In marketing, you can often find "popular terms", and at the moment this term is "sales promotion." Sales promotion is the actions, systems, processes and information that support and facilitate the interaction of sales with customers and potential customers based on knowledge.
Expert opinion
I interviewed three marketing experts to learn about sales opportunities and their importance. And here is what they said:
"Sales support is acceleration, improvement, and increased efficiency."
Gaurav Harode knows a lot about sales opportunities. His company, Enablix, where he is the CEO, is built around this concept. The brand offers software that allows small businesses to combine their organization’s sales and marketing resources on one central portal.
What is sales promotion?
According to Harode, sales promotion is to accelerate them, as well as to conclude new deals. Sales training and sales operations are part of the equation, and content is its main part. To get the right content for the right audience, you need more than just building a blog or document; we also need trading decks and demo scenarios, which are so important for sales professionals.
Harod believes that the key to increasing sales for small and medium-sized markets is to "do more with less." But how can you get a greater return on investment?
It all starts with managing digital content, which is seen as a harbinger of sales promotion. Once this content is organized in such a way that it makes sense to the buyer at that stage of the life cycle in which he is, and so that your sales representatives can access it at any time, you can improve your results.
Revitalization of sales may gain momentum, but at the moment, Harode says that most companies have not yet implemented it properly and are not using it. But everything is changing rapidly. “I believe that as we move forward, we will see how the individual pillars of sales promotion become independent.” - says Harode.
Considering that right now, everything from sales training to adaptation and content are mixed together, Harod claims that all changes occur gradually, until each of the pillars becomes more independent.
According to Randy Frisch, marketing director for Uberflip, a digital content platform for marketers, sales support is a collaboration between the sales team and other business areas.
When the sales force has access to the right tools and content, it can more easily conduct sales with existing or potential customers. Frisch says at Uberflip that when an account manager tries to convert sales, the Product Marketing and Channel Enablement team constantly monitors the brand’s information, its entry into the market, and ensures that Exec has access to messaging and uses this opportunity to help in closing deals.
The Customer Success team also ensures the work of the account manager, providing information about negotiations with customers, as well as potential opportunities to improve communication with them. It is this cross-functional collaboration that helps strategies to create demand for a brand and provides a level of its personalization and granularity on a scale.
“This is not the best practice - it is a necessity”
Nissar Ahamed, founder / publisher of CareerMetis.com, believes that any brand that wants to compete in today's market needs to understand the importance of aligning marketing with sales. He says: "If any marketing team is not related to sales, this is possible and needs to be fixed."
Ahamed, on the other hand, says that the more they are agreed, the more successful they are. "Marketing should support sales not only through CRM and potential customers, but also to ensure that they meet customer needs."
According to Ahamed, the sooner such coordination occurs, when marketing groups provide the sales department with assets that they can provide to customers, the greater the likelihood that these prospects will affect the buyer. We are talking about analytical materials, case studies and marketing automation, which make possible the transition from potential customers to real ones.
Brands need a union of sales and marketing
While each of the people I interviewed had different approaches to sales, one thing is clear: brands need an alliance between sales and marketing in order to be successful. These two departments can no longer work separately. When they coordinate their goals and work with real-time data and content targeted at a specific audience, large-scale things happen.