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Hi, I’m Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment, and this blog is all about how to align your marketing and sales function for maximum impact.
So let’s get started then looking at how do we answer this question of aligning marketing and the sales team, your consultants.
What is the Recent Data Saying?
Let me tell you about a survey that McKinsey did slightly earlier in lockdown – they wanted to look at what was the impact on an organisation’s sales function. And out of it, there were some real key themes that appeared.
The first one was spend, organisational spend. The second was how sales functions responded using digital platforms. And thirdly, of course, the impact of remote working. So let me share a few insights then. Because when you look at organisations and what they are looking to invest moving forward and now, surprisingly, about 47% of organisations said that they will be decreasing their spend.
However, what that obviously meant is just over half, 53% of businesses, were going to either maintain or increase spend, which has to be good news for any country’s economy, and I think they covered about seven countries in this particular study.
Digital Alignment
Now, coming on to digital, there’s a real connection, of course, between digital and remote. But when you think about a sales function in any business, of course, the majority of it generally is face to face and on the phone. But 90% of organisations said that they were able to pivot very quickly and move their whole sales function online. Now, using things like Zoom; if you haven’t heard of Zoom before, you absolutely have heard about it now, and of course, there’s webcasting as well.
It’s easy and fabulous actually to use an online video platform if you’re wanting to take someone through a service and the flow of that service and offerings.
What’s really interesting here though is 50% of those organisations said that they actually thought that their sales teams were functioning as effectively, if not more, as a result of using all these different digital platforms and selling in a different way.
Creating Cohesiveness in Your Team – Long-Term
Now, coming back to our question of aligning marketing and sales. If we have got teams who were going to be working remotely for an extended period of time and permanently have more flexibility around working, which means that people will continue to work remotely, then we will be relying more and more on these digital platforms.
So thinking then about marketing and sales, of course, from a marketing point of view, the marketing teams have been used to digital platforms, digital marketing, as that’s evolved more and more in the last few years.
As an industry, recruitment companies are looking to automate more and more of their marketing to increase our efficiencies.
So how about if now we take this opportunity to bring our marketing team and consultants together, or look at what marketing is required in today’s environment to bring people into the sales conversation digitally.
Once we have some of those online conversations, what sales materials and follow-up materials do we require to follow up these online digital conversations?
As well as phone conversations, of course. But what emails do we need to be nurturing people? And how can marketing help the sales team automate some of this follow-up, so it’s efficient as well?
So if you haven’t been thinking about aligning these two teams, now is a fantastic opportunity. So good luck with that, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
For more info and insights on how to master sales and marketing in your recruitment company from the experts – head to our blog where you will find a catalogue of helpful blogs, or subscribe to our weekly podcast The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast – Apple users click here, Android users here.
That’s Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment.
