Many sales and marketing departments aren’t as connected to each other as they could be, for one reason or another. This results in wasted time and lost opportunities trying to attract the right customers to an event.
There are numerous benefits to sales and marketing working together, such as creating higher quality leads, improving conversion rates, reducing customer acquisition costs, enhancing marketing and promotional materials, and ultimately increasing revenue for your business, just to name a few.
Before you plan your next virtual event within your event marketing strategy, consider the many advantages of merging your sales and marketing teams so that you’ll have a better understanding of your target demographic, as well as more ways to attract and retain customers going forward.
Benefits Your Company Will Immediately Notice When Your Sales and Marketing Teams Work Together on Your Next Event Marketing Project
Benefit #1) Direct Customer Questions Are Inserted Into the Event Planning and Promotion
The sales team often has insights and feedback from customers that unfortunately never make it to the marketing team during the pre-planning stage of an event.
Perhaps the sales team is dealing with the same customer issues daily. When sales and marketing work together, this information could be shared and inform how the event is planned and marketed. For example, promotional emails and the event’s website can directly address customer questions, providing the information they most often want to hear. This will also reduce the sales department’s headaches, allowing them to spend more time pursuing leads.
Benefit #2) When Marketing and Sales Teams Work Together for Event Marketing, it Results in Better Quality Leads
When marketing and sales agree upon common language, terms, and lead scoring methodologies, they can then determine what characteristics are most attractive in leads, and clearly focus their energy on targeting those leads.
Because both departments are speaking the same language, it becomes easier to discuss what determines lead quality.
Benefit #3) Increases Marketing Effectiveness in Ad Targeting
Once a lead scoring methodology has been chosen, marketers have a clearer picture of the kind of event attendee to target with their promotional materials and ad campaigns.
This helps them deliver better quality leads to sales, effectively spending less money on ads shown to people who don’t fit the qualities of valuable leads.
Already sold on the benefits of sales and marketing working together? Learn how to bring them together in your virtual event strategy.
Benefit #4) Increases Sales Effectiveness in Cold Calling
By agreeing upon shared lead scoring methods when sales and marketing teams work together, the salespeople are given higher quality leads that will close faster.
New leads can be ranked by their sales-readiness, or how likely they are to buy. They can be assigned point systems to notify sales of how likely the lead is to buy, and where they are in the buying process. This information warms up what would otherwise be a cold call.
Benefit #5) Shared Lead Scoring Methodology Increases Revenue
When combining sales and marketing to create the perfect lead scoring system, the probability of closing a sale to a qualified buyer increases, achieving higher revenue for the company over less time.
Benefit #6) Improves Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents your company’s target demographic. The problem is that many times sales and marketing don’t share the same buyer persona, resulting in ineffectual marketing materials that don’t reach the true target demographic.
When sales and marketing work together to update their shared buyer personas, marketing can create better content that will resonate with potential event attendees, bringing in more qualified leads to your event. Sales will then be given higher quality leads who are more likely to close after attending the event. Synergy!
Benefit #7) Reduces Cost of Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition cost is a calculation of all of the costs involved in winning over a customer to purchase your product, service, or event ticket. It includes costs like promotional materials, ad campaign budgets, hours worked by sales and marketing members, etc.
A benefit of sales and marketing alignment is reducing that cost. Both departments share a clear understanding of their target demographic, spend less money on wasted ads, and spend more deliberately to produce better marketing materials. This includes landing pages that can produce higher quality, sales-ready leads.
Benefit #8) Tracking Common Shared KPIs Keeps Teams Focused
A sales and marketing team should share the same Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) but frequently don’t. If the marketing team is only concerned with producing a high quantity of leads, but the sales team is overrun by unqualified leads, then clearly something isn’t working properly.
But if both departments are accountable to each other for shared KPIs like conversion rates, qualified leads, length of sales cycle, and marketing campaign effectiveness, then both departments can work together to achieve the same goal: revenue growth.
Benefit #9) Keeps Sales and Marketing Language Consistent
You’d be surprised how often sales calls a product or service one thing, and marketing calls it something else. If simple terminology and common terms aren’t agreed upon, then your company’s branding is compromised. Your customers will be confused about what you actually offer. For example, you can’t have the marketing team call your event an expo, and have sales call it a fair.
Branding guidelines should be easily accessible in both the sales and marketing departments to prevent confusion from customers who read one thing in an online ad but were told something different by a salesperson at an event.
Benefit #10) Increases Sales Conversion Rate
It’s been said that when a qualified lead talks to a salesperson that over half of the sales process has taken place.
When sales and marketing work together, your salespeople can inform marketers beforehand of what customers want, what websites they are likely to visit, what influencers they follow, etc.
Your marketing team then can produce promotional content for the event that’s so captivating your leads are practically sold before they even speak to a salesperson after the event. Or better yet, the leads convert online without having to go to sales in the first place, giving them more time to nurture other qualified leads.
Benefit #11) Promotes Higher Customer Retention Rates
Your sales team just closed a deal on a qualified lead. Your company’s branding was consistent, the marketing materials were effective, your event was a success, and the salesperson understood the customer’s wants and needs. Congrats!
Now that you have a successful sale, both departments can work together to retain this customer as long as possible, using the thoughtful marketing and sales techniques that attracted them in the first place.
This customer can now be first on the list for remarketing campaigns, emailing them to tell them about upcoming products or events they might be interested in.
When sales and marketing align to define their perfect customer, they will eventually find those people, and hold onto them longer because the customers will feel better understood and have a better user experience.
Benefit #12) Increases ROI and Promotes Business Growth
When sales and marketing alignment happens, you get a win-win-win scenario, resulting in lower costs and increased revenue growth, all contributing to an increased return on investment. This creates more profit for your company and room for business expansion.
Boosting revenue, increasing marketing effectiveness, improving customer retention, and maintaining brand consistency all contribute to a result that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Get Your Sales and Marketing Teams Started Building Your Virtual Event Today
With an understanding of the benefits of sales and marketing working together, hopefully you’ll start inviting salespeople to your marketing meetings, and vice versa.
To take your event marketing even further, consider trying a virtual event platform like SpotMe, which allows you to brand and customize a range of event marketing efforts, and collect all the data you need to reproduce an effective event. Reach out today to start your free trial and learn why G2 called us “the complete engagement platform.”
For those looking for more ideas to promote upcoming events, be sure to check out 12 Event Promotion Strategies to Attract the Right Audience and Grow Your Business.
