Sales and Marketing: how they work together in the HVAC industry.
Sales and marketing — it’s not uncommon to hear them either lumped together or, contrastingly, positioned as mortal enemies.
In reality, neither is an accurate representation.
While sales and marketing are not synonymous and definitely have more differences than they do similarities, they do share the same goal: growing business.
Sales and marketing are the duo who, when they collaborate, can bring out the best in one another.
Here are some of the key ways that we’ve seen sales and marketing complementing one another, to the benefit of the business.
How marketing can enhance sales
Forget cold calls: That form of outreach is far from ideal, whether you’re making them or receiving them. However, with strong insights about sales prospects, marketing can create a targeted campaign to ready leads and make those cold calls significantly less chilly. These campaigns can even have those prospects calling your sales team first.
Warm up those leads: When a lead isn’t quite ready, sales will often back off and leave it be for a while. In the interim, marketing can subtly nurture those leads so that they don’t get swept away by your competitors and keep you top of mind. This is a great way for marketing and sales to get together and create campaigns designed to prevent leads from slipping away and make conversion easier when the time is right.
Strengthen your brand recognition: Marketing should be driving a clear and consistent message about your business and brand. This often gets through to prospects faster than irregular phone calls or sales meetings (which prospects may be reluctant to book in). Via marketing, prospects can have regular insights into your business that are not solely reliant on (usually) one to two team members to build your business image. Getting your brand and controlled messaging around your prospects can be done more efficiently and easily with marketing, than your salespeople, who often (sometimes rightly) assume that prospects know your business before they even walk through the door. So they can keep conversations focussed on the immediate topic, while marketing can communicate the overarching business messages.
How sales can level up your marketing
Let’s get technical: In our experience, salespeople often have previously resided in roles such as internal sales engineers, technicians, and even straight off the tools. They understand the technical aspects of the industry, equipment, and the solutions your clients require. Arming your marketers with knowledge of the technical aspects of your business absolutely benefits the impact your sales and marketing results have. The combination of a technical sales team, working with experienced marketers who can drive marketing and branding messaging makes all the difference when it comes to business growth and recognition. We’ve seen it time and time again, and it happens when marketing and sales are working together.
Gain insights into your audience: Data on your target market is more powerful than ever thanks to the digital world. But let’s not discount the invaluable wealth of knowledge held by the people who are regularly face-to-face with customers, gaining in-depth details about your audience’s challenges, desires, and obstacles as part of the sales process. These insights should be shared and used to enhance marketing strategies.
Seek marketing feedback: Again, there’s only so much reporting can tell us, and that includes information about how your marketing is being received. But your sales team can fill in the gaps. When the sales team passes on feedback from customers about their experience of your business’s marketing, you get the opportunity to do better and be better.
Bringing sales and marketing together
Both marketing and sales are vital to every business in their own right. If you can get these two key players in your business working together more effectively, you can expect some impressive results.
And getting sales and marketing aligned is fairly straightforward. Here are a few quick tips to get things moving in the right direction:
Put them on the same page. Literally. Put together a spreadsheet or similar that highlights shared goals that are relevant to both sales and marketing. Number of leads, brand reach, profits — create a space for common ground.
Schedule regular meetings: Speaking of common ground, a regular meeting where sales and marketing can come together to review progress and share their insights and ideas.
Collaborate on your prospects: Make the time for sales and marketing to work together on your audience/s, with regular reviewing of them. This ensures that both teams are always targeting their efforts in the same direction.
We know this because we do it every day. Our team is already implementing this with sales teams across your industry - and the businesses with both teams working together win every time.
If you need a little guidance on leveraging this partnership more effectively, let’s chat.