Do you look at marketing as a cost center or as a revenue center? If you answered “cost center,” you’re missing out on a big opportunity. However, don’t feel bad. For a long period of time, marketing has been seen as just that: a necessary but overall costly part of doing business. Revenue? How could it actually impact that?

But things are changing, and fast. Buyers are much more self-educated than they were ten years ago (or even ten months ago). They’re studied up, Internet savvy and turning to social communities, like LinkedIn and Twitter, to see what people are saying about brands. They’re so knowledgeable, in fact, that many business buyers have already made a decision about what they’re going to buy before talking to a vendor.

In response, sales needs to adapt and be on equal footing with the buyer. Luckily, marketing has a wealth of knowledge at its disposal to help them do just that. Marketing can enable sales reps to be as educated as the buyer so that they know exactly where the buyer is and help them move forward in their journey towards a sale. In doing so, marketing can helps sales reps better do their job and, in turn, actually impact revenue generation in the process.

Make a culture shift

When computer animation came on the scene, it was initially met with skepticism by traditional animators. “Why mess with a good thing?” they said. “That isn’t going to last.” Over time, however, the ease-of-use and value of computer animation gave it an edge of traditional animation, and now it’s the industry standard.

Before you can use marketing to generate revenue, you’ll need to bring about a similar shift in culture. Marketing needs to be seen as an equal partner to sales. This is easier said than done, however. You’re fighting with decades of commonly held beliefs. Sales needs to be made aware of the dramatic shift in buyer aptitude, and marketing needs to step in and do some of the heavy lifting.

You’ll be better able to integrate your sales and marketing if you do the following:

• Stop working in silos: Sales and marketing fulfill unique roles; you can’t have one without the other. But there’s no need for them to exist in separate organizational silos. You need to break down the barriers between the two in order for there to be a free-flowing exchange of information from one team to the next.
• Get buy-in: More likely than not, you will get push-back from sales. The viewpoint that sales and marketing are distant cousins has long been ingrained in many a sales rep’s mind, and they will probably be resistant to the idea. You will need to convince sales of the valuable information that marketing can provide.
• Demonstrate marketing’s value: Marketing is home to a wealth of information on the buyer that could benefit sales. If you’re having a hard time getting buy-in from sales, unearth some of the data you’ve collected on buyers and prove to them just how valuable that information really is.

Educate Sales Reps

What do you do when you’re interested in a particular brand? You probably visit that brand’s Facebook page, right? You likely ask people about said brand on message boards or read reviews about their products on sites like Amazon. Needless to say, you don’t just take a brand’s claims at face value; and neither do your buyers.

Whether your sales reps are social media savvy or living-in-the-90s Luddites, it’s marketing’s job to educate them, to provide them with enough info so that they are as knowledgeable, if not more than, the buyer. That way, when leads come in, sales will be better equipped to guide the buyer through their journey.

Educating your sales reps will be easier if you do the following:

1. Listen: It’s marketing’s job to gain insight on buyers, and the amount of channels available to do so is growing every day. Marketing needs to be where the customers are (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, message boards) and monitoring their activity on a regular basis to collect quality data.
2. Mine your data: Sales won’t benefit from marketing if you feed them endless amounts of unsorted data. Provide them with a clear, easy-to-follow overview of buyer sentiment by sorting through this data and filtering only that information that will help guide buyers on their journey.
3. Provide some guidance: Once you’ve gathered all the necessary data and filtered it down to the most relevant information, it’s marketing job to provide sales with this data and help them understand what it all means. For example, if a buyer voices his frustration about a product on Twitter, marketing could let sales reps know and to be prepared to respond to these concerns, even if it means sales reps logging on to Twitter themselves.

Take the proper steps to integrate both teams, and watch how marketing can have a direct impact on revenue generation. While complete synergy won’t happen overnight, by providing valuable information and getting sales reps up to speed with buyers, they’ll be better equipped to guide buyers on their journey. Make that process smooth enough, and marketing will be seen as a key player in revenue generation.

Now, ask yourself again: do you still see marketing as a cost center?

This article was inspired by my Moneyball for Marketing podcast featuring Karen Walker, Senior VP of Marketing at Cisco.

Originally published on MarketingProfs.

Image: Courtesy of Bloomberg 

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