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Sales and Marketing: The Magic Mix

Posted on 1 April 2019 by dukadmin

You have a great product or service and you’ve been making good inroads with your sales and marketing activities; however, you’re still experiencing a cycle of revenue highs and lows. If you’re looking to expand your client base and maintain a more consistent flow of quality prospects, to convert into paying customers and bring stability to your business then read on.

Having a strong relationship between your sales and marketing team is vital. Yet, some businesses still find it hard to align these two very important functions of the business, in some cases, they are run completely independent of each other.

Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy 38% higher sales win rates. From the types of people that sit within the departments, to their approach to technology, the contrast between sales and marketing teams can sometimes cause friction and can put unnecessary strain on your business. With them not working together, you won’t be able to expand your client base and nurture quality leads, which may turn into high paying customers.

Here are 5 things you can implement to align your sales and marketing teams for greater business success and a more enjoyable working environment:

Communication

It is important that sales and marketing have a great relationship, how do you encourage this? By ensuring the lines of communication are kept open.

Make sure the two have ample opportunity to talk to each other. Sales should be aware of what marketing activities are taking place and marketing should be aware of how sales are going to activate the marketing. B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs 10% or more of revenue per year. Any conscientious marketing team will be asking “what can we do to make the job of the sales team easier?” Sales on the other hand should be thinking about how and what to report back to marketing; which assets are working and is there any valuable customer feedback? 60-70% of B2B content created is never used. In many cases, this is because the topic is irrelevant to the buyer audience

Technology

Has your business evaluated the tools it’s using to ensure they are helping everyone, and more importantly, is everyone using them? Today’s sophisticated technology offers real time data and functionality to support multiple ways of working, from the way you access it, to the way you use it. From this data, your business can gather really intelligent insights to prospects and customer interactions. Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months’ time.

As long as your teams are trained to use these tools and understand their capabilities there is no excuse for your sales and marketing teams not to be aligned in using the same technology. Ensuring both teams are making the best use and are working within the preferred platform will offer a deeper, richer level of reporting, improve the lead-management process, customer experience and the day to day running of your business.

Strategy

Is there a clearly defined strategy? Are both sales and marketing aware of this strategy? The business and its teams have got to know what you’re selling, how you’re selling it and to whom.

Understanding your ideal customer is the first fundamental step in a successful strategy. Developing buyer personas and getting them right will enrich the work that follows. Until you can nail down your ideal customer profile and what you can offer them, there is little point moving forward, as this forms the platform for all of the work that follows. 71%of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. Once you have this in place you can target the perfect customer, get prospects to engage with you online, build brand awareness, direct traffic to your website and build an online community around your business.

Goal Alignment

At the very least sales and marketing should be working towards the same goals. Both should have visibility of the strategy and targets, with plenty of opportunity to communicate between the two on activity, successes, the ideal customer journey and campaign dates and timelines. Companies with “dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes” report an average of 10% more sales people on-quota compared to other companies.

In essence marketing should be setting up sales with leads who have had some touch points with your product or service. Aligning any messages and content to enable sales success. If sales do not know how and when to activate the marketing work, then everyone’s efforts are in vain and the opportunity may be missed. Aligning your teams and their efforts like this will ensure any activity will be visible and dealt with efficiently, resulting in closure one way or another.

Quality over quantity

Are the leads being generated meaningful and of a high quality? In an ideal world marketing should only be passing over high quality leads that are sales ready and match your ideal customer profile. However, some leads, whilst they may look good on paper, through further investigation and an initial phone call may not be right or may need further nurturing. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, but only 27% of those leads will be qualified.

Relying on your technology to help pipeline these leads and ensure that you keep your business at the front of their mind until they are ready, becomes an important part of the process. Highlighting the importance of the technology you use and how thoroughly your teams are using it. 18% of salespeople don’t know what a CRM is.

Marketing qualified leads are only part of what will be going on behind the scenes. Marketing should also be proactively targeting the companies that you want to do business with, nurturing these prospects to generate leads and to create opportunities that help you to meet your commercial objectives. Sales should be ready to pick up on this and continue nurturing prospects.

