How Marketing Can Influence Sales Opportunities and Increase Deals

When it comes to B2B marketing, we all know what lead-gen strategies are and how helpful they might be in boosting your company and generating new sales opportunities.

Long story short, lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated an interest in your company’s product or service and might end up becoming a client.

What is Influence Marketing?

Now we know that lead-generation tactics help us generate new opportunities from scratch. But what happens to all those leads and opportunities we already have in our pipeline?

Why should we invest all our marketing resources in generating new leads? Even when we have a sales pipelines full of qualified contacts with extremely valuable information?

Here’s where “Influence Marketing” takes place. Influence Marketing is a set of tactics and actions that influence existing leads and opportunities already registered in our CRM. With specific and remarkable content in order to drive them through the bottom of the funnel.

The kind of pieces of content users might vary; but the most common are usually ebooks, quick-videos, case studies, or researches.

Unlike lead-gen marketing, influence marketing impacts leads and opportunities that we already know. Meaning that the main goal is not the generation of those, but their quicker conversion. (To meetings when we talk about influenced leads and to deals when it comes to influenced Opportunities).

The way we can impact those leads can be effective if we use the information that our sales reps have been collecting.

We can see amazing results using influence marketing at different stages:

• Influence Marketing to Leads to generate more meetings: The part of the influence marketing that focuses on those leads that your SDRs team has stuck in their pipeline.

• Influence Marketing to Opps to close more deals: The part of influence marketing that focuses on those opportunities. Those that your Account Executives team has stuck in their pipeline.

Apart from the main and obvious reason for using influence marketing, (generating more deals); there are some other considerations that might help your marketing and sales department grow significantly.

3 Reasons You Should Include Influence Marketing in Your Marketing Plan

1. Generate New Content Ideas Based on What Your Prospects Need.

We tend to use different techniques to find the best content for our target market; and sometimes we forget the most evident one: To ask. Our sales reps are all day long talking to prospects from our target market (or at least they should be…). They know their most specific needs, concerns, and motivations.

From the very little question about how our product solves that particular issue to their highest motivation. Isn’t it logical to think that our sales reps should be our main source of content ideas?

When implementing influence marketing, ask your sales reps what they need to close more meetings and win more opportunities based on what their prospects and contacts want.

This way, you’ll be giving your sales reps the perfect tool to leave behind old-school excuses to follow up such as “Hi there, did you get a chance to review my email?” and start using valuable and relevant insights more likely to be answered.

Eventually, your resources page will be full of relevant content, not only useful to close existing opps but also to generate new leads.

2. Understand Your Market and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

Once you focus on what your prospects and contacts need to finally convince them to move to the next stage, you’re also making a huge effort to get to know them better.

Your sales reps and your marketing team will, eventually, end up becoming real experts on the industry and your product because they are going to be facing all kinds of issues and questions your Ideal Customer Profile might have during the prospecting stage.

3. Keep your Sales Pipeline Organized.

Doing all the tips mentioned above you are not only creating relevant content to generate more meetings and win more deals, but you are also organizing your sales pipeline.

You are kind of being forced to go to your sales reps’ pipeline (leads and opps) and take a closer look at the ones that are not moving forward and understand why.

We’ve identified 20 can’t miss sales development KPIs for B2B outbound teams. Read the ebook.

Finally, want to check out more of our latest content? Read more articles.