Integrating Sales and Marketing Teams: A Strategy to Improve Your Customer's Buying Journey and Boost Sales

Are you struggling to close deals and are losing customers to your competitors?

The reason could be that your sales and marketing efforts are not fully integrated. In today's world, buyers make purchasing decisions differently than before, and they expect a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints.

To maximize revenue, your marketing and sales teams must work collaboratively to add prospects to the buying funnel and nurture them through it.

In this blog, we will explore the first step in integrating your sales and marketing teams to improve your customer's buying journey and increase your sales.

Buyer Journey Personas

The first step in this process is to collaboratively develop buyer personas to understand purchase behaviors. Adele Revella's approach to conducting buyer interviews, "the Five Rings of Buying Insight," is an excellent way to gain insight into your customer's buying process. However, it is crucial to ensure that the interviewer can bring the perspective of both a marketer and a salesperson to get accurate and complete information.

With the input and exploration of the sales team during the buyer interview process, we were able to uncover further details of the customer triggers and issues that were impacting and lengthening the buying process.

At a recent client engagement, we discovered that their complex, multi-step sales process was not being fully communicated up front, leading to confusion and lost trust.  The marketing team collaborated with the sales leaders to develop updated materials and a messaging campaign that triggered early in the sales process to educate the prospect and allowed them to share important information with stakeholders who may not be part of the sales process.

By triggering informational emails during each step of the sales process to decision-makers and those impacted by the decision, we were able to build trust and create a more collaborative situation, which sped up the sales cycle and grew revenue.

This approach to buyer interviews is different from the standard approach of creating personas based on age, gender, education, etc. Instead, it focuses on understanding the buyer's perspective and the factors that influence their decision-making process, which can be used to create more effective marketing and sales strategies.

Know the Buyer Decision Factors

These buying factors include, how prospects compare companies and products during a sales process.  We have found that in many cases, companies exploring a solution do not have an organized approach for comparing offerings.  This leads to emotional decisions versus clearly understanding which product or service offers the best solution and value.

A recent set of interviews demonstrated how potential clients were confused on how to best compare offerings.  The company we work with was being undervalued for the offering they were selling.  We created with the sales team a features and benefits checklist that showed the key features of the offering and checked all of the boxes for our product.  We left additional columns for the potential client to add other companies.  We knew the features we picked for the checklist were more complete than the competitors and would clearly show the superiority of the product.  This allowed us to provide a valuable tool to the prospect and turn the conversation to the value we could provide.

If prospecting and closing new deals is a challenge, understanding your customer and their buying process is essential to succeed in today's competitive market.

Start with the target customers and listen to them.