To be truly successful, sales and marketing must align, working to support each other. Behind every great sales team there is a set of marketing processes and principles being implemented. For your marketing activity to be truly successful there must be a sales process ready to activate it. Alignment of your sales and marketing will in turn bring business success and increase your revenue.

At Roots we are very lucky to have a great working relationship with Air Marketing Group, our sister company and award winning outsourced B2B sales and acquisition specialist. Meaning, that as well as having the skills and capabilities to merge with your own sales team, we can also integrate Air into your company if required.

If you want to align your sales and marketing teams, but don’t have the resource or expertise in-house, get in touch with us and we will help you to create an undivided sales and marketing function for your business. Give us a call today on: 01392 796 702 or email: contact@roots2market.co.uk

What are the benefits of outsourcing your B2B full cycle sales?

Posted on 20 March 201919 September 2024 by Doug Roots

Running a business is a constant learning curve. It will always involve a juggling act, as one plan lands another will inevitably be up in the air. Sometimes, it pays to admit that you can’t do it all and look towards outsourcing to help.

At Air, our team are experts in outsourced business development. Our services offer you a powerful route to success, providing impressive ROI and your own ‘plug-in’ team. We’ve worked with all kinds of businesses, local and international, big and small, from Funding Circle on a national scale to PAHS, a local client in Devon and also the likes of Oxygen in Bermuda. We are an adaptable and dynamic company, offering an array of services including appointment setting, multilingual telemarketing and inside sales to name a few.

Are you ready to feel the benefit of working with us? Call us on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk, today!

Modern Marketing is Visual, So Why Do We Need Words?

Posted on 6 March 201929 June 2023 by Doug Roots

People prefer visual content. Attention spans are shortening. People don’t read anymore. At least, that’s what we’re told. So, do words really matter in modern marketing?

Words, of course, do matter. Language is still our primary form of communication, particularly when we have to put across information that needs any significant level of reasoning and interpretation.

The digital revolution has left us inundated with information. Attention is harder to earn and to keep and you have fewer words to get your message across. Doesn’t this mean that each word you choose matters more, not less?

Strangely, written content is usually the part of a website project that gets the least attention. Pictures, graphics and colours take up more meeting time than the tone, meaning or impact of the words that fill the spaces. And deadlines seem to matter more than quality when it comes to regular content publishing. Brands are missing important opportunities to be better connected and more persuasive.

What Do Your Words Say About Your Brand?

Every piece of written content, whether it’s a web page, blog article or social media post is a representation of your brand. If you thought that people were forming a judgement about the likely experience of working with you from what they were reading, would that make you choose and organise your words with greater care?

Content has to be useful and connect with a defined audience. Ideally, it should move people towards taking action. This isn’t a five-minute job.

Emotion in Marketing

Our buying decisions are much less rational than we like to admit. Effective marketing (both B2B and B2C) has to engage our emotions. You can’t hope to do this without finding the right words.

And when people have to rationalise or justify their buying decisions they need words that are concise, targeted and easy to digest.

Content Quality and Search Rankings

Content quality matters if you want your site to perform well in Google searches. Google wants to serve up the most useful, relevant and trustworthy search results to its users. If Google stops being the go-to place for information and answers they won’t be able to earn so much from advertising.

So, Google’s ranking algorithm smiles favourably on content that is original, well written, authoritative and relevant to the audience (based on the search they made). It will downgrade sloppy, unoriginal, irrelevant content and anything that looks like it was written to game a search engine rather than for people.

Words and Pictures

Maybe video is the chosen medium for most of your marketing content – that’s all about images, right? But even here you are likely to have text displayed on screen or a voice-over that has to be scripted. These too, need carefully chosen words to be effective.

There’s no getting away from it, words really do matter in the battle for attention that is modern marketing.

Guest blog by Richard Hussey, https://rshcopywriting.co.uk/

How our 5* incentives have contributed towards client success

Posted on 1 March 20193 June 2025 by Doug Roots

Lost employees can cost a company up to double an individual’s annual salary. The eye watering reality is that this cost alone is unlikely to address recruitment costs, the time lost through learning and upselling, and the detrimental impact that a high employee turnover has on the relationship you build with your clients.

