If you’re a solopreneur or small business, marketing and sales are one and the same thing. As your company grows, the work starts to get divided up. Marketing focuses on building brand awareness, stimulating interest, and generating leads. Sales works to turn prospects into paying customers.
Because sales people want a sale now, and marketing is working to build long-term brand equity, the timelines, goals, and outcomes are different enough as to make the teams basically ignore each other at best, or work against each other at worse. They are both friends and rivals. In a word: frenemies.
But Sales and Marketing share the same goal: increase revenues. Nothing else matters. As a company, there are 4 main ways to increase your revenues.
1. Increase your number of paying customers
2. Increase the quantity of goods or services a customer buys per transaction
3. Increase the price per transaction per customer
4. Improve retention rates of existing customers and increase the overall number of purchases they make with you over time
To achieve these, Sales & Marketing must bury the hatchet of frenemyship and become Smartketing. To achieve this level of nirvana, the two teams must sit down and define the customer lifecycle, mapping the major points along the timeline.
This enables both teams to know exactly where they stand in terms of increased revenue today, next week, and 6 months down the road. They can better forecast where they’ll be, identify chokepoints in the process that cause lost revenues, and work more closely together towards goal achievement. In the next post, we’ll discuss more about these goals and how to measure the impact of micro-conversions in the customers buying journey.