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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 off ers
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 f or driving
ROI. In order t o 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:


brand might meet their priorities and pain points better than others. If you were a car dealership,
writing content that compares, contrasts and highlights details is a strong choice for the desire
stage: "Crossover SUVs: Honda CR-V versus Toyota Rav4" or "Why 2009 Was a Great Year for
Honda Crossovers."
Action:
You head to the car dealership and drive away in your new Honda CR-V. You've now reached
the bottom of the sales funnel in our example, and have become a client at your friendly
neighborhood dealership.