Marketing and sales—these two critical business functions go hand in hand. Often though, they’re either conflated or pitted against one another. But the real magic happens when you align marketing and sales so they work for you, not against you.
While these two business functions share a common goal—attract prospects and convert them into clients (hello revenue!)—they do in fact differ. In the early stages of firm ownership, you’ll likely handle both the marketing and sales sides of your firm. But as your team grows, you may have employees who are responsible for one or the other.
Knowing the differences between each and understanding how to keep them aligned is essential whether you're wearing both the marketing and sales hats or you're delegating these tasks to someone else.
Marketing is the art of informing and attracting potential clients to your product or service (in the case of financial planning, a service), which in turn generates a list of leads that can then be handed off to sales.
Marketing does the legwork to show why your solution is better than those of your competitors and why people should ultimately choose you as their financial advisor. The more immediate goal is to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads; if your marketing efforts have been effective, sales will be able to take the baton and convert those sales-qualified leads into clients.
Always remember that marketing is a long play. You may find you need to nurture most leads for at least six months before they're ready to make a buying decision and become a client. Keep at it—it's all a part of the process.
There are a variety of marketing techniques you can use within your firm. Let’s explore a few:
In today’s world, the internet makes it easy to find whatever you're looking for at any time. This means consumers can do all their research before even interacting with your firm, so you want to ensure the content you put out is helpful, useful, and meaningful. There are countless marketing techniques, so don’t be afraid to jump in, try out a few, and find what works for your firm.
Eventually, there is a handoff from marketing to sales. Once marketing has delivered sales qualified leads, it’s up to sales to convert them into clients.
Some sales activities include email correspondence, phone calls, and virtual or in-person meetings to answer outstanding questions while reinforcing the value of the service (or product) being provided. The prospect is already interested in your service, so your focus will be relationship-building and providing the additional resources and information a prospect needs to make an informed buying decision. Remember, a prospect is working to discover if their problem will be solved by the solution you're offering.
There are a few things you should be doing within the sales world to keep track of your qualified leads as you build a relationship with them throughout their buyer journey.
One of the best indicators of your marketing and sales success is knowing who you are marketing and selling your service to. You likely already have a niche established, but you need to dig deeper and create an ideal customer avatar for your firm as well.
Avatars are also known as personas. Essentially, these are fictional characters you create that represent the ideal client who would be using your service. By designing personas, you’ll have an understanding of your clients’ needs, behaviors, challenges, and goals.
Creating personas ensures that marketing and sales stay on the same page because you know exactly the type of client you want to be work with.
A customer relationship management (CRM) software can be used to manage both your marketing and sales activities as well as ongoing client activities. A CRM is not only a great way to stay organized, it also allows you to keep track of what is working within your firm and what is not by providing a “full picture” from the time a prospect first enters your universe to the time they convert into a client (and beyond). With a CRM, you will have all the information about their journey from prospect to client and can use this to inform your marketing and sales efforts.
A CRM is also incredibly useful for data reporting. You’ll have separate data metrics for your marketing and sales functions, but that doesn’t mean you have to (or should) keep them separate. Create a spreadsheet or data report that tracks both sets of metrics so that you can easily visualize the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel all in one place. Doing this will not only allow you to see the big picture but it will also ensure your marketing and sales activities stay aligned.
Without marketing, you won’t have leads, and without sales, you won’t have clients. These two business functions are vital to your firm's success so while they may not be what gets you out of bed in the morning, they certainly help keep the lights on.