Six Steps to Aligning your Sales Team With Your Marketing Message

Having worked with many sales teams, the common problem that I find is that if you interview each member of a sales team, they will convey a different message about a company’s products or services in the market place.

A properly developed marketing message will define the best way to describe the features and benefits of a product or service to a prospective customer. For any product or service, there is an optimal way to present it to a prospective customer and it is critical that a company’s sales team deliver this message in a consistent manner.

So if each member of a sales team has his or her own version of your marketing message, you will get a confusing message about your product or service that will work against your marketing department’s attempts to establish a clearly defined brand and message in the market place. Worse still, the message of some sales team members may fail to fully demonstrate the features and benefits of your product or service, resulting in a poor conversion rate.

Is your sales team aligned with your marketing message? If they are not, what would the impact be on your bottom line if your sales team could consistently deliver your marketing message? To get your sales team aligned with your marketing message consider the following six steps:

1.     Define how your sales team must deliver your marketing message

The marketing department should be responsible for defining the marketing message and how it is to be delivered by your sales team. This will ensure your sales team are equipped with the best way to describe the features and benefits of a product or service to a prospective customer. Sales team members are often amazed at how a well defined marketing message can improve their conversion ratios.

2.     Check your sale team’s delivery of your marketing message

To determine how well your sales team deliver your marketing message, you will need to test their delivery of this message. You can either get your sales team to write down the key benefits of your product or service that they would convey to a prospective client in a given situation or go out on some sales calls with your sales team to see how they actually convey your marketing message.

3.     Get your sales team buy-in

Getting buy-in is critical in any situation where you require individuals to commit to a specific course of action. In order to get buy-in, a sales team needs to understand why it is important, from a marketing perspective, that each one of them delivers a consistent message about the features and benefits of a product or service in the market place.

Once they buy-in to the importance of delivering a consistent message, they also need to commit to not change the message when they get bored of it or to become careless and to stop using the defined marketing message.

4.     Train your sales team

Once a sales team has bought into this principle, each member needs to practice and perfect the delivery of the marketing message. It is completely acceptable practice to get individual members of a sales team to roll play various sales situations and how they would deliver the marketing message. This will ensure individual team members are properly prepared.  

5.     Create a feedback loop to improve your marketing message

Once prepared, the sales team can test the marketing message with customers and prospective customers and give the marketing department feedback. This is an important feedback loop, as the sales team should be involved in the development of any marketing message. The sales team are able to give valuable feedback as to what works and doesn’t work with prospective customers. Even better, marketing team members should go out on sales calls with the sales team to get firsthand experience as to what is important to the customer.

6.     Create marketing material that your sales team will use

Marketing materials and literature are too often not used by the sales team. It is important to ensure all marketing materials align with your marketing message and are useful and used by your sales team in making presentations.

In conclusion it is important that both marketing and sales work together to ensure your sales team deliver a consistent message in the market place.

Written By Graham Mitchell, Certified Business Coach with ActionCOACH