5 Questions Your Marketing Should Answer for Prospective Customers

The digital world has changed the way we make purchasing decisions, including B2B businesses. Consumers and potential clients are more in charge of the buying process than ever before. In fact, it’s been reported that “57% of the purchase decision is already complete before the customer even calls the supplier.”

If this is true, that means potential customers are expecting to be able to answer the questions which were formerly answered directly by a salesperson. This is where marketing comes in.

5 Questions Your Marketing Efforts Should Answer for Prospective Customers

Whether it’s through your website, email marketing, or advertising campaigns, here are five questions your marketing efforts should be answering for prospective customers:

  1. Why should we trust you? More than likely, your business is just one of a dozen or more options that customers can choose from. Why should they choose your business and trust you to solve their challenges? The best way to increase trust and help people understand why they should choose your business is to position yourself as an expert and share meaningful insights. Numerous studies have shown that when the brain recognizes that someone is an expert, it is far more likely to comply with that person’s suggestions.
  2. Why should we choose your specific product or service? There are two primary reasons people choose a particular product or service: cost and differentiation. To differentiate your product or service, potential customers must understand your unique value proposition. Your value proposition is a unique value that a buyer desires and will receive from your company, product, or service. Think of the word “only” and how you can apply it to your business, products, and services.
  3. Why now? Overcoming the lack of urgency is a challenge for many B2B marketing and sales professionals. While you don’t want to become an overbearing hustler (that doesn’t work), you need to help your customer realize that embracing change now rather than later is in their best interest.
  4. Is it worth the investment? When you are asking buyers to purchase something from you, you are also asking them not to do something else. The most effective way to answer this question is to appeal to the emotional reasons people buy. Knowing this, identify ways to start creating emotional connections with prospective customers to increase their likeness toward making a decision.
  5. Is it worth making a change? People have a natural aversion to change. The brain is wired to associate a high level of risk with accepting a new idea or purchasing a product or service. The most compelling ways to incite change is to find problems by challenging the status quo with insights that compel your buyers to think about how they can improve themselves or their business.

How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team


When most businesses think about marketing automation, they tend to focus on—you guessed it—marketing. They’ll use marketing automation to send welcome series, lead generation campaigns, emails for conferences, newsletters, etc. And, that makes sense. Marketing automation is a great way to create personal and relevant marketing experiences for your customers and potential buyers.

However, one of the often overlooked marketing automation strategies is sales enablement. As I’ve mentioned before, when marketing and sales work together, businesses thrive. But, what role does marketing automation play in that effort?

How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team

Here are two simple advantages every marketing automation platform provides your sales team:

  1. Equipping your sales team with insights on any activity from the account. Marketing automation allows you to track everything from email opens to how long someone watched a webinar. This is valuable information for sales representatives when they’re following up with a potential lead. But, in many cases, looking for insights beyond the individual prospect they’re following up with can make a tremendous difference. Finding out what other people within the account are also downloading can provide sales members with a more comprehensive view into all of the potential challenges the organization is facing.
  2. Sending sales emails on behalf of your sales team. There are a couple of benefits for leveraging marketing automation to send emails on behalf of your sales team. First, these emails are tracked. This helps your sales team actually know who is opening your email, who is acting on it, and who isn’t interested. Another advantage is that it gives both marketing and sales the ability to test and see which type of subject lines, messages, and calls-to-action are most effective for converting new business.

Marketing automation isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a sales tool. However, in order for it to truly work, you need to make sure your marketing and sales teams are completely aligned. Taking the time to discover how you can leverage marketing automation to support sales will not only make your sales teams more efficient, it will ultimately help them be more effective.

One of the Easiest (and Most Effective) Ways Marketing Can Support Sales

notes on email marketing


As the buying process has evolved, the clear-cut lines between sales and marketing have started to blur. Potential customers are significantly further along in the sales process before they ever connect with a salesperson. In the same way, marketing plays an important role in the sales process by equipping the sales team with tools to support and accelerate the sales process.

While there are a variety of ways in which marketing can become a strategic asset for business development, one tactic is so easy that it can often get overlooked.

One of the most valuable things your marketing team can do to support sales is to create email templates your business development team can copy, paste, and customize for conversations with prospective customers.

3 Sales Templates Marketing Can Help Write

If you’re interested in equipping your team with pre-written email templates, here are three you should consider:

  1. Emails for Sharing Lead Generation Resources. You spend a lot of time and energy creating lead generation resources or hosting webinars for your sales team. But they’re incredibly busy, too. Most days, they don’t have time to read the entire resource, summarize it, and craft an email to share it with current or prospective customers. One of the easiest ways to maximize the reach you get from your lead generation resources and webinars is to also craft email templates your sales team can copy to quickly share it with their contacts.
  2. New Products or Solution Announcements. As a marketer, you’re at the center of knowing about the direction your company is going. Whether it’s a new product or important announcement from your leadership team, having a few templates in the sales team’s back pocket provides flexibility and helps them stay on top of communicating the latest and greatest information to customers and prospects.
  3. Answers to Common Challenges and Pain Points. Your sales team is constantly communicating with people about how your business can help solve their greatest challenges. As someone in the marketing seat, you have a perspective into all of the various pain points and challenges they hear. You also have the ability to constantly test and tweak messaging to see what resonates most. Based on what you find, you can easily create sales email templates built around common challenges and pain points with the messaging you’ve found to resonate most.  

Creating email templates your sales team can customize not only saves them a great deal of time, it also allows your marketing team to control the messaging. This means potential customers are getting the same message about your brand, products, and services, regardless of who they might be engaging.