Inbound marketing: How should sales and marketing interact?

Inbound marketing is a methodology that consists of attracting customers through the creation of valuable content and tailor-made experiences. This allows companies to set in motion a virtuous circle in which customers amplify the reputation of their brand.

In this way, inbound marketing strengthens a company's online presence, positions a company at the top of mind in its category, consolidates long-lasting business relationships, generates more leads, more sales opportunities and more profitability.

There are three ways to apply the inbound methodology: attract, which consists of capturing the attention of the right people with valuable content; interact, that is, offer people information and solutions that take into account their needs and objectives to increase the likelihood that they will buy your products and services; and delight, or in other words, provide customers with the help and tools to enable them to achieve success through their effective purchase. It is also important that all areas of the company are united and work in sync, especially the marketing department and the sales department.

what is the mission of the marketing department?

The marketing team, in general, is in charge of getting information about the brand and the products or services to potential customers. Therefore, this department has to design and execute the commercial communication tactics. However, it has many other functions, such as these 4:

• Designing the buyer persona of your brand, either at a general level or for each of your products or services separately.
• Planning and executing the entire commercial strategy, which involves defining your brand's value proposition and developing the necessary tactics to make that proposition known to your target market.
• Establish the business objectives you need to achieve through the strategy, including, for example, new customers.
• Define and deploy the company's communication plan, which is used to communicate your value proposition to the market and create sales opportunities to achieve your objectives.

what is the role of the sales department?

The sales team is the one that accompanies potential customers during their purchasing processes so that they make the right decision at the end. For this reason, the sales department is usually one of the largest within companies and must fulfil, at least, the following 4 functions:

• Tosuccessfully close the sales process, the department provides all the necessary advice to potential customers until they decide to conclude their purchase process, hopefully with a big sale.
• Maintain a good relationship with customers by means of different tactics that allow us to deepen the levels of trust with customers.
• Measure and analyse customer satisfaction indexes through different techniques that allow us to know their opinions about the product, the service, the purchase experience and so on.
• Capture market information, which generates insights into the business itself.

The keys to creating an inbound marketing strategy between marketing and sales

As you have already seen, by defining the roles and functions of both departments, we can easily detect the need for them to act together. Moreover, this operational alliance has a name and is known as"SMarketing" (Sales + Marketing). But what are the keys to making this alliance work? Pay close attention!

1. define the pain points of your ideal customers. Buyer personas are not only the ideal customers for marketing or the ideal customers for sales, they are those of the entire organisation. Therefore, the definition of their pain points must be carried out jointly by both expert teams.
2. optimise the content for your sales team. Based on the pain points of your ideal customers, your marketing and sales teams should work together to create the valuable content to distribute. However, beyond the content itself, one of the key aspects is to know how to detect at what stage of the buying process a prospect is at.
3. use the Sequences tool to distribute content. Sequences is a tool from HubSpot, and other CRMs, that allows your sales force to automate certain tasks in order to accelerate the buying process. One of these tasks is to send personalised content to your prospects, based on the dynamic lists in which they have been registered.

Finally, remember that with the right joint strategy, both marketing and sales teams can become great lead capturers and customer converters, although don't forget that by working all the departments of the company together you can also achieve great objectives in the short and long term.