sales are failing to convert leads’ - is dismantled before it can even begin.

However, in your SME, you’ve got no such trouble. Your sales and marketing strategy can be aligned and actioned quickly and efficiently. You can decide to generate a certain number of leads each month, make a defined number of follow-ups within a set timeframe and create an easy-to-use dashboard that clearly shows the data generated by both functions.

Sales and marketing each have the same goal: increasing income. The technology and platforms are available to create the hybrid of the two that helps your business drive towards more profits.

If you would like a free consultation or advice please contact Chorus Business Advisers on 0845 8671263 or email info@chorusadvisers.co.uk