Last week I was talking about how Marketing and Sales should work together when it came to targeted outreach aka actively sending out materials in order to create sales. Now I want to talk about ‘Passive Outreach.’ This is much more the day to day activities such as content marketing, blogs, newsletters etc. So although an element of creating sales most often these are activities are done with a broader remit.

What’s The Point?

Where Sales largely leads when it comes to the pro-active, targeted outreach in finding new customers, marketing leads on what could be described as the ‘softer sales’ work. It’s easy to overlook just how new tools like social media and even the internet are. The whole concept of content marketing is hardly ten years old and only used in any widespread way for about 7ish years. (Although I find it amusing how many experts claim to have 20 years experience in this)

Yet for all the heavy focus on these new platforms and the never-ending barrage of well-intentioned advice, I think many marketers completely miss the point. Tools like content marketing and social media have on purpose above all: to keep in front of people.

That’s really it.

I would always argue of course that putting out quality content on a regular basis to the right people is more likely to convert into prospects and eventually sales, but it is certainly a softer form of promotion than any active campaign. I don’t think Businesses discount the importance of this task (certainly not in B2C environments) but it will always be less valuable. This is why often I think Sales struggles to interact and push out what marketing is producing.

Sharing Is Caring

Content is normally planned out in advance but having your company all sharing it out seems harder than you would think. Firstly in many organisations the only people allowed to use social media/linkedin are the marketing team themselves so that’s no good…secondly even where people have access expecting them to sign in, see your companies posts and actively share is unlikely for all but the higher ups. My advice would be to send your sales team a little table of this week’s content with a brief description and link so they can quickly and easily share it. It’s certainly not a waste of time to put together a video/presentation so that people in your organisation understand how to use these platforms and why. This is especially true of management who may see this as an unnecessary task.

Source for Ideas

Sales is also a fantastic source for ideas when it comes to article/questions or concerns they are hearing from the front line. Working in tandem sales and marketing can see what is popular with their targeted market and feed this back to sales and vice versa.