You've Been a Terrible Marketer

It's okay, we all have. The good news is that we can improve!

In marketing, we get a little cocky and tend to work in a vacuum. But our ideas aren't uneducated guesses. We painstakingly research industry trends, evaluate the competition, carefully select media and events to spend our precious budgets on. You know which resource you probably haven't leveraged in a while? The most precious of all resources available to us as marketers. No, it isn't Marketo, HubSpot, Semrush, or even Tableau. It's better and it's free. It's your sales team.

Here's the thing, we ask a lot from our sales teams. They are the boots on the ground to execute our initiatives. They send out our email copy, drive attendance to events, and work our booths- all in the hopes of generating hot leads to close. Do you know what marketing does? We push initiatives out to our sales teams based on what we think will work. The sales teams know what will work. They talk to customers all day every day, they have the first hand knowledge of what resonates and what doesn't. And yet instead of asking what they need, we tell them what they need and expect them to make it work. Even if the message is all wrong. If you are a marketer, here's what I want you to do:

• If you already support a specific sales team (field and partner marketing) you can probably skip this step. If you don't, I want you to talk to the marketers who do. Ask to join sales team syncs and all-hands, and just listen. Absorb as much as you can. And while you're at, build a relationship with them! Sales follows direction from their leadership. If you build trust with their leadership, you can guarantee they will prioritize your initiatives.
• Read any win/loss wires that come through your email. Find out the details- where was the lead uncovered, what were the challenges, what resources did the sales team use? Take notes and compare them to your current initiatives to see where you can make updates. Celebrate every win, but autopsy every loss.
• Stop writing email/social copy for sales. It comes across as unauthentic when every sales person is posting the same copy everywhere. Instead, try providing your teams with 3-5 key bullet points that are really important to get across. Empower them to craft their own messages for each contact and I promise you will get a better response. If you must provide copy, make sure it can be easily customizable, or provide 3-4 different templates so they can choose which is most relevant for their contacts. .
• Clean up your lead lists! Data integrity includes filtering out fake names, emails, phone numbers, and non-buyer titles. While it's important to track traffic, the summer intern has historically never been a decision maker. Do not upload those to your CRM, take the time to ensure your data is correct. Sales will not want to support you if you give them worthless leads in return. Don't waste sales' time with leads that won't go anywhere.
• Cut the jargon out of your messaging. Industry buzzwords are fine for landing pages, but sales doesn't want to decipher what you are saying. They simply do not have the time. Write your initiatives in layman's terms so your core messaging doesn't get lost in a bunch of marketing fluff. The length of some emails are out of control.

I'm not letting sales off the hook here either. If you are in sales and frustrated with your companies marketing efforts, speak up! Give specific feedback to your marketing team to let them know what isn't working. We can't fix something if we don't know it's broken.

Remember that marketing is a science, but sales is an art. Marketing's role is not to dictate how/when sales reaches out to their prospects. Our job is to supplement and support their efforts by providing leads and getting messaging out to market. You aren't in a power dynamic and you certainly aren't adversaries- you are partners. Support each other accordingly. We are all marching toward the same goal.

Questions? Have any lessons that I missed? Share below in the comments — I’d love to hear them!

#MarketingTips #MarketingStrategy #SalesTeam #LeadGeneration #DataIntegrity