Sales-Marketing Synergies That Boost Conversion

What is the purpose of a business? When it comes down to it, it’s about revenue – always has been, and always will be. But businesses of today know that in order to succeed, they must first appreciate and embrace the fact that everything must revolve around the customer. To achieve this, businesses are bringing sales and marketing together to create an effective strategy, improving sales qualification and lead conversion.

Here’s a look at the benefits of creating this synergy.

Reaching more of the right people

The journey to effective sales qualification and ultimately lead conversion begins with marketing. By leveraging the power of quality content, among other strategies, marketing creates the ability to put your brand in front of not just new, but targeted audiences. This is vital because 96% of business-to-business (B2B) customers want content from thought leaders to inform their buying decision (Demand Gen Report) and B2B businesses that blog generate up to 67% more leads per month than those that don’t (Social Media B2B).

A successful content strategy using a mix of free-for-all, gated, and upgraded content not only establishes trust in your brand, but paves the way for better lead generation and effective sales qualification – all of this before any conversation between your business and the potential customer even takes place.

Matching the customers intent with the right message at the right time

Having your brand in front of the right audience then opens up opportunities for new conversations based on searcher intent which can be categorised as informational, commercial or transactional.

Informational intent – Informational visitors seek to learn about a subject and performs broad generic searches on the internet. These searchers generally want content-rich pages that answer their question in a quick and concise manner. They are much less likely to convert into customers at this point.

Commercial intent – A sort of hybrid intent that is a mix of informational and transactional. Commercial intent visitors are generally ready to buy but are also seeking for information that directs their buying decision.

Transactional intent – Transactional searchers are usually at the ready-to-buy stage. Their buying decision is mostly driven by price. In terms of content, transactional searchers are looking for product, service or subscription pages.

Knowing the intent of your potential customers allows for a more proactive approach to improving their experience through tailored conversations – either through content or by other means – that suit the stage of their buying journey. This understanding coupled with today’s artificial intelligence-powered tools allow you to also influence the customer intent by continuously displaying the more relevant content to them across multiple touchpoints.

According to Curata, 74% of businesses find lead quality and quantity went up as a result of introducing content that’s relevant, useful, and timely.

Along with this, your brand can continuously stay in touch, remarket with similar products and services, and keep them warm through every stage of their journey while providing key data and insights to the sales qualification team to direct more effective follow-up interactions.

Freeing up resource for more effective lead qualification and conversion

When your business is raking in high quality leads generated from reaching the right people and understanding intent, they inevitably result in dramatic improvement to sales effectiveness. This means better conversion rates as sales professionals are now conducting thorough conversations at the best possible timing.

This saves valuable sales resource, especially since 66% of sales reps’ time is spent pouring over spreadsheets and emails which accounts for plenty of wasted time, talent, and opportunities to build relationships with prospective customers that are ready to buy.

Bringing together sales and marketing may not always be the easiest task – since they are often portrayed as two opposing forces – but pull it off and the rewards extend beyond revenue increases, but also a better customer journey that will attract prospective customers and keep existing customers coming back to your brand.