How sales and marketing complement each other?

Contribution of Salespeople to the Marketing effort-

People working in the sales department often make more money than people from other marketing departments. Salespeople are in touch with the customers on a daily basis. They exactly know what the customer’s needs are.

The salespeople pass on information from the buyers in the market to other members in the organisation. The information can be shared via various vehicles of communication. Instead of just relying on third party research data, it is in the best interest of the organisation to invest in systems or methods wherein information can be gathered from the salespeople. The feedback from a salesperson can even result in making changes to the product features, faster delivery, or even change in the packing for easy handling.

Salespeople are also a source of information about the competition in the market. Most of the customers often counter a sales-pitch by talking about a better feature or better price in the competitor product. This gives opportunity for the management to work on its weakness, and consolidate its market presence by making changes basis the feedback received from the market.

The organisations should have online systems where salespeople can put in their comments about the approach made by them to prospective buyers. It should not matter if the sale was made or not. The focus should be on gathering as much information as possible about the customer’s counter arguments, etc. The management can then do analysis of this information to take corrective action.

Contribution of marketing to the sales effort-
A company’s marketing team creates awareness about the products and brand via various promotional campaigns line advertisement, direct marketing, trade shows, etc. This becomes source of case studies, customer feedback (testimonials), clinical studies, market studies, etc. This information is shared in the form of brochures, documents, etc. with the salespeople so that they can utilise the same to support their argument when meeting a customer. The printed material or digital material that salespeople use is known as Collateral. Collateral helps salesmen support their claim especially in today’s times where ethics in the form of correct claims holds immense importance.

Advertisement, brand awareness, etc. makes the job of a salesperson quite easy. Once the customer is aware about the brand and the product, it becomes easy to talk about a product during sales-pitch. The salesperson can directly focus on the benefits and technical aspects of the product rather than educating about the brand.

Most of the time during promotion campaigns, trade shows, in-store promotions, etc., customers are asked to fill a form which asks customers to give contact details. These contact details are analysed by the marketing team and basis the interest of the customers, the contact details are shared with the salesmen. This helps salesmen in contacting an interested buyer. Once a buyer is identified, the information should be immediately shared with the sales-team for sales conversion. Similarly, the contact details utilised for Direct Marketing, can be shared with the sales team so that they can personally approach and help customers make a decision.

The shift in today’s time is an integrated marketing effort wherein all the promotion tools work in cohesion and complement each other. If an organisation fails to integrate the promotion tools and rely on their independent approach, the results are not as promising. An organisation should always strive to support the sales team with promotion tools like advertising, personal relations, direct marketing, promotion campaigns. Accordingly, there should be systems in place to gather as much feedback as possible from salesmen on customer’s objections and opinions.