Now, you maybe questioning why a telemarketing company, involved in an industry notorious for poor staff retention rates, has grounds to comment on improving employee turnover? Well, we know it pays to keep our team happy and encourage them to be the best that they can be. Not only for the benefits of our employees and our company, but so our clients can receive the best possible service from our team.

So, what’s the secret to creating the loyal, motivated and results driven individuals that have become familiar faces among our team? The truth is, we have always placed strong emphasis on recognising and rewarding individual excellence and creating a positive team culture. We have tried and tested many ways of achieving this, but our recent 5* incentive scheme is one that has allowed our individual team members, the company as a collective and our clients to really reap the rewards.

At the start of this financial year, our 5 Star incentive put a playful challenge in place for every member of team Air: showcase your outstanding performance or team spirit throughout the year and win a paid for trip to Edinburgh, Dublin or Paris – for you and a person of your choice, we’ll even throw in spending money.

This scheme has not only drawn Team Air’s attention to what’s really important, awarding the people who outperform expectations and continue to win new opportunities for our business and our clients, it’s also delivered improvements in multiple areas:

Impressive results for our clients driven by the buzz of healthy competition amongst our team
Elevated team spirit and heightened sense of wellbeing created through employee appraisal
Our strongest team members continuing to progress within our company, ensuring our clients have a dedicated campaign team that are familiar and confident in selling their products and services
An electric culture which continues to encourage new sales talent to become a part of our family and our clients’ campaigns
Increased motivation that pushes our team to outperform competitors, better handle gate keepers and in turn secure the success of their team, our company and our clients’ new business.

Having started our incentives as a trial, we have experienced an overwhelmingly positive result. With 5 hardworking team members having won well deserved breaks with their friends and family throughout the financial year, the 5* incentive is measuring up to remain a deep-rooted tradition for Team Air. So, we pose the question – what 5* incentive will you be using this year? We’re already working on a new idea to reward our lucky 2019 winners. After all, it’s only right that our MD tops sending someone on holiday, isn’t it?

If you feel that your business could benefit from the support of an exceptionally driven outsourced telemarketing team, then get in touch today – Team Air are always on hand to help. Call: 03452413038

Ethical Selling: A Priority for Team Air

Posted on 28 February 20193 June 2025 by Doug Roots

Ethical selling is not often something which springs to mind when people picture a sales person. Only 3% of people asked trust sales reps, so it’s not surprising that businesses can be reluctant to outsource their sales to an external team that they don’t know on a personal or professional level.

However, at Air we want to change that. We want to show that the vast majority of professionals in the outsourced sales industry are trustworthy people, looking to help businesses develop and grow. Of course, we have targets to meet and we are ultimately accountable to that, but what actually drives Team Air is people and, more importantly, our ability to build relationships with them.

From day one we are upfront and honest with both our clients and prospects, we base our entire sales journey on ethical selling. Offering a consultative approach, we work with our prospects and clients to help them to make smart businesses decisions.

We know it’s all well and good to hear us saying that, but let’s break down how we achieve it:

Realistic campaigns and goals: If a prospect approaches us and we know that they simply can’t afford to work with us, or at least can’t afford to work with us in the way they want to, we tell them. We will never sell our services to a prospect who doesn’t stand a strong chance of generating tangible success with us, whether that is through ROI, conversations with decision makers or leads. That’s not to say that we won’t work with them full-stop, but we will arrange further conversations to better understand their budget and goals. From this, we either recommend a reduced campaign or other approaches that may work for them – such as digital marketing, utilising the services of our internal marketing company, Roots to Market.

Transparency: At Air, we don’t just take your money and run with a campaign – we want you to be involved at every stage. When you express an interest in starting a campaign with us, we will invite you to the office to meet the team and view our office culture before you even start working with us. From there, you will be invited in to assist with the training of your dedicated dialling team and provide insight as well as getting a clear understanding of our approach. As the campaign runs you will receive weekly reports and calls as well as having access to our live time reporting system in the client portal.

