We are talking about how to ensure that Sales and Marketing can play nicely together and their different roles through customer journey. Let’s start by thinking about targeting.

Who Are Your Customers?

Normally the outlook of the business is set out by the owner/management team, and they dictate the sort of customers and clients you should be aiming for which in turn drives the strategy for sales and marketing. I’ve never met a business owner who didn’t have a slightly rose tinted view of his/her company and although it’s good to be aspirational often the companies the owner would like to aim for and the ones they actually do have something of a gap between them!

Target List

Having a clear definition on your target market(s) is of course clear but I’m often surprised how often businesses don’t have this in place.

If you’re B2C it’s important that you have a clear picture of what your customer should look like. For these business often it’s the sales team who will do the most interacting, often on the phone or in person so it’s key that any marketing team spends significant time with them and sees the type of people they deal with regularly and their needs. I would recommend having a profile of who you’re targeting and even writing a bit of a back story for them.

For B2B, have a list of top 10 targets (usually these are the aspirational ones your boss things are doable) and a larger list of about 40 other good targets. I’m shocked how often marketing aren’t involved at all in deciding who should be targeted when with the range of tools available now, having this information could make them much more effective.

What Sales Should Know

Sales should obviously have an intimidate knowledge of whom exactly you are targeting as it’s their job to warm them up and ultimately sell to them. Although few other departments need to have this level of knowledge, certainly it should be no trade secret as to what and whom sales is targeting.

What Marketing Should Know

Marketing needs to have a clear idea of who they are selling ad of course what will appeal to them. As a general rule of thumb, marketing should always aim slightly higher than the target market so it has it’s own aspirational quality.

With both teams having a clear outline on who is being targeted how are they going to reach them?