It is time for financial service firms to align their sales and marketing teams to be working together as one. What we see today, in the financial service world, is that the marketing department focuses on generating a lot of leads and the sales team, the advisors, focus on closing.
This may sound OK but typically the issue is that there is not a lot of communication between those two departments in order to help each other to achieve better results.
When you set a common goal, you will see a big difference on how sales and marketing work. You will see that they will keep each other accountable, work better and increase revenue in the long run.
Some common goal examples that you can set could be to Increase the number of qualified leads for advisors or for the marketing team to help the sales team to reduce the length of the sales cycle.
Would you like to know what is the most important goal that you should set for your sales and marketing teams? It is to set a revenue goal. When you set a revenue as the common goal for sales and marketing teams, you will see that the dynamics between the two teams will be very different. The sales team and the marketing team will work together in order to keep each other accountable as to what they are doing and to help each other grow in order to be better and improve the way that they do things.
Investors have changed the way they shop. In the past, whenever they need information, they would go straight the financial advisor. But these days, we see investors go online in order to look for information and only when they are ready to talk to an advisor that they will go consult them.
Knowing that investors go online to search for information, it's important for sales and marketing to work together to find out what content would be important for potential investors to find online.
There are 2 main things that sales and marketing can work together in terms of the content strategy:
1. Work on the Buyer Persona, which is a semi-fictional character of a representation of an ideal client.
2. Work on the Buyer's Journey, which is to understand how they shop from the beginning until the end.
When sales and marketing work together to on the Buyer Persona and the Buyer's Journey, they can both identify what content they should create that is important for potential investors accordingly.
A good CRM that is functional for both departments or both teams provides transparency between the two. When there is transparency, there is a lot of data that could be used for both departments in order to improve the way they do things.
The sales team can benefit by having marketing data to help them to close leads in the pipeline. They can see what pages they've been on, what emails they've clicked an open and even the forms that have been submitted online.
The marketing can also benefit as well in terms of what they can see in the CRM. They can see what sales emails are being sent, what they are logging in terms of activities and phone calls as well.
When a good CRM is used with the sales team and the marketing team there is a lot of transparency. Both departments can see what they are doing. By having the insights of sales data and marketing data, both departments will be able to improve their processes and the activities that they are doing on a day-to-day basis.