Lately I’ve been reading more about how one should define sales and how one should define marketing and how they are standing across the aisle looking at each other.

In any small business, you need new customers.  Probably true for ALL business.  New customers are important to the health of the company.

Usually, there is a group called ‘Marketing’ which is out there every day generating ‘leads’.

Generally, there is a group out there called ‘Sales’ which takes these ‘leads’ and tries to convince them to become ‘customers’.

handshake

I can tell you from first hand experience if these two groups Sales and Marketing aren’t close friends, you’ll have trouble generating the new customers to the business that you need to grow.

How Marketing and Sales can Work Together.

Here’s an example of a case study that shows how email B2B marketing and sales can work together.

We often work with companies that have a customer email list and a sales person or sales team.

We had customer with a call center.  They had a marketing department.  The two groups didn’t interact very often.  They got along OK, but they just didn’t think of each other.

We suggested they send an email to their list and the call to action in the email was to connect the call center reps with people that were on the email list.

There was a lot of resistance from the call center, but we were finally able to get them to agree to run a test campaign.

It should be pointed out that the call center reps were largely compensated on commission so a bump from email marketing should have been welcome.

Here’s how it played out.  We made sure that our first email campaign created inbound phone calls for the call center reps.

The day the campaign went live, we were on the floor in the call center.  When the first rep got an inbound call there was an immediate buzz and some new excitement.

We used that buzz to reinforce how effective email marketing can be to provide LEVERAGE to an existing sales team.

It was a perfect way for Marketing and Sales to get closer and support each other more effectively.