Sales Skills You Need in Marketing

Traditional marketing roles in most organizations have converged from full teams of people with varying skill sets, to cross-trained specialists who can design a website as well as write copy. An interesting byproduct of this shift is the need for marketers and sales teams to understand each other’s functions and be able to overlap to a large extent.

Whether you work in a boutique digital agency or a large television or radio station or are the chief marketing executive for a company outside of the advertising world, here are a few areas where scales skills directly impact your ability to do your job well.

Whether you are learning how to be a good salesperson or aspiring to run a marketing department, you must have a good rapport with your company’s clients and/or vendors. If you work in a marketing firm or advertising agency, you will be a part of the team that will present your plan to your customers.

If you are driving their marketing strategy, you need to be just as persuasive as the salesperson that the components of your proposal will pay off. The salesperson will need to discuss numbers and close the sale, but the substance of the marketing sales presentation may be the deciding factor just as much as the cost of the campaign.

From another perspective, if you are a marketer working on behalf of your team and company, you will need to work with partners and vendors to get the best mileage out of your advertising dollars. This often involves the same types of negotiating that salespeople need to use when closing deals on behalf of their business.

You may oversee marketing a line of products to the general public, or you may be tasked with marketing your client to their target audience. Either way, it’s critical that you know what you’re talking about. The first skill an effective marketer must possess is expertise. You should be able to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the product.

Both marketing managers and salespeople need to be able to think on their feet and brainstorm problem-solving solutions at the drop of a hat. Your clients and partners expect you to know your business inside and out. When you need to figure out how to put your resources together to achieve a common goal, you need to work collaboratively and quickly.

You are bound to have some failures and crises. When things fall apart, pros rise to the occasion and work to fix them or mitigate the damage to their company. Marketers may have to put on PR hats and work to address a company-wide crisis. Salespeople may need to assume blame to save an account from going to a competitor. Either way, the same skills apply.

Sales and marketing are both essential and related functions of successful companies. Always keep in mind that they are two sides of the same coin!