Accountability: Our campaigns are driven by learnings and so the strategy or approach may change throughout depending on the results that we generate. However, through your weekly calls and reports you will be made aware of this and able to see our reasoning and the difference in results. As well as reports, you also have access to every call made on your campaign, upon request, so that you can listen to how we handle your calls and prospects, ensuring that you are happy and can voice any concerns or questions that you may have.

If you are looking for an outsourced sales team, who place an emphasis on ethical selling, get in touch today. Email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk or call: 0345 241 3038.

Outsourced Inside Sales – Your secret weapon

Posted on 27 February 20193 June 2025 by Doug Roots

As your business grows, you’ll find yourself having more and more conversations (both in person and over the phone) with potential leads. Whilst this is great news and shows that your business is developing good traction, do you really have the time to sift through all of those conversations to find the diamond in the rough? Unless you have an in-house sales team, the simple answer is probably no.

In order to close qualified leads, you need to be able to spend time talking to prospects after the initial stages of the sales cycle. This is where outsourced Inside Sales comes in.

Some people may be dubious of the benefits of inside sales at first, asking, “is it not just telemarketing?” Whilst both are predominantly phone-based selling, they deal with opposite ends of the sales cycle. Whereas telemarketers are often cold calling and forming a first point of contact between a business and potential client, inside sales reps act as a final touchpoint, being the ‘expert’ and nurturing or closing warm leads.

With continuous developments in technology, inside sales is growing 15 times faster than field sales and buyers are becoming increasingly comfortable holding remote conversations and making remote purchases. But how does inside sales differ from traditional sales? And how can it become your secret weapon?

Location

Similar to telemarketers, inside sales reps work in the office, contacting their leads via phone, email or video calls. This method of sales is both time and cost effective when compared to field sales reps who may find themselves travelling up and down the country attending dinners, presentations and meetings. By having your sales team all in one place, they are always contactable and not prey to delayed transport or miscommunication of locations.

Technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are vital in assisting inside sales team and ensuring a smooth sales operation. In having a CRM assisting your sales, all prospect information, campaign updates, messages and appointments can be kept in one place and visible to both your team and yourself. Also, if you do choose to employ both inside sales and field sales, your inside sales can do the ground work and then pass key information on to your field sales team. At Air, we also offer full reporting. We understand that it can be daunting to outsource your sales activity which is why we created a unique client portal where you can see your campaign and it’s results in live time.

Scalability

You may have the best field sales rep in the world or be amazing at closing yourself but if you’re generating a large sales pipeline, who is going to manage all of those leads. By having inside sales reps that work as a first touch point, a relationship can be built and solidified before you or your field sales rep gets to the prospect. It also allows you to reach a broader audience, even a global one if you see your market growing to that extent. Team Air are experts at holding conversations with senior decision makers in businesses of all sizes and locations – we’ve even worked with a company in Bermuda.

At Air, our inside sales team is driven and dedicated to getting you the results that you want, often exceeding expectations. If you feel that you could benefit from working with our expert team then get in touch – call: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk

Direct Marketing: Is it worth your investment?

Posted on 21 February 20193 June 2025 by Doug Roots

Supposedly, it takes multiple contact with a prospect – studies say as many as eight are required – before a sale is closed.

In 2018, 75% of companies said closing more deals were amongst their top priorities. However, with 63% of prospects having little to no knowledge of a company before a sales rep approaches them, with a new product or service, it’s no surprise that 40% of sales people are finding closing the deal more challenging. So, how can direct marketing help?

Direct marketing is a great way of introducing your product or service across multiple touchpoint, over a variety of different platforms which include: direct mail, email marketing and telemarketing to name just a few. When delivered tactfully this marketing tactic will:

Help you build relationships with new customers using personalised and targeted messaging
Test the appeal of your new product or service
Take your prospects or current customers on a brand journey that appeals to their own values
Measure and advise you on which marketing platforms connect with your target audience best
Provide customers with compelling content that will help nurture them through your sales cycle
Indicate where prospects sit in your sales cycle using specific call to action that inform you if a prospect requires more information, a follow up call or a way of purchasing your product
Allow you to base your sales strategy on fact and customer needs, increasing your overall success rate

So, how does direct marketing nurture your prospects through the sales cycle and at what stage does it need to be implemented if you want to reap the best reward?

