Know your customer – succeed with sales & marketing

Even if you work with marketing or with sales, you have at least one time been frustrating when generating traffic to your website but didn’t succeed creating that much leads as you wanted – or been on 50 sales meetings and didn’t close any of the deal opportunities. One way of reducing that gap is to simply know your customers.

Working with digital marketing

The last decade there has been a change in the traditional marketing objectives and into a more modern digital marketing with focusing on getting people to your website and convert – also known as lead nurturing. Even though many businesses are working with this new digital marketing, they are not creating that many SQL as they need in order to grow their business. Why?

There is a lot of reasons such as:

They don’t,

• Have the resources needed
• Know what’s selling
• Know the timing of when a users is ready to buy
• Test, test and test
• They don’t know their customers

Working with sales

You should be proud! Sales is the second best job in the world – right after marketing. I know sales managers back in time who complained about not doing any deals and who to blame was the marketing apartment. Maybe sometimes this was right argument, but the most crucial part is that neither the marketing department or the sales department didn’t know the customers.

Those who know their customers will create more leads and in the end sell more. For a marketing manager you should focus on the data:

• Which ad does the SQL come from?
• What’s the size of the company?
• What are they selling?
• Where is the HQ?
• What is the business area?
• And much more…

This structure is the same for the sales manager. If you ask your customer all these question you eventually have references to use for the new prospects you talk to. You will have the confidence to tell your prospects that you know the their business and that you already have customers as them with that size, knowledge of their product, where they are selling it and what they need in order to sell more. Don’t think that this structure is just for B2B, you can apply it for B2C aswell.

Working as sales & marketing

In the picture above, I have illustrated the relationship between marketing and sales (and ofc customer success). And this is a great picture showing the customer journey and who is your customer. If marketing and sales sat down together and discussed every single step of this journey, they will soon get the pieces together on which customers they have (and want). As the marketing managers know who to target: in what geographical area, business sizes, how to reflect the ad in what network and so on, the sales managers feel comfortable with selling the product to the SQL, when they have plenty of business cases and references to show. Imagine knowing your customers and you know which pains they have. If you could show their pains in your live demo of your product, you most certainly already sold your product.

So as a Customer Success Marketer, the customer journey is my coffee, my food and my pillow, every day in my work. Working with all these elements and identifying where the MQL or the SQL is on their journey makes the relationship between marketing and sales a lot easier. For me, I am identifying the customers need of buying more from us, at the right time, at the right place thanks to the customer journey.

Don’t miss out my previous blog post regarding MQL and SQL:

How can Customer Success work with MQL and SQL?