How Marketing Can Help Your Sales Team | Ep. #362

In Episode #362, Eric and Neil discuss how marketing can help your sales team. These two teams have the tendency to be at odds with each other when there is so much opportunity to benefit from one another. In fact, when marketers are successful at their job, it is easier for sales to close a deal as that brand awareness is already top of mind. Tune-in to learn how marketing helps your sales teams and why teamwork is always the way to success.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: How Marketing Can Help Your Sales Team
  • 00:43 – The more people that see your brand, the more your sales team can close a deal
  • 00:58 – Neil does marketing case studies that focus on content marketing and press
  • 01:28 – When Eric hears “I see your stuff everywhere,” that’s when he knows the marketing is working
  • 01:46 – People can get to know you more on an intimate level from videos or podcasts
  • 02:48 – A sales team isn’t as data driven as is the marketing team
  • 02:59 – Marketing teams should use tools that will help the sales team understand what needs to be done
  • 03:36 – Hubspot has tools for marketing and sales teams
  • 03:55 – The worst thing you could do is participate in the “blame game”
    • 04:12 – Sales and marketing teams should work together
  • 04:38 – Look at the data and don’t focus on the complaints from your team
  • 05:07 – Make sure you’re tracking your numbers
  • 05:15 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which will help you see people’s behavior on your website
  • 06:10 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. The more people see your brand, the easier it is for the sales team to close a deal.
  2. Marketing should work closely with their sales team—planning hand-in-hand and helping with each other’s weaknesses.
  3. Stay data driven; this will inform each and every step you make for your business.

Leave some feedback:

  • What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below.
  • Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.

Connect with us:

Full Transcript of The Episode

Intro: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about how marketing can help your sales team. So, Neil, I mean, I think Kissmetrics is a good example of this, of how marketing has helped in the past. I mean, do you want to talk about that or something else, because I think you have a couple of examples right at the top.

Neil Patel: Yeah, with sales, whether it's inbound or outbound, the more people that see your brand, the more likely the sales guys are to close deals. Even if their being out and emailing people, if others have heard of your company, you're much more likely to get conversions. So, the way we like doing it is with marketing, some things like case studies [inaudible 00:01:02] those guys more ammo.
Or we focus on content marketing, then that way people are seeing our brand. Or we focus on press, so then that way, that's highlighting our features. Like, TechCrunch will end up releasing, oh Kissmetrics just released X, Y, and Z feature and here's what it does and this is why it's cool.
And what we've found is the more noise we end up creating, the easier it is for the sales guys to close and the higher their closing percentage ends up being.

Eric Siu: So the phrase I usually end up hearing often is, you know, I see your stuff everywhere. Right? And it's coming from the right people. That's when I know that marketing is working out and when I hear that from prospects, I see you everywhere, I know the sales cycle is going to be shorter. Because they're actually consuming our content and they're actually getting to know us more. Especially when you have something like video or podcasts, they actually get to know you more and it becomes a lot more intimate.
So, that's how you can help your sales team close the cycle more, because they feel like they know you, or close the cycle more ... close the cycle faster because they feel like they know whoever it is representing your company on a more intimate level. So you know, we already talk about all the content marketing things that you can be doing. Neil talked about the role of seven.
So, I think it's just important to be out there and instead of ... I do think it's important to have an outbound sales team, but at the same time, sometimes I look at, you know, some of the other agencies out there that have heaps and heaps and heaps of salespeople and then I look at ours where we really don't have many salespeople at all, it's just the people that are closing. And that just allows me to focus maybe more of that overhead on marketing more or developing more talent internally. Instead of having you know, big overhead around sales.
Not saying that it's not important, but, you know it's my advantage and I like kind of where things are at right now.

Neil Patel: The other thing that I found too, with sales guys is that they're not as data driven as let's say marketing departments. What you can do is you can help them by doing things like when they send out proposals, use tools that can help them see, hey, how many pages are people scrolling down and looking at the proposal. Out of that, what pages should we rip off, what else should we add? Like where's the drop off? Are people opening up your emails and even looking at the proposal?
And there's a ton of tools, I don't know if Proposable exists, there's another one I think that's called PandaDoc is another one, right? And all these tools can help you maximize your chances of closing a deal, because it's just data. If people aren't looking at the stuff you're sending them and you're trying to close them ... probably not going to close if they're not opening stuff up.
Same with emails. HubSpot has a lot of tools out there where your salespeople and marketers can track if people are just even opening up your emails. Because if not opening up your emails, how do you expect them to click on a proposal and read it and sign it?

Eric Siu: So, at the end of the day, I mean, you know ... if you're from sales, make use of your marketing team, make use of the data that they have. Ask for stuff and work in tandem. The worst thing is when marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing. And there just tends to be kind of a total disconnect and that's when things don't happen. I think this one's ... I think Neil if you have anything else to add before we go?

Neil Patel: No, we mainly covered everything, but Eric has it right, even though they're separate departments, they should be working together. If they don't and they're blaming each other, you're not going to get much improvement. And I've seen this, I've seen it in my own company in which sales blamed marketing and vice versa and it's like oh, marketing drives really bad leads this week ... Or best of all, they're like it was a great month, but next month we don't know what's going to end up happening because the leads aren't looking as good.
It's like the same bullshit responses or excuses on both ends. And what you need to do is just look at the data and ignore what people are telling you within your team, if they're one of those guys or gals that just likes making excuses and sandbagging.

Eric Siu: Yep. You know that's really important. I mean, there's a lot of people that go off of gut feeling, and then the thing is when you have the data there, there's nothing that can be argued. And there's only so many times that they're going to be arguing it before they start to realize, like damn, I need to fix something and I'm not going to be able to wiggle my way out of it. In that case, you know, sales is really data driven at the end of the day. So, make sure you're tracking your numbers.
But before we go today, we actually have a giveaway that we're going to be doing almost on a weekly basis. So this is Crazy Egg. This is actually Neil's tool. So, do you want to talk about what Crazy Egg is at the moment, or for a moment?

Neil Patel: Yeah, sure. So, if you're having visitors come to your website, even if you don't have a ton of traffic, Crazy Egg will show you where people scroll, where they click on, what do they not click on. Through our WYSIWYG feature you can even make changes to your design, run A/B tests and best of all, you can even like monitor mouse movements. You can be like, oh here are what the users that convert do, and here's what the users that don't convert, here's their ... you know, mouse movement and patterns. From there you can make changes and increase your visitor to conversion rate.

Eric Siu: Great. So, if you want to get access to this giveaway, this one is actually ... there are multiple ways to get more entries. All we need to do is go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and then you'll get the details on it. So, check it out and hopefully you get to win. So if not, I mean, we are giving away one every single week.
So, that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Outro: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.

We help great companies grow their revenues

Get Your Free Marketing Consultation