We like to think of marketing and sales as the gatherer and the hunter. The gatherers job is to go out and make the initial contact with the prospect, discovering where they spend their time, what needs or problems control their impulses, and how best they can nurture this prospect to help them improve their situation. The hunter on the other hand is programmed to close the deal. Using the information/data the gatherer provides the hunter can increase his chances of success, he has inside knowledge of where the prospect can be found, he understands what problem areas are best to attack and he knows the prospect is at a stage where they feel safe enough to take a closer look.

In our 7 step sales and direct marketing diagram you can see exactly how we optimise this integrated approach:

We have learnt that both direct marketing and sales need one another to be truly successful, so, investing in a strategy that aligns the two is a wise move heading into the new financial year.

There’s even evidence that supports this approach, according to 2018 statistics, companies who better align their sales and marketing teams experience 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts, 73% agree their buyer’s journey has a higher conversion rate, 38% have higher sales wins and 36% experience higher customer retention rates.

Looking to better align your sales and marketing strategy, increase customer loyalty and boost your ROI?
Air Marketing Group work closely with their sister company, Roots to Market, to deliver multi touchpoint campaigns that benefit our clients bottom line. To get in touch call: 03452413038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

On average, for every £1 our clients invest they achieve an £18 ROI. Are you ready to see results?

Permission Based Selling – does it benefit a telemarketing campaign?

Posted on 15 February 201919 September 2024 by Doug Roots

When I first started working at Air I found myself in a whole other world. I had landed a job in a fun, dynamic and rewarding start-up where we worked hard and reaped the returns. Air has a culture that we all want to be a part of and is a company that you truly want to contribute to. But when I started one thing did have me stumped – the method of permission based selling.

I won’t lie, I was dubious at first. It was different to anything I had ever known and the sales person inside of me was so well versed in the hard sale and simply working to turn a “no” into a “yes”. This new tactic of asking the prospect for permission at various points to progress the call simply seemed alien to me, I just wanted to get my information across, follow up on a lead and close the sale. However, I quickly came to see the method in its madness.

Many telemarketing companies conform to the stereotype of cold callers – they’re more interested in their numbers, not the people on the end of the line. At Air, we’re different. Permission based selling is a non-traditional selling technique in which sales people reach out to prospects after they have received permission from them to do so via opt in forms, email or calls etc. This method allows us the opportunity to be professional and polite but also assertive when building rapport and developing a 2-way relationship with potential clients. In turn, this often ends up saving us and our clients more time and money. This is for two reasons:

People love to buy, but hate being sold to. Today, prospects prefer a personal approach, they want you to be consultative and guide them through the sale with clear expertise.
Instead of pushing a hard sell that fails to close, by taking the time to read a prospects response and ending the conversation when you don’t strike a chord you will spend less time chasing unlikely leads.

So, how does permission based selling fit into our sales process?

At Air, we understand that no one thing will make a sales call great, as different prospects will respond to different tactics. Cold calling is about the combination of many small things that increase your chances of achieving the right outcome – and in my opinion, permission based selling is one to be practised.

Opinion piece by Shaun Weston, Operations Director

5 things to consider before beginning a telemarketing campaign…

Posted on 30 January 201929 June 2023 by Doug Roots

If done right, telemarketing is a great way to provide an interactive and personal sales experience to your prospects. With a good telemarketing team, like TeamAir, behind your sales activity you can create immediate rapport with your prospects and, in turn, be able to gauge their interest in your product or service.

By using an outsourced telemarketing team, these rewards are further by freeing up your internal sales team to do what they do best – making sales!

However, a telemarketing campaign is not free and before you start you want to ensure that your new team know what they’re doing. So, what should you consider before beginning a telemarketing campaign?

