Sales and marketing – they are 2 divisions with the same end goal for your insurance business, but each plays a very different role in helping you achieve it. The marketing group targets their initiatives to get leads, while it’s the sales department’s job to support and convert. They are 2 interrelated challenge items, but the relationship between them is usually completed when marketing hands over leadership to sales.
What a pity. While each stands alone in the level of value they provide to your business, there’s no chance to really suggest the idea that they should collaborate as a whole, rather than separate as entities in the same group.
When marketing and sales work together with a more integrated approach, amazing things can happen – like a clearer target market, better prospects who are easier to convert, and a good cushion to your bottom line. However, it can be difficult to get out of the separate but equivalent frame of mind of sales and marketing, so let’s break it down and discuss how they should collaborate and what happens when they do.
Quality content is essential to every step of your client journey. From the moment they first start considering their insurance needs to the day they buy a plan and past, the right content caters to them and motivates the next step. Typically, the job of marketing is to produce content that is targeted at a specific target market and it’s the sales team’s duty to optimize it for conversions.
The only problem is that there is often a huge difference between the way these 2 groups define effective and quality content. That 90% of the content generated by marketing is not also used by sales, which salesmen invest more than 30 hours a month – for most of the work week – finding and producing their own content demonstrates this point.
There’s no need to be smart to see that there’s a huge waste of resources going on here, and in the end, it’s tantamount to unleashing the potential for your business. The first step is to get these 2 groups to work as one and work together on great content that reviews potential customers through the sales funnel.
For example, let’s say marketing works side by side between your salespeople and customers. They can watch the communication and gain an understanding of the real client discomfort factors that salespeople see every day. Where marketing is concentrated on information and metrics, sales people deal with real people and feelings. Often a little point of view makes all the difference.
Online marketing professionals understand trends and build interactions from a basic target market, while sales know more about individual customers. They can both bring what they know to the table, and produce balanced, effective and conversion-worthy content.
One of the main factors that often clash between these 2 divisions is that they see points through very different points of view. Let’s take a hint for example.
In your insurance business, you have all kinds of prospects – quality information, quality marketing and quality sales. Do your marketing and sales groups know how to identify each type of lead and do they agree with each other on evaluations? If they leave the same page about their ability to read the kind of clues that are in front of them, then you are losing a customer.
Make an effort to discuss certification prospects, and make sure that everyone gets the same web page. Do they know the difference between a novice site visitor who is being asked for a quote and one who is downloading and posting information about your plan and taking the time to research before asking for a quote? Define criteria for lead types so they can both identify leads that are ready to convert and how to further support immature leads.
Online marketing professionals do a lot of work behind the scenes, which means they are not the face your business is connected to. Your salespeople are the ones on the front lines, using all that marketing has to offer to secure deals. Since online marketing professionals are professionals and production brand names are more attractive and credible, why not use the same skills as your sales group?
Start by conceptualizing ways for your marketing group to increase your sales with content. For example, if your insurance website has a blog site, an online marketing professional could come up with valuable and useful stuff but consist of someone from your sales division as a writer. Also, individuals have a lot of questions about insurance, so why not provide answers? Fill your marketing group with one of the most common, and then have them present an online social media event where faces from your company respond to them based on a warehouse script.
Coming back to how sales are the face of your insurance business, and marketing works behind the scenes, it makes sense that they often have very different ideas about a client’s personality. Online marketing professionals emerge in the industry as a whole, and then narrow down their initiatives to identify specific types of clients. They see the bigger picture.
Sales on the other hand saw the lead before them. The bigger market doesn’t really mean much to them. They look at the individual elements in comparison to the whole. What happens when you combine an understanding of what attracts the attention of a broad target market and how to inspire them individually?
The best word for its development.
Sales and marketing must share understanding with each other to develop a more reasonable buyer persona for the type of insurance you are selling. At the end of the day, this means more quality leads and development for your business.
You need an advertising group that understands the insurance industry and the value of understanding your salespeople can offer. We want to work with you, and your sales group, to come up with an advertising strategy that produces real results and real growth. Contact Confluency Solutions today to find out how we can help you.