The Ever Blurring Line Between Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing have a symbiotic relationship. As marketing delivers leads into the funnel, sales has to close deals from those leads. Over the last few years however, sales and marketing have become much closer in their relationship because generating leads for sales is increasingly useless if there is no prior relationship associated with these leads.
Deana Goldasich elaborates on this concept in her post, “Why the Line Between Marketing & Sales Gets Blurrier Every Year”. In it, Deana writes:
For marketers, it’s easy to obsess about lead generation, especially when it’s the primary KPI by which they’re judged. But, obsessing about having buckets and buckets of leads can cost you long-term conversion. Today, marketers must join sales in obsessing over what conversation needs to be had over time (a.k.a. Lead Nurturing) and how to expand that dialogue to the entire group of decision makers.
Lead nurturing is crucial to the sales cycle; educating leads about the problems your product helps them solve is a huge boost to closing sales. And content is integral to nurturing leads:
According to Forrester, customers only contact an actual human after they’re 70 to 90 percent “sold” by the information-rich content they find on their own. It drives home how important it is to provide mission-critical content as buyers research—rather than create content because it’s “on the list.”
To ensure your content has the greatest impact on the sales cycle requires an effective content strategy, such as Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid. Read more about the relationship between sales and marketing via the link below.
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