Integrating Marketing & Sales Plans

It’s Marketing’s job to get potential customers to notice you and take some kind of action that moves towards a purchase. In a retail business, for example, effective marketing tactics get customers into the shop. For your business, perhaps the measure of successful marketing is the volume of incoming phone inquiries or visits to your website. Knowing what you are trying to accomplish with your marketing, and how to measure it, is an important place to start when devising your plan.

It is not Marketing’s job to land the customer. This is the the job of your sales plan. Marketing brings the customers to the sales people, and it is up to Sales to close the transaction and get cash into the till. There are a variety of steps in the sales process, such as welcoming the potential customer, building rapport, determining the customer’s want/need/problem, determining a solution or choice of solutions, delivering that solution, concluding the transaction, and post-sales customer follow-up.

In the early stages of the sales process, customers can step back, and Marketing must once again do its job. Think about how many times you might visit a favourite retail store without making a purchase. It is marketing tactics, such as advertising, promotions and visual merchandising, that send you through the doors again, and on occasion, the product/service offering is right and you make a purchase.

As your business’s key strategist, you must develop marketing and sales plans that work together to generate revenue. Marketing is a waste of money if your business doesn’t have experienced, trained, customer-focused sales people to engage with clients and provide satisfactory solutions. Sales can be a constant struggle, if not downright misery, if every interaction is a cold call. Integrating your marketing and sales strategies will make both plans more successful, decreasing your efforts and costs and increasing your revenues.

At what stage does Marketing stop and Selling begin? How frequently does the customer enter the “welcoming” or “building rapport” sales stages only to back out? Does that customer ever re-enter? Is this normal for your industry, or does it signal a problem somewhere in your process? Despite have distinct duties, there is a reason that Marketing and Sales functions are typically part of the same department: they must be integrated.