Companies that successfully align marketing and sales generate higher revenue and retain more customers.
When this happens, marketing teams better understand how to position their products and generate leads so the sales team can close.
How do you get there? Use this simple tactic:
Listen to sales calls
Have your marketing team listen in on sales calls — in person or, better yet, via call recordings.
Listening to sales interact with customers can unearth insights that can help marketers create better messaging and content across the board.
Why bother? Look at the stats:
- 83% of marketers say content marketing success depends on content quality
- 63% of marketers say creating content is a challenge for their company
- 69% of marketers say they’re struggling with content marketing
Here’s how listening in on sales calls can help:
1. Bring In Higher Quality Leads
Listening to sales calls helps marketers create a more detailed customer journey map. Marketers can develop more relevant content that moves them down the funnel by hearing what customers like and their pain points at different parts of the journey.
Higher-value content and improved messaging bring higher-quality leads and increased conversion rates.
2. Inspire Content Ideas
Sales calls can reveal insights that inspire better content. Marketers can get a lot out of a single call.
For example, a call where a prospect doesn’t understand the value of your product can better help your marketing team create:
- FAQ pages
- Blog post aligning customer pain points with your solution
- Infographics showing your product’s ROI
- Calculator tools that customers can use to determine their savings
- Case studies and customer testimonials showcasing your product’s value
- Explainer videos that demonstrate how easy the service is to use
- Detailed product descriptions using your customer’s language
Listening to sales calls helps you get inside your customers’ heads to create content that will resonate.
3. Reveal Competitor Information
Competitor analysis is a vital part of the marketing machine, but you can get solid insights for free by listening to sales calls.
Customers may reference why they’re considering your competitors on a sales call. They may reveal what a competitor presented and how that compares to your offering.
This information might not register as something your sales team should pass on to marketing. When content marketers hear it directly, they can use those insights to outshine the competition.
Content marketers can use competitor insights from sales calls to:
- Identify successful competitor content and devise a way to make it 10x better.
- Address misconceptions about your company.
- Better position your product against competitor offers.
4. Help Improve Sales Strategy
It goes the other way, too. Marketers can identify pain points and sales objections through in-person or recorded phone calls. Then, they can create collateral that helps the sales reps ease client concerns and overcome challenges.
As new content is created, marketers can share it with sales team members. Sales can then refer their leads to that content to move them along the pipeline.
5. Gain Insight For Buyer Persona Creation
Your sales team is on the front lines of customer communication. And one of their primary jobs is to learn about potential customers and understand their needs.
As sales reps interview prospects on calls and extract this information, it gives your marketing team a tremendous opportunity. It allows them to hear how your target market describes itself — insights can help marketers identify and build the ideal customer profile.
6. Improve SEO For Better Traffic
Sales calls reveal lesser-known pain points and concerns that your marketing team may not have considered. This can help content strategists focus their SEO efforts by finding less competitive specific to your niche keywords — specifically longtail keywords (3 words or more).
Longtail searches account for 70% of all searches.
Sales calls can help your writers generate content that’s better tailored to what your potential customers are looking for when they type queries into search engines (i.e., Google stuff).
Create A Growth Machine
Recording your sales calls is easy to ensure your marketing hits the mark, your sales team is on their game, and your business keeps growing. Plus, it’s wise to use every tool you have to understand your customers better.
In summary, marketers can use sales calls to:
- Real Insights: First, sales calls are goldmines of what your customers think and feel. For marketers, this is priceless. You get to hear firsthand the questions, concerns, and the language they use.
- Content That Hits Home: Armed with these insights, you can craft content directly addressing your customers’ needs and questions. It’s like knowing exactly what your friend wants for their birthday — you can’t go wrong.
- Draw in the Right Crowd: When your content speaks directly to your audience’s needs, you attract more of the right kind of visitors to your website. It’s about quality, not just quantity. You want genuinely interested visitors who are likely to stick around or make a purchase.
- Smarter Content Strategy: This approach doesn’t just make your current content better; it informs your overall strategy. You’ll find gaps you didn’t know existed and opportunities to speak to your audience in ways you hadn’t considered.
- Boost Sales Confidence: It’s a powerful combo when sales and marketing align. Sales teams feel supported because the content is so spot-on, and they have solid answers to customer questions. This can lead to closing deals more smoothly.
- Never-Ending Improvement: The beauty of this is that it’s not a one-time deal. Every sales call offers new insights, keeping your content fresh and relevant. It’s about continuously adapting and fine-tuning your approach to stay in tune with your audience.
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