Are You a Sales-Driven Marketer? You Should Be.

I’m a sales-driven marketer. What exactly does that mean? It means I spent a long time selling to customers for companies whose marketing was either non-existent, inadequate, or completely out of touch with the clients I spent my days in front of. So, I decided to do something about it. Effective marketing should feel like a warm conversation with an old friend, who is helping you solve your biggest problem. That's where sales-driven marketing comes in.

#SalesDrivenMarketing #MarketingStrategy #SMarketing #CareerChange

An Army of One

Selling is a lot harder when you start cold. I often found myself in positions where I either had to educate an entire market one client at a time or dispel misconceived notions based on lackluster marketing. Both take time and energy away from building a quality sales relationship. Instead of being 100% focused on a salesperson’s most important task: selling, I often had to backpedal to build or rebuild a relationship with my customers.

It was ridiculous. A colossal waste of time, money and resources. Mine, my clients' and my company’s. After a decade of going to work thinking, “I know there’s a better way to do this,” I finally decided to take action. Marketing should add value to the sales process and be interwoven into the sales cycle. I was tired of death by silo.

Stealth Marketing

I had been analyzing competitors, researching customer behavior, and designing my own marketing materials behind Corporate’s back for years. Armed with front line sales experience and a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I knew the missing piece was technical knowledge of marketing itself. So, I made the decision to leave sales and become a marketer. Not just any marketer. The BEST marketer. I would do it for all the salespeople out there pounding pavement, making the phones ring, and grinding hard every day to keep their companies profitable and growing. I took a massive pay cut to be come an intern at a tech startup and I emerged a revenue generation machine. I had become a sales-driven marketer. I was seeing results, but never, ever at the cost of my team or my customers. Fluent in marketing automation, data and analytics, content strategy, inbound methodology, social media and more, I was ready to launched myself into the startup community and do some serious growth hacking.

A Sales-Driven Marketer is Born

I didn’t expect it at the beginning of this journey, but I hadn’t just become a marketer. The relationship between sales and marketing should be a bridge, not a dam. As a sales-driven marketer, I am the ultimate translator, uniquely qualified to understand both the sales perspective and the marketing vision, aligning them perfectly for public consumption. I am an engineer, building an infrastructure of processes that support short and long-term growth. I’m a chemist, mixing technology, data, and creativity to execute the perfect profit-generating formula. I’m a therapist, understanding and nurturing the deep needs of my founders, salespeople, and customers.

Today, I continue to pursue my passion for helping startups go from invisible to category kings. It’s a rush to help companies and their teams achieve success this way. Sales-driven marketing focuses on aligning structure, process, purpose and people to propel a brand beyond the competition.

What kind of marketer are you? If you're not a sales-driven marketer, you should be.

Saylor is an agile marketer, startup evangelist, mentorship advocate, tech aficionado and world traveler based in Denver, Colorado. She is most likely to a) stop and pet that puppy and b) sweet talk you into giving her an upgrade.