Leverage Marketing Services for Sales

By: |Published on: Jun 30, 2015|Categories: Marketing Strategy|


Featured People: Chad Root, Spearhead Sales and Marketing, President/Founder, Rick Horn, Play Tall Consulting, 35 years as Director of Sales or VP of Sales and Marketing

Intro:

CR: As a marketing firm we do an awful lot of work with companies that are more interested in the sales side of the equation. I’m hoping that we can demonstrate to our clientele, who are a lot of salespeople or sales managers trying to leverage marketing, ways that they can create marketing type content but yet still keep it very personalized for sales activities. I brought a guest, Mr. Rick Horn. We rely heavily on Rick to work hand in hand with sales managers and people to leverage the marketing system we put in play for the company. A few questions for Rick – Share a little bit about where you come from.

Content:

RH: I’m from the local area here in Michiana. I spent 35 years in the sales and marketing arena, most of that as Director of Marketing or VP of Sales and Marketing. I’ve hired and led hundreds of people throughout the years and spent many years in the field myself.

CR: In your opinion, what really distinguishes the high performers?

RH: There are a couple of key fundamentals. Some people are really good at building rapport. They connect with people and make them comfortable. Some people have the knack for figuring out how to focus on the right relationships. They’re strategic about the people they spend most of their time with.

CR: In your opinion, determining who to spend time on, who to sell to, is that a marketing decision or sales choice? Should salespeople have the freedom to call who they want or should they focus on the target market?

RH: To me, I think that marketing’s responsibility is to establish a clear-cut target market profile. The salespeople use a strategy: identify versus profile. If you have identified you have a list: I want names, contacts, and how to get a hold of them. You can’t do much with just persona and profile. It really helps the salespeople if you can give them an ideal profile to look at. The best ones I’ve seen are a combination of salespeople and marketing, from the top down who look at it and the people who are out in the weeds.

Top Performers

  1. Know How to Build Rapport
  2. Focus on the Right Relationships
  3. Marketers Responsibilities: Target Market-Profile, Salespeople-Identify Specific Contacts

CR: It’s interesting you say that. When we named Spearhead, it stood for leading sales and marketing program. We intentionally cut the word sales, because sales have to be a part of the marketing equation, they have to inform marketing. Now marketing has to do its job, which is to get the profile put together, get a brand position established, marketing communications and so forth. But it’s really an integrated idea and I’m really passionate about that. Making sure the marketing systems we deploy fully integrate sales and vice versa. My hair rises when I get salespeople that don’t want to participate or contribute to that. Or they feel marketing may be overstepping their bounds and stepping on their toes, by integrating marketing communications specifically to their list. Some salespeople won’t even turn over their contacts. In your opinion, in 2015, with the use of social media, digital age, and websites, you see salespeople that use it and some that don’t at all. What advice would you give a salesperson in today’s age for how to leverage that technology and how to work with their marketing department?

RH: Well, one of the things I preach a lot is that I’m not a big believer in cold calling. Now there may be a time where you have to cold call just to get appointments but generally, I want people to perform what I call “warm calls”. The way you get warm calls is to create some kind of awareness out there for yourself, either the marketing department does it or you do it for yourself. One of the things I teach my salespeople is to take responsibility because you’re the one that will be judged on making sales, we’re not. If you’re not getting the support you need, tough, you have to go out and make it happen. There is lots of different technology and a wide range of salespeople, some people can utilize those items themselves and some can’t. Some of us older warriors weren’t brought up in the world of technology and a lot of the younger ones lean into it a little easier. I have learned that sometimes it’s not as complicated as it looks.

CR: I’m glad you said that, that’s part of why we’re here today. It can be scary sitting in front of a camera, it can be scary trying to write out the perfect script. You could spend an enormous amount of time creating content for the content world we live in. What I want to encourage people to think about is that you can do it naturally. You interact like this all the time, in the hallway and after work. Really just think about letting your eggs down and engaging the resources that are there. One of my passion’s for Spearhead is that we can help facilitate this sort of thing.

Notes

  • Advice for salespeople to leverage modern day content marketing
  • Warm calls not cold calls, use of social media, internet, email, or traditional marketing to create awareness
  • Capture natural moments on camera

Conclusion:

CR: Were going to wrap up this one, but I hope you come back and do this again (Rick Horn). We’re going to continue to do this once a week. We’re going to have someone come in like Rick and give their two cents and hopefully give sales and marketers out there, the encouragement to do likewise. Thank you for your time! Want some help leveraging marketing to raise awareness for your sales teams? Contact us @ spearheadsalesmarketing.com.

Calculate Your ROI