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For years now, in the real world outside planning documents, timelines and spreadsheets, the disconnect between sales and marketing has been pronounced and dysfunctional. If you can fix this in your project, it will be your secret weapon.
Think of the sales team as a target audience that needs to be included in marketing and communications plans. It needs a story as much as any other audience, maybe more. Providing sales team training from the marketing campaign team will yield incredible benefits.
The marketing team often gets asked to talk to the sales team about the marketing campaign a day or two before the launch. Instead, it should be working with the sales team from the beginning to ensure it’s fully engaged in helping with the development of the campaign.
Sales team needs to be briefed
Once the marketing campaign launches, the sales team needs to be briefed on a daily basis about the stories being pushed into the market on that day. If a prospect call the sales office to ask questions about something they read in a blog or in the newspaper, or heard from a friend, the salesperson needs to know what information is being pushed out, and how to talk about it.
Furthermore, the sales team can be a powerful ally as you work to keep a campaign fresh and interesting. It can relay information about what’s working and what isn’t, based on conversations it has with prospects and customers.
Ideally, as sales people get to know the product and the neighbourhood intimately, they can act as a news-gathering crew and relay photos and stories back to the marketing campaign team for future use as the campaign unfolds.
Use social media accounts
Encourage sales people to use their social media accounts to share their findings directly with the world.
Seeing their own thoughts and experiences used as part of the campaign will generate enormous goodwill and buy-in as the campaign progresses.
Too often, those of us working on the marketing campaign team view our job as complete once prospects connect to the sales team. But that job, by rights, should only be halfway done at that point.
By working with the sales team, we can keep the story fresh and evolving, which will help bring prospects through the doors and get them to sit down and sign a contract.
David Allison works with executive teams in real estate development and other industries to craft the early-stage vision and brand for projects of all kinds. He crystallizes the most interesting version of any story for early stakeholder engagement, internal audiences, regulatory approvals, consultant briefings and investor recruitment. His award-winning work in the real estate sector alone spans decades and continents. His most recent book, The Stackable Boomer, examines the movement of baby boomers to multi-family homes, and includes research results from a 1,000-boomer survey. He can be reached at david@davidallisoninc.com.
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