Marketing is a sales multiplier.

Understanding this is vital in evaluating your marketing initiatives and success metrics, especially for small to mid-size businesses.

It’s vital for two reasons:

1. Sales without marketing is a lot harder.
Sales owns the client relationships, and that’s where the money is. Marketing’s job is to facilitate that relationship and make sure sales has everything they need – from product collateral to lead nurturing campaigns to a CRM that helps them stick to the sales blueprint. Sales can’t do all these things AND sell; without them, you’re asking them to sell with one arm tied behind their back.

2. Marketing that’s disconnected (or only loosely connected) to sales’ KPIs is expensive.
Between social, email, direct mail, PPC, trade shows, and all the other channels, there is no shortage of ways to spend money and time on often really good marketing. Done well, all of these channels get the message out there and can contribute to brand awareness and tell your story.

But do they make your sales team more effective?

Do they add qualified leads to the sales team’s pipeline? Can sales close more leads faster because you’re doing them?

As a kid, I played Super Mario Bros for hours. On the easy levels, the mushrooms – the multipliers – weren’t always that big a deal. But once things got challenging, Mario needed the superpowers to beat the boss.

Good marketing is a sales multiplier.