Frank Sinatra sang that ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’. Perhaps sales and marketing could have been added to that song.   

Although sales and marketing are different disciplines, if you use them together, and well, your company will see big improvements in areas such as shorter sales cycles, lower marketing costs and the costs of acquiring sales.  

Perth business coach and advisor Justin Davies, who is also managing director of Emergination, says every business needs to align their marketing and sales activities.   

As a starting point, Davies advises companies to tackle their sales and marketing in this order.    

1. Start with a unique value proposition or sustainable competitive advantage, which are really two sides of the same coin. Your value proposition is a statement about what your company offers and how it uniquely solves a pain point or problem for the customer. Why should a customer buy or use your product/service?   
2. Once you’ve done step one, develop your marketing plan and sales strategies.  
3. Then let the above all cascade down to your operations, innovation activity and HR plans.   

“Many business owners make the mistake of starting from operations and work backwards. They say: ‘let’s market what we do and work out a value proposition based on what we do’,” Davies says.

“Instead you should say: ‘what’s our unique value proposition going to be? Now, let’s work out how to make our marketing and sales support that’.

“Then we push it through to our operations, innovations and HR.”  

“If I am helping a business build a strategy, this is the way that I talk to business about how we’re going to tackle it. What’s our value proposition? What should it be? How are we getting that out to the market? How should we be doing that? How do we need to change the operations side of our business to support our marketing?”   

Use great sales language  

Your sales and marketing copy is important and will help you to convert traffic into sales. Here are some tips:  

• Pain point: What’s your customer’s problem? What are the impacts of that problem?   
• What’s your story: Do you have a backstory – why are you energised about helping your customers? Do you have stories of customers that you have helped? People connect with and remember stories.   
• Keep it simple: Communicate your message with succinct sentences. Help people imagine what you’re talking about. Use sensory language (feel, see, hear, experience) to really connect to your customer. 
• Make your content fast to read: Use comparisons between your product and other market leaders, use dot points ‘10 ways to …’. Pose questions – ‘How do you...?’  
• Customer’s language: What words do your customers use? Sometimes we get caught in industry jargon which isn’t the language of the customer. 
• Use an active voice to promote action: Someone did something. I.e. The boy licked a lollipop. Not the lollipop was licked by the boy.   
• Special deal: Tell them about a great offer or an irresistible deal.   
• Make it conversational: This helps make it relatable and fast to read.     
• Include testimonials: Validation creates instant trust.    
• Include a call to action: What do you want them to do.   

If you’re looking for staff, Davies explains people who are in sales need to enjoy working with people, be able to cope with rejection, be relentless in finding opportunities and be strategic.  

Marketing staff need to be able to understand value propositions, communicate that proposition, write headlines, understand online and search marketing and be strategic.  

“The marketing role has changed a lot in recent times, and it is no longer just the custodian of a brand,” Davies says.