Aligning Your Sales and Marketing into One Funnel

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Aligning Your Sales and Marketing into One

Funnel

Posted by Pat Owings on Sat, Nov 24, 2012 @ 07:04 AM

Smarketing: Aligning Your Sales and Marketing into One Funnel

Posted by Pat Owings on Sat, Nov 24, 2012 @ 07:04 AM

Don't Ignore Your Funnel!

Content is king, but irrelevant content is pretty darn

useless. In 2012, producing quality blog content means

more than just taking the time to proof-read thoroughly.

It's an issue of making your blog and content offers

relevant to your buyer personas, and aligning your sales

and marketing efforts, a concept known as smarketing.

Your content calendar should be a road map for driving

ROI. In order to blog relevant information, you need to

ensure your marketing team or content creators

understand your company's unique sales cycle and the questions prospects ask at every stage.

The best content is centered around real-life questions from real-life personas, and it drives

results:

Mapping Your Marketing to Sales

What path do your leads usually take before making their first purchase? You've been through

hundreds of thousands of sales funnels in your lifetime. Think about the research you

performed before your last major purchase - which for the purpose of illustration, we'll say was

a crossover SUV.

You probably started off by heading to Google and looking at reviews of vehicles within your

price range.You may have looked at reviews of car dealerships in your area, too.You might

have even made a few trips in to various car dealerships and performed dozens of test drives

before you finally made your decision.You went through a series of stages that are illustrated

in the infographic below, courtesy of entrepreneur Saad Kamal:

Awareness