Scaling sales is the number one challenge most businesses face. Whether you’re struggling to drive lead generation, responding to incoming leads, staffing a sales team, or modeling sales compensation, sales likely takes up more headspace than you may like to admit. In truth though, we often make sales much harder than it has to be.
Although I work as a growth strategist with a focus on sales and marketing strategy, I don’t come from a traditional sales background. I haven’t attended any formal sales training, I’m not “Sandler certified” and I wouldn’t call myself a “salesperson.” So how have my startups and business ventures achieved such success, largely without any sort of traditional sales team in place? Often, as owners or managers, we get so focused on the idea of a formalized sales team that we miss the basics behind what DRIVES sales – marketing the brand. Brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty are key lead generators and sales drivers.
I was once asked, “If you had a dollar to spend in your business, would you spend it in sales or would you spend it in marketing?”
The two practices, sales and marketing, should not be separated and pitted against each other.
This division of sales and marketing is a common mistake I see in many firms– where the marketing team functions separately from sales and, in some unfortunate cases, the sales teams treat marketing like an afterthought or a nuisance. In my experience, there is nothing so time-consuming and expensive as muscling through sales without the help of a solid marketing practice to drive brand awareness, prospect engagement and lead generation.
My friend Dan Sixsmith recently invited me as a guest on his podcast “Sales Is King” to discuss the age-old battle between sales and marketing. Click here to listen-in on my perspective of why the highest performing sales teams are the ones tightly linked with marketing.