Why Sales People Should Learn Digital Marketing

Have you heard about and worked on Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, Maropost and FlipMyFunnel? If not, the chances of seeking a raise in your salary just got dropped by 75%. Yes, top companies are hiring sales pros with adequate knowledge about marketing automation platforms, mobile marketing, video advertising, social intelligence and email marketing channels. And that makes it a good enough reason for you to up your ante in digital marketing ecosystem.

Survival of the Fittest in Digital

Digital transformation in any business is considered complete when sales teams exhibit speed and agility in their funnel. Nearly 50% of the CEOs prefer to have a strong digital unification between their sales and marketing channels. Therefore, it becomes imperative for sales professionals to undergo a serious, business-focussed training in digital marketing to meet revenue expectations from their efforts.

Inbound Marketing: A Sea of Opportunities Even for Sales

Sales teams around the world face one common challenge – Converting leads into consistent revenue streams. After investing significant volume of resources and effort, sales professionals find it hard to leverage lead generation strategies for a guaranteed conversion that is necessary for the growth of the business. That’s where a unified marketing and sales funnel come into the picture. Sadly, most sales pros are inept at creating brand value out of marketing efforts – especially through inbound marketing.

“In order to meet the business goals, pre-sales engagement has overlapped almost entirely with the inbound marketing strategies. Hence, there is a sizeable demand for sales professionals who are savvy with digital technology and marketing operations. Companies are hiring and promoting sales pros with reliable expertise in digital marketing campaigns, including social media analytics, marketing and sales automation, sales cloud unification, inbound marketing and so on.”

How Digital Marketing Skills Serve Sales Efforts?

According to a leading researcher, 74% of the companies use SaaS-based marketing and sales automation tool for their businesses. Sales managers are expected to understand the approach marketers take to attract customers and engage them through content and relevant brand-centric interactions. Inbound marketing, since 2005, has proven to be the most effective method of doing business online. Companies are generating their own steam of customer data, building email lists and ‘pull’ consumers with sales-centric methodology.

Attract-Convert- Close- Delight:  These are the four inbound marketing actions every sales professional has to manage in a digital ecosystem. Digital marketing for sales, therefore, is no longer an extroverted concept.

Unification of Digital Marketing into Sales

If you are a sales professional in a company with limited digital expertise, there’s a great opportunity for you to fast-track your career. Here’s how pursuing digital marketing course helps sales pros with short, and long term benefits.

• Sales Enablement and Acceleration

Content creation for sales teams is a pivotal factor in accelerating lead generation and conversion goals. Targeted content that answer’s every query that prospects ask require quick sharing and distribution. Content creation methodology for sales enablement, therefore, needs significant attribution for sales-specific activities.

• Customer Lifecycle Marketing

Sales efforts can be refined by identifying the exact phase of the customer life cycle along the journey with brand. Potential customers start as strangers, visitors and contacts, before converting into prospects. Knowledge about specific digital marketing campaigns like email marketing, CRM, social media intelligence, predictive analytics and retargeting enable transformation of strangers into high-value promoters and customers.

• Multi-Channel Personalization and Integration

Every customer is unique. Inbound marketing, by definition and approach, enable sales pros to pick the best channel to interact with the customers using the right content with the right message at the right time for the right customer.

Do you know how Gmail and Outlook can be integrated with existing CRM and log deals? That’s exactly what Digital Marketing courses offer – a thorough navigational insight into content management and contact personalization to understand where your engagement begins in the buyer’s journey.

• Automation in your Sales Ammunition

Sales pros familiar with digital marketing concepts understand the buying cycle of the customer better than those who follow traditional methodologies. Knowledge about sales intelligence tools and automaton platforms gives the power to manage one and every contact and deal without requiring messy spreadsheets and overtly complicated campaigns.

The Way Forward

Customers today prefer to get their queries resolved in shortest time, forcing companies to create a comprehensive plan for quick responses online and manage public relations. Businesses in the new millennium have witnessed a windfall of digital transformation in every aspect of their operations. While marketing continue to lead the way in terms of digital acceleration with respect to automation, CRM and customer service engagements, sales department continues to follow the traditional lead generation and conversion models.

By learning the basics and advanced concepts of digital marketing, the sales pro can leverage the existing “sales qualified leads” and improve their messaging. They can set better ROI objectives by utilizing strong understanding of how to use and share content to attract, convert and delight customers at much-reduced cost of engagement.