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| Sales and Marketing - How They Work Together |
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Marketing can do great things for your organization - but without a formal sales function, marketing can only do so much. Compare to fishing - fish with a net (marketing) and you may find some fish, but try using a fishing line too with the right kind of bait (sales), and you'll reel in the fish you desire.
For many corporations, marketing works with sales and together they produce excellent results. While marketing can identify and educate prospective customers, it's the sales role that most effectively nurtures the relationship toward a closed sale and reinforces future buying activity and long-term loyalty.
While marketing can accomplish a closed sale, this becomes more difficult as the value of the sale increases (e.g. corporate memberships and high dollar non-dues revenue items) or for potentially complex sales (e.g. sponsorship options for a tradeshow or complicated insurance sold to members).
Below are five areas where the selling function outperforms marketing. For your association, identify all of the items (tangible and non-tangible) that you're selling, and think about how a sales function could assist you in closing more business. |
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| Personal Relationship Building |
| While marketing casts a broad net and motivates prospects to self identify, sales can build a stronger personal relationship with prospective buyers through face-to-face and or telephone contact. Even a telephone relationship can become very personal over time. Don't underestimate the power of the personal relationship because it's how significant business gets done. People buy from people they like. |
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| Outward Focus |
| Most marketing efforts start with an internal focus and never fully take the perspective of the member. By the nature of the work, sales encourage you to understand and listen to your prospect. You listen to their pain, learn about their needs, and really get to know them as individuals with families, hobbies, and perhaps a need for what you're trying to market. Only by better understanding the prospective buyer can a good salesperson close the deal. |
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| Positive Reinforcement |
| Sales can remove all roadblocks and reassure the prospect they're making the right decision all the way to closure and beyond. People buy for emotional reasons and often use rational reasons to justify their purchase. |
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| Real Time Feedback |
| A salesperson responds in real time as the prospect talks about their needs and responds to the benefits and offer. This feedback is not based on an outdated focus group that is a one-size fits all needs assessment. |
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| Individual Messaging |
| By truly understanding each prospect, the salesperson can tailor the message and offer to speak directly to the prospects view of the world. While many prospects have similar needs, it is the individual's needs at a specific moment that a salesperson seeks to understand and respond to. |
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You have many options for tackling a sales effort. For each of the strengths listed above, you could try to evolve your marketing efforts (online and offline) to attempt to produce some of the same results. For example, by sending custom email messages to individual groups of prospective members, you could attempt to realize the benefit of individual messaging or you could use the web to provide real time feedback.
If you conclude that marketing can only do so much, and you want to test a sales effort for select offers (more complex sales or higher dollar), you could hire a salesperson and handle internally.
Outsource options include using an outbound telesales center which can assist with script writing and can communicate and sell at a basic level (good option for membership renewal among delinquent accounts).
For more complex sales, consider contracting with a freelance professional salesperson that can make appointments and even attend them with or without you. This can be a great way to learn more about who makes the decisions within complex sales situations and gain introductions that you might never get with marketing alone.
Add a little sales perspective to your marketing and some sales action to your efforts and before long you'll be closing more business and better understand your members/customers. Even if you don't meet your sales goals, the knowledge you gain about your members can result in better marketing messaging and more satisfied members/customers. |
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