What joined up Sales and Marketing looks like

Paul Stratford, Creative Director

Updated Monday, 26th March 2018

This week we were proud to join some of Pearson Business School’s Year 2 students, studying the relationship between sales and marketing roles in business. The lecture, at Pearson’s Holborn campus, included a 90-minute session from Usable Media on our own commercial results of joined-up sales and marketing. All our slides are available at the end of the article, but here’s a brief overview of the lecture:

In our 90-minute section, we covered:

  • The Buyers Journey (Awareness, Consideration & Decision)
  • Creative Responsibility (is it with Sales or Marketing)
  • Optimum Sales-Response times
  • How to properly measure ‘Conversions’
  • Buzzwords: What to ignore, what to follow
  • Best Practice: Learn from the World’s best
  • Case Study: 3 Brilliant examples

Section 1: The Buyers journey

This is the modern buyer journey (defined here by Hubspot) which Sales and Marketing teams need to consider when creating content.

Section 2: Creative responsibility (& Planning)

Among some great questions from students was ‘who should sign-off on any marketing designs?’. Paul answered: ‘In a joined up sales & marketing environment, certain critical decisions should be made at the beginning, before any design work is carried out. These are best agreed as a group with the designer and copywriter present’. Set objective criteria to assess the final work and stick to the plan”.

Optimum sales response time

Ever wondered how soon is best to respond to a new lead enquiry? Whilst researching, we discovered a critical component in sales conversions; Businesses who responded to an online enquiry have just 9 seconds to achieve the highest results on test.  This was tested against 5 minutes, 30 minutes and 60 minutes.

This data really illustrates the value in Sales and Marketing teams accessing the same information. It also highlights the case for programmatic marketing and automation.

Astounding, was how many businesses fail to follow up at all though:

Types of sales and marketing conversions

Measuring your Google Ads by the volume of clicks or forms filled out is a skewed metric. Without linking leads through to actual sales it’s impossible to understand actual conversions. Pete said: ‘What if people are filling out enquiry forms is not actually turning into sales. These ‘tyre kickers’ may have never have actually purchased from you. Just tracking enquiries is only part of the job’. Real metrics, linked to business performance go deeper. Only leads that go on to purchase matter. With sales and marketing joined up and data shared, purchases can be accurately attributed to external content and events.

This full slideshare includes a test on ‘Marketing Buzzwords’, with a short interactive quiz to check your knowledge. A look into what the ‘world’s best brands’ are doing and current best practice. We finished with detailed tests Usable Media have carried out for its clients and some of the results of joining-up sales and marketing communications.

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