A Marketing and Sales Love Story in Four Acts

Welcome back to our second act of our sales and marketing integration discussion. We want to focus this month’s chat on the Prospect and Lead phases and express the following central idea: your marketing team can better tailor their content and messaging campaigns if they understand the nuances and details of both the target demographic and the value position your company offers this group of people. Constant integration and perpetual inclusion of both teams is the best way to focus your team on a common goal. With that said, let us kick things off and explain a method to optimize a customer’s journey while at the same time establishing more peace and harmony between your sales and marketing teams than one would find at a Tai Chi conference.

Before we begin, let us travel to a theoretical white board session at which your marketing and sales teams are defining the target demographic for a particular campaign. Your marketing team’s inclusion in these discussions is important because this is the time during which they begin to understand the nuts and bolts of what constitutes the target audience. Everything from education level to projected hobbies helps the marketing team craft a better message that speaks directly to a specific group of people as opposed to a broad audience. For example, if your sales team wants to target your dealership’s customers who drive luxury models for an upcoming snow tire campaign and your marketing team delivers a message about the importance of preparing one’s vehicle for winter, both of your teams are out of sync and will fail to maximize the outputs of their efforts. This scenario ultimately costs both the dealership potential revenue and your staff’s time and effort. In different terms, your sales team is trying to sell apples while your marketing team is telling everyone that eating fruit is a good idea. You might sell some apples, but not as many as you should.

Now that our marketing team understands the target demographic and the sales team is confident that a relevant message will support their efforts, we can begin our journey. For our purposes, we will call our target demographic “prospects.” The sales team begins to connect with current luxury cars owners who purchased their vehicle from your dealership, but have yet to buy snow tires for winter. At the same time, the marketing team begins to work content on social media and other platforms that engage luxury car owners who are not current dealership customers. Just because they did not buy their car from you does not mean you cannot sell them snow tires.

While your sales team works the phones, your marketing team monitors the effectiveness of their multimedia campaign and adjusts their content using predetermined metrics. Eventually, prospects who own luxury cars and are in need of snow tires will respond to your sales teams’ calls and your marketing team’s multimedia campaign. We can now push those prospects to the next phase within our progress.

Prospect Phase Objective: Your potential customer is interested in learning more about purchasing snow tires for their luxury vehicle and responds with a request for more information.

Now that the prospects have become leads, your sales and marketing team can better focus their time and efforts on a smaller group of potential customers. After combining the responses to the marketing team’s multimedia efforts with those collected with their own efforts, the sales team now influences the lead by explaining why your dealership’s luxury snow tires create a shared value position for your potential customers. At the same time, your marketing team is working with the leads and sharing blogs and website updates that inform them as why buying snow tires from your dealership is in their best interest and present them with additional opportunities and information that is relevant to their priorities and interests.

So the leads need luxury snow tires? They might also need to replace their summer oil with a weight optimized for cold weather. It just so happens that your dealership has amazing customer reviews from people who recently purchased oil changes. Your team’s background research concludes that luxury car owners often work 60-70 hour workweeks, so they have limited time to address maintenance issues. Your marketing team uses this information and explains that can address multiple winter preparation issues in a single visit. While your sales team influences the leads with a shared value position for snow tires, your marketing team informs the leads of additional opportunities that will save them another trip to your dealership. The leads who determine that your dealership offers them the best potential for service and value then move to the Spin Phase and transition from leads to committed customers.

Lead Phase Objective: The potential customer understands why purchasing snow tires from your dealership is in their best interest and is aware of additional opportunities and services.

So that wraps things up for this chapter in our epic journey to sell luxury snow tires to both current and new customers. Bringing things back to our core message, you can accelerate and optimize your customer’s journey if your sales and marketing team integrate into a cohesive effort that maximizes the talents and capabilities of both teams during each phase of the customer’s journey. We understand this is not a new concept; however, we believe that people often overlook the steps and structure required to arrive at a harmonious sales and marketing drum circle. Hopefully, our integration concept is generating ideas as to how you can employ a similar construct in your dealership. Also, you probably noticed that we failed to copyright this process, so you can implement it for the low price of Free-fifty. We make it rain here at Auto Labs, because that’s how we party.

So tune in next week as we move the next two phases of our process. Eventually, our theoretical dealership is going to sell some luxury snow tires, and hopefully, they sell a lot of them without the sales and marketing team demand trials by combat to resolve allegations of using all of the French Vanilla creamer in the break room.