Most sizable organizations have an inside sales staff or inside sales department. I would like to make an argument for an inside marketing department, or at least a marketing department that does not ignore this essential role. As a marketing professional—or group thereof—you are responsible for marketing your product not only to the external customer, but also your own sales force. Sound strange? Think about it. First of all, if you are lucky enough to work in an organization where the sales staff are direct employees of the company, you are guaranteed their entire bandwidth, whatever that may be. Unfortunately, we do not all have that luxury, and many of us work in organizations where sales are handled through representatives and distributors. When this is the case, you are now competing with other companies for the salespeople’s bandwidth, as they likely represent or distribute more than just your product. In this situation, it becomes essential to market to the sales force in order to get buy-in from them in terms of the market potential for your product, the strength of the product’s unique value proposition, and the return they will achieve for the bandwidth they devote to you.

Furthermore, the sales force often needs a great deal more information or resources than the average customer, and providing additional information and training that will allow the salesperson to have enough tools under their belt to address many different customers with varying needs is also essentially the responsibility of the marketing department. Why? The marketing department should ultimately have some control over the messages being given to customers and prospects. What one’s brand comes to represent out in the world is in large part a reflection of how well-prepared your sales team is. Providing sales people with a deeper knowledge about your product than you would the customer boosts sales confidence, helps salespeople take on a more consultative role with the customer (consultative sales strategies are highly effective), and creates an image for your brand that is associated with knowledge.

Finally, getting your sales staff as excited about your product as you might want your customers to be is a strategy that will help you as a marketer—and your sales team as a sales team—in several distinct and highly useful ways. First of all, excitement is contagious, and our expertise as marketing professionals is to infect others with excitement or admiration for a product. The first people we want to pass this infection to is our own sales force. A salesperson that is truly excited about a product comes off as honest and helpful, so it is to our benefit to get them there. Second, by getting our salespeople excited about our product offering, capabilities, etc, we teach them tools they can use to get others excited about our offerings as well. This teach-by-doing or teach-by-showing model works very well for most learning styles and is bound to be more effective than trying to teach your salespeople about getting customer buy-in via powerpoint presentation.

Read More…

• Back to Basics Marketing
• Marketing as Company Wide Responsibility
• Mobilization: Reaching Outside the Marketing Department
• Advanced Lead Qualification: Sales and Marketing Work Together
• Sales’ Feedback into Marketing: Profiling Prospects and Their Problems
• You Are Here “Inside Marketing”: Marketing to Your Own Sales Organization
• Developing Unique, Customer-Focused Value Propositions
• How to Train an Entry-Level Marketing Employee
• When Return on Investment Doesn’t Paint a Full Picture
• Defining and Presenting Value Propositions in a Competitive Market
• Logos and Promotional Product Designs for “Difficult” Subjects
• Defining and Refining Value Propositions for Luxury Items
• Evaluating Return-On-Investment (ROI) for Tradeshow Activities
• Management Mistake in Small Business: No Investment during Trying Times