When it comes to driving revenue, it’s easy to get caught up in the old, outside-in approach. The fallacy is thinking that if you launch a large-scale marketing and branding effort eventually it will lead to an increase in sales. However, this paradigm overlooks the most critical interaction—the one that happens at the point-of-sale.

According to a recent article on information-based advertising, “An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer.” ¹ By starting with that engagement, taking an inside-out approach to marketing, we can have a substantially more significant and direct impact on revenue.

On the surface, integrating sales and marketing in this way may seem simple, but in reality it often falls short of expectations. In an executive study on missed business opportunities, 53% of corporate officers stated that their sales and marketing functions had a close and collaborative relationship, yet only 7% felt the two groups worked together to effectively harvest business prospects.²

Truly integrating sales and marketing requires an in-depth understanding of the sales process and customer behavior. Here are three ways to jumpstart your efforts from the inside out:

1) Build your messaging based on real behaviors. Eliminate the guesswork. Observe what your customers and prospects are actually doing and saying. Spend time with sales reps in the field and on call. Monitor web site activity and behaviors. Then, use what you learn to address customer objections, advance prospects and gauge readiness to buy. It’s a strategy that successful online retailers like Amazon.com have been quick to embrace, presenting you additional purchase suggestions “recommended for you” on their web site and in timely emails personalized just to you.

2) Look for opportunities for service innovation. Marketing is more than catchy slogans and celebrity endorsements. Some of the most powerful sales motivators are born out of simple observations. Take the banking industry for example. For years, consumers complained about being charged ATM fees to access their own money. Eventually banks like Bank of America³ began to take notice and started refunding these fees as a means to set their checking accounts apart from competitors. After all, the cost of these minimal fees was easily offset by the value of new customer conversions.

3) Empower your sales force. Take that intelligence that you gathered from observing customer behaviors (see Point 1) and feed it back to your sales team. Then give them the tools to customize communications directly to the individual prospect’s specific needs. The key to ongoing success in sales and marketing integration lies in keeping the lines of communication open. Encourage dialogue within your organization and with customers and prospects. Observe, listen and track behaviors. Then use what you learn to make your most critical engagements infinitely more powerful.

Sources:

1. “Engagement—A New Information-Based Form of Advertising,” Lester Wunderman, MarketingProfs.com, April 29, 2008.
2. “Gauging the Cost of What’s Lost: Improve the Return on the Resource Burn,” BPM Forum: Reports & Research, November 2004.
3. MyAccess Checking^®, BankofAmerica.com.