Marketing > Sales (Is Your Sales Team Even Relevant Anymore?)

Sales growth: There’s the old way and the new way. The new way to grow sales is to understand that marketing is sales. 

In fact, I’ll be bolder. I’ll go as far as to suggest this equation: marketing > sales.

Bear with me for a minute and I’ll explain (as a long-time salesperson, I feel the need to both explain and defend my statement): 

The old way to grow sales was simply to hire more salespeople. Add more and more bodies to the payroll and hope and pray a few of them actually work. A costly growth strategy that can fail more often than succeed. 

Why is marketing the new sales? And why is marketing > than sales?

Because the sales game has changed forever and as we are all painfully aware of now:

Selling is no longer analog. 

Gone are the tradeshows, the 3-martini lunches, the all-afternoon golf games, and the 5 o’clock business socials. The old ways of attracting and engaging customers are as stale as that box of donuts sitting in the breakroom that the sales rep “just happened to drop by.” 

The reason marketing is greater than sales is one simple reason: Buyers now live behind screens. 

And screens are an impassable roadblock unless you understand that the same tools that allow buyers to hide are the very tools that allow us to find. This is why we can say that marketing is greater than sales because the “>” sign signifies not more importance but weight: Selling today is done in a digital-first environment. And because it’s digital-first, marketing is the new form of selling and should command much more of your time (weight) than it currently does.

But first, a confession: From SEO to WOM, CTA to CMS, ABM to CRM, and from PPC to the memory-defying AIDA - we marketers have made marketing confusing as f-u-c-k. Unfortunately, far from simplifying things, these acronyms marketers LUV just ... confound. In fact, we spend more time deciphering our tools -and explaining the damn things- than using them. 

Even the word “marketing” is bloated with misperceptions, but marketing is simply inspiring the right people to come to you at the right time so that you can solve their problem intelligently (i.e., sell).

And there are two vital tools you need in your sales toolbox to do this: a CRM + marketing automation. And, we’ll liberate our acronym-shackled sales tools by defining them this way: 

1. A CRM is for deep insight that leads to foresight.

2. Marketing automation is for inspiring engagement and nudging along. 

Though most people conflate the two, they are distinctly different tools: 

CRM = intelligent insight. It does three things: collects data on potential clients, tracks sales opportunities, and grows existing clients. With a CRM you can create company profiles, add notes, calls and meetings, set reminders for follow-ups, keep a history of activity, assign statuses, utilize tagging, categorize customers (and more), all to simply keep your sales funnel organized. It’s like having a second brain for all prospect and client data. As a sales intelligence tool, it simplifies and categorizes your database. It amplifies your problem-solving skill because it allows you to have the visual clarity to speak clearer and louder toward solutions that really matter for customers.

Marketing automation inspires engagement and converts leads into customers, faster. It’s focused primarily on new lead generation. It tracks your marketing across various online channels (email, social media, websites, etc.) and saves you time by automating repetitive tasks. Marketing automation tools can tell you the number of opened emails, web form data, and more. According to Hubspot, it takes an average of 18 calls to connect with a buyer. Marketing automation inspires creative interaction and accelerates sales activity by automating those touchpoints (i.e., nudging along).

But as was highlighted at our recent skucon conference recently, data does not equal insight, which is why salespeople today are more valued and more important than ever before. It’s not that the digital world has silenced salespeople; it’s that the digital world has changed the salesperson’s role - forever. What salespeople once did in an analog way, marketing tools now do much faster, at scale, and with greater efficiency. 

One example (of many) in our industry is new product promotion. Before, suppliers would spend a tremendous amount of expense flying salespeople all over the country to (basically) demonstrate new product. COVID-19 ushered us into a world where new products/ideas are now presented digitally (a far less expensive way to sell), which leaves many of us reconfiguring the role of sales: from product presenters to problem solvers. And the same goes for distributor salespeople, too (hello kitting and fulfillment projects and shipping to homes).

As we now know, and according to McKinsey & Co research, “almost 90 percent of sales have moved to a videoconferencing(VC)/phone/web sales model,” but here’s the stunner: “while some skepticism remains, more than half believe this is equally or more effective than sales models used before COVID-19.” 

McKinsey calls it the B2B digital inflection point:

“B2B companies see digital interactions as two to three times more important to their customers than traditional sales interactions.” 

This leaves the role of the salesperson to do exactly what our buyers are begging us to do every day: know their business well enough to solve their problems intelligently. Which requires CRM and marketing automation.

Neither a CRM system nor marketing automation is a new concept, rather they are a “now” concept, one of the many emerging technology solutions that suddenly become urgent in our digital-first world, and one that marries engagement with the digital experience. And the new e-commerce (engagement + digital experience) is how buyers prefer to interact with businesses. 

So, the question remains for you and your team: Are you using both a CRM and marketing automation to inspire, engage, connect, and amplify your sales? To make your sales team stronger, smarter, and faster? Or are you trying to shoehorn an old, slow sales model into a new world that no longer wants it?

Note for commonsku customers: commonsku has launched integrations with both Mailchimp and HubSpot. Having Mailchimp and HubSpot integrated with commonsku CRM means all of your leads information would be in one place, and easy for your sales and marketing teams to edit and manage. These integrations will allow you to sync your contacts from commonsku to Mailchimp/HubSpot and send commonsku contacts newsletters or enter them into workflows from Mailchimp/HubSpot plus use any of the other features available in those apps. Ultimately your marketing automation platform of choice would work with commonsku to make a complete sales and marketing solution.

For more on the differences between these two platforms check out Mailchimp vs. HubSpot Product Comparison.

For further reading: 

• The Only Marketing Strategy You Need to Supercharge Your Sales

• How to use marketing automation software as a distributor

• How distributors can use marketing automation and CRM together