Target Market

Of course, the first thing to consider when making any sale is the people you are selling to. Who are they? What kind of profile do they fit into? At Air, we sit down with our clients to analyse who their target market is, what type of industry they want us to target and what level of decision maker they want us to speak to. For us, the most important aspects are who and why. We don’t make any calls before we have created an in-depth company and prospect profile.

The Script

We need to establish what it is you are selling and what we are going to be pitching. From Fintechs to Soft Drinks Companies, we have worked with a variety of businesses and so we understand the importance of a perfectly tailored script. When TeamAir are dialling, they will know your offering, its USPs, why a company should use you and not your competitor and how they should engage with a prospect. Engagement is key, so we establish the best route to success by implementing a two-way, consultative, permission-based conversation.

Data

Strong data is key to strong sales. Whether you have your own data, or we need to source it for you, we offer a data cleansing service to ensure that you’re hitting exactly the target market that you want to hit. If we are sourcing data for you, we want to have a clear understanding of the data profile you need, from there we look to our UK data providers. Any data that we source belongs to you, this is why we are more than happy to build relationships between our providers and our clients, this allows you to get the best out of your time working with us.

Objections

For telemarketers, objection handling is a fact of life – it’ll never go away. However, at Air, we make sure that our diallers are as knowledgeable as possible with regards to your product and ensure that they are armed with information to handle the relevant objections that arise. We also follow the diffuse > statement > question formula. By diffusing any negative pressure, TeamAir are able to make statements which switch the focus of the conversation and ask open questions which allow it to flow once more.

Engagement process

Once a prospect is engaged, what are you looking to do with them, book a phone call or a face to face appointment? But more importantly, what does is take to qualify a lead? These questions are at the forefront of our campaign strategy as is it essential that we know your end goal. If booking appointments is something you would like us to help with then we ask for access to your calendars, this allows us to efficiently provide you with any details which you’ll need to know for appointments booked for you. With regards to lead qualification, that’s all down to you, you set the criteria and we follow, making sure to engage with the prospects who matter to you.

If you feel that your sales team could benefit from the support of an expert outsourced telemarketing team, then get in touch today – TeamAir are always on hand to help. Call: 0345 2413038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk

Why is market segmentation vital to your business?

Posted on 28 January 20193 June 2025 by Doug Roots

In the era of GDPR, unwarranted contact should be a distant memory. To be truly business savvy is now, and always should have been, demonstrated by a company’s ability to target customers based on their wants and needs, not your own. Sales are increasingly determined by the trust that a customer has for a brand, if you are honest and transparent with them upfront they are more likely to buy into you as a brand. People value a brand they can trust.

A simple and effective way to build a trustworthy brand is by implementing a segmentation strategy – it shows that you have taken the time to understand the various groups within your target market. We’ve created the infographic below to highlight 5 key reasons to segment your data and customers:

But many businesses are still failing to hit the mark, with 20% of respondents to an Avention survey feeling that segmentation was one of the biggest challenges facing their organisation. Segmentation is a tried and tested means of delivering results to your customers. We only have to look to email campaigns, where Mailchimp showed that clicks are 74.53% higher than non-segmented campaigns, to see these results.

By taking the time to highlight the different needs and barriers that may be important to your potential clients, you will be better able to sell to them. Not only will it allow you to understand them, but it will allow you to forge personal relationships with them through meaningful interactions – which is essential in the telemarketing industry in particular. So, how can you segment your customers?

However, it is important to remember the earlier point about customer trust. With increasingly personalised sales and marketing materials out there it isn’t enough to take your data and simply spilt everyone into superficial segments. You need to gain insight into the people behind the numbers, otherwise your will simply be working from conjecture.

To gain insight and create genuine, informed personas for these groups, it is vital that you demonstrate a desire to know more when in conversation with your prospects. It is with this in mind that the scripts used by TeamAir are only there as prompts, we encourage our BDEs to engage in meaningful, personal conversations when on the phone. This helps us to nurture a sense of human connection whilst carrying out the vital research that is needed to lead a successful campaign and enrich the data that is held.

If you feel that you could benefit from working with a reputable, award winning telemarketing company, who work with a customer-centric focus, get in touch. You can call us: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Category: Blog