Observations
How Investments of Salespeople’s Time in Marketing Pay Off
What is the most valuable and expensive resource in the commercial function? It’s not the CRM system or the advertising budget. It’s your salespeople’s time.
This is why the idea of closer integration with marketing often raises justified concerns among sales leaders. “It sounds great,” you think, “but that means new meetings, workshops, and interviews. All of this will take away the time my team is supposed to spend on calls and meetings with clients.”
This way of thinking prevents growth. The time your salespeople spend collaborating with the marketing team is not a “cost.” It’s an investment. The goal of this collaboration is not to create more work for the team but to eliminate 80 percent of low-efficiency routine tasks so they can focus entirely on closing deals.
In this article, we will show, using three specific examples, how a few hours your salesperson invests in transferring knowledge to marketing will pay off by returning several dozen hours to them in the future. This is the mathematics of efficiency.
Investment #1: Two hours on a “pain map” saves 20 hours on qualification.
You allocate two of your best salespeople for a two-hour deep interview workshop with the marketing department. Note: This is not a meeting, but rather a “knowledge extraction” session. In this meeting, the marketer’s role is to be an “investigative journalist” who asks the right, deep questions to uncover the truth about the market.
Instead of asking the general question, “What do you need?” they ask:
- “Let’s recall the last lost deal. Which customer objection left you at a loss?”
- “What is the one question you are asked on every first call? Let’s formulate the ideal ‘golden’ answer to it.”
- “Imagine I’m a new customer from industry X. What three things should I learn about your product in the first five minutes so I don’t leave?”
- “Which of our competitors are we most often compared with, and in which area do we fall short in the eyes of customers?”
After collecting the answers to these questions, the marketing department creates two assets. The first is public FAQ content that answers these questions in advance and saves time on calls. The second asset is an internal Sales Playbook that directly solves the problem of training and scaling, which is the most important for you.
For example, the answer to the question about Competitor N becomes a chapter of the playbook called “Battle Card: Us vs. Competitor N.” The answer to the question about the first call becomes the basis of the “First Touch Script” section. The analysis of a lost deal goes into the section “Handling the Objection ‘Too Expensive.’” When a new employee joins, you won’t spend ten hours recounting your experience. You give them this document and say, “Here is 80 percent of what you need to know. Study it. We will discuss questions tomorrow.”
Let’s calculate the ROI. Two veterans spend two hours creating a system that reduces the onboarding time of each newcomer by at least ten to fifteen hours. For a team of ten, the savings from answering routine questions can reach twenty to thirty hours per month. This transition is moving from “heroics” to a system.
Investment #2: One hour spent on case interviews saves ten hours on “finishing touches.”
Your salesperson, who has just closed a landmark deal, spends one hour on a structured interview with a marketer. They don’t just share their joy; they also analyze the entire journey in detail, on the record: what “pain” the customer had at the start, what objections there were, which argument became decisive, and how the customer calculated the benefit for themselves.
Without this interview, marketing will most likely write a “bad” case study. It will focus on the features of your product and general phrases. However, based on the salesperson’s story, a “good” case study will be created. It will focus on the customer’s journey, their doubts, and their transformation. Rather than speaking about features, it will speak about how a specific pain of the financial director was removed.
However, the main secret to its effectiveness lies elsewhere. This one hour of interviewing is “raw material” for not just one, but an entire series of “closing” assets. The argument for the financial director becomes an ROI calculator template. The response to an objection about a competitor becomes a battle card. A key customer quote becomes a teaser for social media or a script for a video testimonial.
In short, one hour of investment by one employee creates an entire “arsenal” that saves the entire department dozens of hours in preparation for final meetings. Your salespeople stop creating “craft” content and become professional users of effective, pre-prepared tools.
Investment #3: Three hours on SLA development saves 50 hours on “junk” leads.
Investment: You and your key salespeople spend three hours in a joint workshop with the marketing team. The goal is to develop and approve an official interaction regulation, or Service Level Agreement (SLA). Without this document, marketing and sales are like two kingdoms living by different laws.
A good SLA is a short but clear document that includes three main points.
- A unified definition of MQL and SQL. Together, using specific examples, you and your salespeople will agree on the characteristics and behavior that constitute a “quality lead” (MQL) that marketing can pass to sales.
- Lead response time. We establish a rule that a salesperson must make the first attempt to contact an MQL within X hours. This ensures that “hot” leads do not cool down.
- Feedback process: We determine exactly how a salesperson “returns” a lead to marketing if it turns out to be low quality. They must select a predefined reason from the CRM, providing marketing with data for optimization.
ROI: Three hours invested in creating these rules brings perfect order to the funnel. Marketing begins delivering predictably high-quality leads. Salespeople no longer waste time on “junk.” In our experience, this saves the team up to 50 percent of the time previously spent calling “dummies.”
Marketing as Your R&D Department for Increasing Sales Efficiency
As you can see, salespeople’s interactions with the marketing department are not a distraction from their work. It is the most important part of scaling their efficiency. Every hour invested in knowledge transfer saves time many times over.
System marketing is not an ancillary service; rather, it is an internal R&D department dedicated to improving sales efficiency. Its primary responsibility is to invent new ways to help salespeople work more efficiently.
