5 Steps Towards Alignment: Matching Up Your Sales With Marketing

15 Oct 5 Steps Towards Alignment: Matching Up Your Sales With Marketing

Chances are your marketing efforts and your sales efforts sometimes (or often) conflict with each other – one is driving brand awareness, which is hard to measure, while the other is completely results driven. However, the two need each other to be successful and it’s important to align the two efforts to maximize your results.

Sometimes referred to as “smarketing” (a.k.a. the alignment between your sales and marketing efforts), this tactic is an important step to boosting your business, gaining more leads, growing your revenue, and overall working more effectively. Here are five tips to better integrate sales and marketing within your agency:

• Focus on the insurance consumer. Consumers have so much information at their disposal that it’s sometimes not necessary for an agent to walk them through every step of the sales process. But this is why focusing on your consumer is important. When you put yourself in their shoes to see what information they need – from first discovering your agency (marketing) to making a purchase (sales) – you can make better-informed decisions about your sales and marketing efforts.
  
  

• Align your goals. At the end of the day, both the sales and marketing efforts have the same high-level goal – to make your agency as successful as possible; however, they just have different paths to get there. When you work on aligning your goals and defining what success is, you’ll find that your marketing and sales efforts can work together seamlessly. Ask yourself some questions like: Who is my ideal insurance consumer? How will I measure return on investment? What tools will I use to market?
  
  

• Set up a system. While the goals of your sales and marketing efforts will be the same after you align them, the path for each will probably differ. That’s why it’s important to have a system in place where you can garner feedback from other agents, measure results and your return on investment, and otherwise keep track of both efforts.
  
  

• Start reporting. One of the main tenets of “smarketing” is closed-loop reporting, where the sales leads that you pursued and their level of success will drive the marketing decisions. This sales information allows you to better understand how to allocate marketing dollars to generate the most qualified leads.
  
  

• Let it go. Once you’ve aligned your goals, defined your metrics, set up a system, and started reporting on the data, it’s time to evaluate it all and see what’s working – and more importantly, what’s not working. If something isn’t serving you, let it go and try sometime else. It may take some trial and error at first, but as you continue to gather data on what’s resonating with your potential insurance consumers and how your leads are doing, you’ll be able to quickly refine your process.

As you can see, a lot of integrating sales and marketing efforts revolve around consistency. At the end of the day, both efforts are working towards the same goal for the business. When you’re able to better align those efforts and take a data-driven approach toward improving the sales and marketing process, you’ll find that you and your agency are achieving more as a whole.