3 ways field marketing drives more sales

With marketing strategies evolving from day to day and time to time, chances are if you are in the marketing industry or a salesperson you’ve heard the term “field marketing” thrown around. 

However, too often, companies take a limited view of field marketing, relating it solely with events or in-field activities.

But how well do you really know and understand the meaning of it and what it can mean for your business?

Just as every company is different, this including their own structure, target markets, challenges, and opportunities, etc. — no two field marketing programs are exactly alike. So, what is field marketing, you ask?

At its core, field marketing can be defined as strategic marketing activities and programs designed to support the sales process from prospecting to close and beyond. These activities are often customized to specific regions, reps, deal sizes, industries and so forth.

Added to that, field marketing may also include two-way communications such as requesting feedback about a sample or inviting consumers to follow a brand on social media.

Now that we've got the basic meaning of the term out of the way, below are three points as to how field marketing can help fuel sales for your company.

Aligns Communication Between Sales and Marketing

This may sound like a given, but it's not considering how often sales and marketing efforts go misaligned. So much marketing material goes unused by sales either because sales don’t know how to use it or it’s simply not useful. So many leads get qualified and passed along only to fall by the wayside. Field marketing can address these issues and help bridge the gap, especially when it spans the entire sales process and serves as a catalyst for true open dialogue between sales and marketing.

The field marketing representative should be a trusted consultant to the sales team, helping them understand not only what material is available for their use, but how to position the material and most importantly, how to follow-up.

Organizing Field Marketing Events

Events are typically what first come to mind for those thinking about field marketing. Perhaps you are in an organization that already has a field marketing team and they focus exclusively on in-region events.

While field marketing can be much more than just events, they can play an incredibly important role in your field marketing strategy. Events can take the form of cocktail receptions or various forums open to many, or exclusive executive events such as dinners or suites at a ball game.

Works Cross-Functionally to Develop Regional Campaigns

One of the most powerful tactics you can use to help sales and sales development reps prospect, as well as move deals through the pipeline, is to work with marketing to develop a series of custom templates that can be used to quickly address the specific needs of a prospect.

For example, organise your case studies by industry or challenge and create a custom booklet for a prospect that you can follow-up on. Prepare an audit of your digital marketing properties that you can share with members of the sales team to show some of your capabilities in action.