Mostly, the workflow between marketing and sales is linear: the marketing department is looking for leads and salespeople are following up with those leads. At a glance, this practice seems correct, yet it is actually a guaranteed failure for inbound marketing.
When it comes to inbound marketing, people travel in different directions across the sales funnel. They don’t follow the same structure of actions. They can chime in of the sales cycle at different stages, as they do more research and follow the recommendations of their family and friends. That said, with inbound marketing, you need to move fast and clearly align it to the real-time actions of your customers. As your contacts move from one stage of the buying process to the next, you need to collect insights about their behavior and preferences. This can be achieved through a geolocation-based marketing or other personalised marketing methods.
Want more? The following infographic elaborates how sales and marketing machine work in the future, while explains the importance of closed-loop marketing.
Infographic credit: Salesforce