5 Things Every SaaS Salesperson Should Know About Marketing

“Let’s get ready to rumble!”

Do the famous words of ring announcer Michael Buffer play in your head every time you meet with your marketing team? Trust me, you’re not alone.

According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018 report, just 26 percent of respondents operate under a marketing and sales service level agreement (SLA). Sometimes it seems like sales and marketing departments are boxing each other into a corner. Maybe it’s because sales teams believe that marketers often take too much credit for deals that they have closed. 

Or maybe it’s because marketers believe sales teams always complain about the worthiness of their hard-earned leads.

No matter which side you believe is fighting below the belt, in SaaS sales, you need to learn more about marketing if you want to see 38 percent higher sales wins and 208 percent more revenue.

To help you fight fair, here are five things that every SaaS salesperson should know about marketing.

1. SaaS doesn’t sell itself—you need marketing to tell a story.

No matter how great your SaaS product is, you can’t sell on features alone. Creating a desire for your product will help you deliver more value to your customers. That’s where marketing can step in. Marketing campaigns tell a story to your customers that will ultimately help them buy from you in confidence. Some of the different ways marketing can help tell a story are through:

• Social media efforts
• Blog articles
• E-books
• White papers
• Videos
• Infographics

2. Marketing helps get your buyer personas to know, like, and trust you.

Many of today’s successful sales leaders know that buyers do business with people they know, like, and trust. Marketers help get your buyer personas closer to all three of those goals through content. Relevant, compelling, and consistent content can help build the brand, prove your authority, and provide thought leadership to customers who will eventually refer your service to others.

You should also regularly communicate the problems you are hearing from your buyers to your marketing team. This will help them develop content that addresses how your service can specifically help them solve these problems.

3. Marketing data can help you stay focused.

Reporting and analysis is an integral part of any marketing strategy. It allows your marketing team to leverage user data and helps you better understand when a customer is ready to demo your service or ready for a sales conversation. Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and Marketo have made the Buyer’s Journey more transparent than ever. Understanding this user data can help you stay focused and cut through the noise.

4. Marketing can make your job a lot easier.

A marketing department that is communicative and collaborative can provide you with sales enablement content, such as case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, and product one-pagers for all the different stages of the sales cycle. This will help you drive home the messages that you’ve already conveyed to your customers. Remember, marketing has laid the initial groundwork to get your customers to become aware of your brand and your value proposition.

5. Simply put, you need each other to succeed.

When the sales and marketing teams’ gloves come off, everyone runs the risk of failing to meet crucial benchmarks and goals. Both departments have a shared goal of increasing awareness and revenue and to execute and achieve these goals, the two departments have no choice but to be aligned. A sales and marketing partnership is essential to your company’s success.

Learning how to run an effective sales and marketing alignment meeting can help both departments better communicate and set clear, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goals. You should confirm that the messaging marketing is sharing resonates with the leads you’re working with—and that content is addressing the problems and pain points your buyers are experiencing.

When both teams work together, your competition will be down for the count!