What Your Sales Team Should Be Doing

What Your Sales Team Should Be Doing

Your sales team is vital to your company’s overall success. Sales are responsible for promoting your brand identity and maintaining high levels of trust with your customers. They often know about complaints that never make it to your official customer service department.

With so much on the line, it’s easy to see how a bad sales team can negatively impact a company’s morale and bottom line. Even if you’re in marketing, optimizing your sales team’s performance is beneficial.

Is your sales team contributing to the overall success of your company and the product you (and they) sell? Probably not for most companies. So, here are four sales tips your team should be using if they aren’t already.

1. Creation of Content

Sales are part of your company’s thought leadership team. So why not tap into that knowledge by asking your sales team to create original content? Your company blog or an outside publication needs content to demonstrate expertise and credibility.

When a sales team creates content and shares it with prospects, they build trust and a resource pool of potentially useful content. Their sales emails will be far more engaging if they use this email marketing fuel.

2. Email Automation

Sales reps, like marketers, are overworked. They don’t always have time to manually follow up with all of their leads or send timely emails. Automation is a no-brainer for more effective emailing.

Similarly to marketing, automating sales emails helps maintain customer relationships, keeps your brand name top-of-mind, and optimizes your entire funnel. If your sales team automates email outreach, they can better connect with customers and send them content tailored to their specific needs. This allows sales to focus on other tasks while still ensuring prospects are nurtured appropriately based on their stage in the buyer journey.

3. Regular Marketing Team Meetings

To maximize the value of both teams, it is necessary to dispel the myth that marketing and sales are completely distinct departments. In order to achieve the same goals, marketing and sales must work together. Clients can see through a strained relationship between the two, implying that the company as a whole may be lacking in focus.

Include the sales team in your marketing efforts, allowing for a free exchange of ideas. This approach makes sense because marketing creates the content that sales uses in their conversations and thus greatly benefits from knowing exactly what sales needs.

Schedule regular sales and marketing meetings to discuss the questions your sales team receives and the challenges they face when talking to prospects. Employ the content strategy generated by those discussions.

4. Creating Social Media Networks

In today’s market, you need to be creative with your sales tactics. It’s also important to consider where your audience hangs out online.

While obvious for marketing, social media is often overlooked for sales. Because many customers use social media to assess a brand’s and employees’ credibility, maintaining a social media presence is vital for sales.

Client-facing employees should be active on social media, regularly sharing content and posting industry data and compelling articles. This demonstrates to potential and current clients that you are up-to-date on industry trends. Or, diversify and encourage sales professionals to join other networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Sales, like all other departments, are in it to win it. While you may not have direct marketing authority, you can (and should!) make suggestions that will help you work better and faster. Plan your next steps based on the four ideas listed above.

Leave a Reply