Why should a Marketer be a good sales person first?

The answer is pretty evident: You both got to sell!

Whether you draft out a really good copy of newsletter or plan an incredible campaign, at the end of the day it boils down to business! How much of sales has happened? What revenue have you made?

As marketers we are creatively challenged everyday to bring out the best possible techniques/campaigns and content to draw enough attention to our brand, create reassuring content to convince the leads hoping to expedite conversion and keep making enough noise to be ensure brand loyalty.

This is our job — Every single day.

The question is, do we do it from a sales person’s perspective? In fact, there are product marketers to think and analyze the marketing aspects from a product team’s stand point.

However, it is imperative to align the marketing aspects to empower sales through a unified goal:

“To be be genuinely interested in the customer and talk their language so that, we aren’t just a company putting out flowery marketing content with the usual road to Promise Land, in their minds”

Here’s an interesting example of how Marketing campaign backfired for Coca Cola back in 2004.

In 2004, Coca-Cola marketed their Dasani brand of water in the U.K. by referring to it as “bottled spunk” with the tagline “Can’t live without spunk,” oblivious to the fact that the word spunk is slang for semen there. Yeah, this is because they did not know what they were talking about.

Had Coke’s creative team spoken to the regional sales guys and understood what they were actually talking about, they wouldn’t have ended up telling people that they literally cannot live without SEMEN ;). It is understood that for a brand as BIG as Coca Cola a sales guy need not sell the water door to door or talk to convince the buyer, however the marketing team is supposed to work around campaigns keeping this very scenario in mind — what if I were the sales person talking to the customer right now, delivering this tagline!

Brands cannot afford to do such mistakes.Think of how many times of the day we create and deliver marketing messages from a sales person’s stand point? Do we create our campaigns and content by thinking of how the sales person would deliver the content or ad copy that we are creating here from our desks, to a customer, in person?

A decent marketer should also be a decent sales professional! Be it B2B or B2C, good marketing content, campaign or copy should be such that it strikes a personal and genuine conversation with the customer like how a sales person would converse.

For instance sales person at a retail store selling washing machine to a customer isn’t describing just the product features, he’s getting to know the customer, their usage pattern, number of people who are going to handle the machine and probably every little detail that connects the product to the person. Imagine if your marketing copy had all these aspects!

Ideally advertisers show women doing the laundry, kids creating stains and so on which is great. But wouldn’t it be nicer to understand the FAQs from sales and retail teams and deliver campaigns based on those? In India most house holds have domestic help and predominantly it is the house help who operate the Washing Machine. Instead of stereotyping the lady of the house, can we actually talk to the lady of the house telling her how her house help can operate the machine easily? This content would be more personal and is more understanding of the customer.

For instance the campaign could be ‘Rekha didi does laundry FTW’ ( Yes, I’m using a trending acronym here :) #Sooveratted :)) or show how simple it is for the old parents at home to do the laundry(Something that says ‘Chacha is our laundry hero’).

We do analyze trends and run campaigns based on those huge market trend reports that are purchased for thousands of dollars. However, what we need to do is get the report from internal teams, the teams that face customers and try to talk in their language.

Yes, you can argue it’s a trend, but the point is, merge the market trend and sales trend to synchronize the message which the business needs!

And how do we deliver good quality, coordinated sales-marketing campaigns?

Answer: By working the Funnel in reverse!

Work your funnel in reverse:

How would your marketing impact the person’s purchasing behavior? How would your message be delivered as if you were talking to a person? It would be great to work some of our marketing messages in reverse and create the brand from there. It’s time we backtracked from the bottom of the funnel and delivered content and messages that matter to the customer the most!

As a marketer Creativity is your Forte! But selling is your road to the Fort!

Let’s manifest our power as marketers to be the revenue makers with the ‘Right Story to tell’.

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