Understanding the Concept and Purpose of Sales and Marketing Hybrids

Sales and marketing hybrids, as the name implies, are a blend of sales and marketing skills. It is surprising how the companies never thought of his concept before. For several years, companies have kept their marketing and sales departments separate. First, the marketing professionals create customer personas and then approach them accordingly. Once the customer enters the sales funnel, the information gets handed over to the sales team. However, this model involves unnecessary steps that result in delays in actions from the sales teams.

The Rise of Sales and Marketing Hybrids

It is only recently that the need of combining the two has been realized. One of the people who propose and support this idea is Sara Larsen. She is the head of Vainu’s Business Development and believes in combining the skills of marketing and sales into one place. She talks about the concept in detail in her interview. A subset of this concept is real time sales. In a nutshell, sales teams should be able to harness customer data right from the beginning, and approach customers at times when offering a product leads to improved conversions.

Let’s say a customer is on the website looking for fedora hats. Now, in a conventional model, you will monitor the movement of the customer and see how long he/she stays on the page or whether or not he/she makes the purchase. If the customer does not make a purchase, you segment them in your hot leads, and create a plan to approach them with a sales pitch. Perhaps, you will write an email, address them with their name, and send a discount offer for buying a fedora hat from you.

But what if you don’t have to wait for them to leave the website before you can approach them? That’s the idea of real-time sales. What if you had a chat feature on your website and your sales people could talk to the customers as they were shopping? By doing this, you could offer them a discount right then and there. You remove any chances of missing the lead and convert instantly. All of that is possible when you have sales and marketing hybrids.

With sales and marketing hybrids, you will have a strategy ready for the customer even before they land on the website. Their recent mentions on social media might indicate to you that they are going to buy a fedora hat in a few days. Using that information, you could approach them even before they approach you.

Bottom Line

The idea of combining sales and marketing in one place is key to growth. Not only does it have the potential to increase sales for companies but it can save a lot of money for them too. However, companies will have to facilitate the sales process too. The rapid pace of doing business means that they will have to come up with ways to train these individuals on not only marketing techniques but also to become more data-drive by the use of new tools, such as Oneflow. According to the experts, data-driven companies are growing 8x faster than the global GDP.