Jul 27, 2018
Brent Adamson has a bone to pick with marketers: the way many of them define their industry is miles off the mark. In fact, Brent may want to abandon the term 'marketing' altogether, because too often the notion of separate marketing and sales departments breeds a lack of coordination. If your marketing and sales teams are not in perfect lockstep, you can count on your business suffering. If you disagree, maybe he can sway you in part 2 of his interview.
In today's conclusion to the interview, Brent and Drew get at to the heart of how a marketing team needs to operate to be successful, and it involves a lot more than handing leads off to sales like a relay-race baton. Brent will talk the listener through seven tools that can help make speed up the process of connecting a customer with a product. Then, Drew and Brent talk through the buyer enablement journey, and why breaking down walls between sales and marketing will enable the teams make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy. In the end, that's goal number one.
This episode is brimming with wisdom to help you shed some outdated notions of marketing, don't miss it!
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Brent wants every marketer to understand that the role of every B2B business is to make buying easier for the customer. This is achieved through a high level of marketing and sales collaboration. Gone are the days where marketers can simply hand off a prospect to the sales department and hope for the best. If a company knits together the two departments, they will have a competitive advantage over every other business in the industry.
During the purchase journey, a buyer is always seeking for validation on the information they receive. After speaking with a sales representative, there are 3 main places where they will look for validation:
That’s why it’s so important for companies to be unified in the way they deliver information and lay out why their solution is the best available. If a buyer receives mixed information, they’re less like to choose your solution.
A B2B company with linked marketing and sales departments can work together to create tools that help a customer make easier buying decisions. There are 7 main categories of tools that can be explored.
These tools ultimately allow the customer to choose the best solution to their problem. Brent explains that there is a “huge commercial benefit” to providing tools that make a customer’s life easier, and companies can see increased loyalty from customers after they use these tools.