Five Sales and Marketing Trends for 2015

Modern buyers are not waiting to be sold to, they’re proactively gathering information, soliciting peer recommendations, and making decisions about you and your competitors. Here are five trends I expect to see in Sales and Marketing in 2015.

1.     Social Selling: connecting with modern buyer

Social selling is about sales people building a strong personal brand. It is about understanding the role of content and how content can be used to tell a powerful and emotional story. And it is about growing your social connections. Finally, social selling will keep salespersons CONNECTED and ENGAGED with modern “digital and social” buyer: super-busy, super-mobile, super-connected and Hyper-informed.

2.     Content marketing: Marketing by attracting, not interrupting

The new age of marketing is about providing value and earning customer loyalty instead of simply pounding a message into consumers heads and hoping it will stick. Content marketing can play a vital role in filling the sales pipeline for a business, as it can drive leads and help convert prospects into customers. Data will play a larger role in content marketing; beyond just producing great content, brands need to reach and engage the right audience. The best content marketers will use data to personalize content according to who the consumer is, and tell a rich and seamless story (Storytelling) that carries across screens.

3.     Mobile: Increasing sales and marketing productivity

Mobile technology offers one of the most effective ways to support marketing-sales alignment and boost sales. Marketers can use mobile technology to provide sales reps with the right content at the right time, while increasing lead conversion and sales. Mobile sales-enablement tools are creating new and better ways for marketing to support sales reps in their customer interactions. Many teams are now looking toward mobile-ready sales-enablement technology to bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing; the adoption of such technology will be a defining aspect of successful businesses from now on (Marketing Profs, 2014).

4.     Automation: Saving time and money while boosting the bottom line

Marketing automation is a powerful tool with the ability to greatly increase your conversions. The use of a marketing automation platform can enable marketing and sales to work better together. Many marketing automation systems integrate with the sales systems, social media, search, support Web tracking and offer multi-channel marketing capabilities. These systems are continually evolving and helping both teams gain greater insights for their prospects and customers, especially about their digital behavior.

5.     H2H: Humanizing Your Brand with , Personalized message

There is no more B2B or B2C: It's Human to Human H2H. This is not about relationship selling, it's about talking to your customers and prospects in a way that they understand and expect. Versatile salespeople understand the need to be chameleon-like in their selling approach. High versatility sends a message to the customer that you are making an effort to do business in a way that is comfortable for them. It is essential that the salesperson gain the customer’s trust during the customer interaction. One way to develop trust is to help customers feel comfortable. Customers feel comfortable when you adapt to their needs. The result is comfortable customers – and comfortable customers buy, buy more, buy faster, and buy longer than uncomfortable customers.

I wish everyone happiness, good health and prosperity in 2015.

This post was originally published at Pulse