Get Your Dealership’s Sales & Marketing Working Together Hand-in-Hand

On any construction job site, or in any type of trucking operation, if your team isn’t all working together, they’re not working efficiently. It’s a losing proposition no matter how much skill is involved. When it comes to building business for your dealership, you have to get sales and marketing working together to achieve success.

 

Good-natured team rivalry is fun, even productive in a motivational sort of way. But you’ve got to work together to get results that drive your bottom line upward and grow your dealership.

Unless your marketing and sales teams are functioning smoothly, as one, it’s time to think more cohesively. Here are some tips to get everyone working hand in hand. Try them and watch your sales increase.

Get on the same page.

Which exact words you use to identify contacts, prospects, qualified or sales-ready leads aren’t as important as the fact that everyone needs to use the same words to describe each type of potential buyer. Otherwise, you’re working at cross-purposes. These definitions are fundamentally important to keep sales and marketing working together.

You also need to clarify which team is responsible for reaching each of your sales benchmarks and who’s responsible for each of the related marketing tasks. Most importantly, when does the hand-off from marketing to sales occur? How will you know when a lead is ready for that? And when is it appropriate for sales to hand a lead back to marketing for further content-based nurturing?

Marketing messaging is everyone’s job.

Marketing has to get them in the door, electronically speaking, but your sales team ultimately has to make contact and close business. What types of content – topics, formats, delivery platforms, specific offers – is working the best? Your analytics tell you a lot, but feedback from your own real people is vital here, too.

For that matter, augmenting all that with some personal feedback from your customers and online communities will ensure you’re headed in exactly the right direction with each of your target audiences. And people love it when you ask their opinion. Your reputation will soar, and that’s always good for sales.

Tell them what they want to hear.

We hope you don’t need this reminder, but make sure all your marketing messages – in person or online – focus on the why and the how, not the what. It’s not the features of the construction equipment or heavy-duty trucks you sell that matter, it’s what the business benefits your customer will get from buying and using those machines.

With sales and marketing working together, you can collect and use customer stories and other real-life examples to back up your assertions. However you present your messages, they must be coordinated and consistent across all channels, inbound or traditional.

Nurture, nurture, nurture.

Online content, marketing automation, personal follow-up – strategically planned and implemented marketing moves people through your sales funnel and into the capable hands of your sales reps at just the right moment.

Score your leads to take some of the subjectivity out of your system. But not all of it – you’re people selling to people, so instinct based on experience counts, too. Use marketing automation to ensure you’re delivering the right messages to the right people at the right time during late-stage nurturing. And integrate that system with your CRM software, so you’re entirely efficient.

And, of course, constantly monitor and evaluate your progress so you can learn from it.

Getting the hand-off right every time – well, realistically, most of the time – takes practice. It takes sales and marketing working together.