Two professions that are intrinsically intertwined are sales and marketing. They both require their practitioners to convince people to spend their hard-earned money on particular products or services.
The main difference between the two professions is that salespeople try to directly influence their customers while marketers use more indirect means of persuasion. As such, many of the skills that go into the making of a good marketer are also useful to sales professionals.
Become a good marketer is a great way to become a better salesperson and vice versa. Whether you take classes, get coaching or do as much personal research as you can, the benefits of being familiar with both ends of the operation are substantial. Read on to learn how understanding marketing can help your sales career:
Techniques and Strategies
The main thing you’ll develop is the myriad of marketing strategies and techniques you can use to convince prospects to invest in your goods or services. The bread and butter of marketing is to peak people’s interest through a variety of means. While cold calling and sales pitches can be effective, there are many other little ways developing marketing knowledge can help boost your sales.
One of the most common ways is to understand the main benefit of what you’re selling in a succinct way. Over-explaining why someone would want something often bores potential clients and makes you seem like you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
Advertisements only have a short amount of time or space to convince people to buy their product, so they need to be concise. Approaching sales in this way can save time and make the client more interested more quickly. Additionally, you can also focus on what’s unique about your product, like if it does something better than other products of its kind.
It’s never a bad idea to keep an eye on how your products and services are being advertised. Knowing your company’s ads will help you understand your prospects better and it might give you some ways to make your sales pitch punchier.
Consumer Psychology
Jill Rowley, a social sales evangelist who has worked with companies like Hubspot and Salesforce said: “The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.”
Understanding the needs of customers is one of the most important aspects of either discipline, one that is absolutely essential for the success of each.
In sales, the main approach to this understanding is through concrete knowledge of the needs and problems of a client, along with strong intercommunication skills.
For marketing, the main focus tends to be on consumer psychology, predicting an audience’s thought patterns and coming up with ways to influence their decisions.
Salespeople already do this, in a way, through their interpersonal skills and the way they present themselves. However, having the depth of understanding that marketers have on consumer psychology can give you an edge in your sales pitches.
There are many things that can influence customer psychology, some as seemingly insignificant as a color or a choice of words. On a big picture level, approaching a meeting with an heir of authority on the topic and being able to
show social proof of your product or service’s effectiveness can get clients more interested in your pitch.
However, trying to manipulate the client into investing in a subpar good or service will lead to a diminished reputation and long-term failure.
Industry Insights
Finally, learning more about marketing for the sake of your sales career can provide you with greater industry insights as well as a better understanding of cause and effect. It will also help you appreciate how sales and marketing intertwine.
The more you know about not only your area pf expertise but other – such as marketing – can only help make you more powerful as a sales professional.
