4 Marketing Insights to Know Before Calling a Prospect

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In today’s world, the buyer has more control over the sales process than ever before. On the one hand, this can make things more difficult for sales professionals. They don’t have as much control over the narrative and buyer’s journey as they once did. However, this new world order provides opportunities for business development pros. Rather than having to conduct tons of research on a prospect or cold-calling potential leads, they can instead use marketing insights—one of the many reasons salespeople are smarter than ever before.   

Marketing Insights Every Salesperson Should Know Before Calling a Prospect

Here are four specific marketing insights to share with your business development team to help them be more effective in their outreach to prospective customers: 
1. Their Overall History of Engagement with Your Brand
Today’s marketing tools allow you to track a prospect’s engagement over the past several years. These insights can help salespeople quickly answer questions like: What content have they read or converted on? Have they ever spoken with a sales representative before?  Even if it’s their first time speaking with a prospect, your sales leader can know the prospect’s entire relationship with your brand. This information is incredibly valuable for weaving the context of their history of engagement into the conversation. 
2. Insights Behind the Action That Qualified Them as a Lead
Knowing what action a prospect took to qualify them as a lead is non-negotiable. However, I’ve found that it’s also important to provide sales with an overview of what that resource or lead magnet is about. In many cases, sales professionals don’t take time to read all of the lead generation resources that marketing creates. Providing a brief synopsis that helps your sales team know what the resource is about makes it easier for them to create the connection between the action of the prospect and your products and services. 
3. Their Ability to Make a Purchasing Decision
Most companies know the job title or roles that would have the ability to say “yes” to a final purchasing decision. Capturing this information through your marketing efforts will ensure salespeople aren’t wasting time on leads that they can’t convert.  
4. The Career History of a Prospect
It’s useful to understand your prospect’s job history. In many cases, your CRM can track whether a person has moved from one company to another. You can also leverage LinkedIn insights to capture a prospect’s career trajectory and mutual connections. All these factors will influence how much a prospect can impact a purchase decision, how much educating you’ll have to do, and how quickly they can make a decision. Today’s business development professionals have access to more information about their prospects than ever before. The more your marketing team can help salespeople contextualize their messaging and save time getting to know the prospect, the more effective both teams will be in the long run.  Green Apple Strategy’s team is dedicated to understanding our clients’ target audience, creating compelling content, and generating the leads you need to grow your business. Contact us today to schedule a consultation.

How to Align Sales & Marketing in Just 30 Minutes a Week


Let’s face it: Aligning your sales and marketing teams isn’t easy. For many businesses, there are big obstacles to overcome—from breaking down the silos between the two departments to getting everyone to agree on the ideal customer for your business.

While business leaders understand the importance of marketing and sales alignment, most businesses can’t stop everything they’re doing to make sure marketing and sales are on the same page. Leaders are left asking, “How do we improve marketing and sales alignment as we go?”

How to Align Marketing & Sales in Just 30 Minutes a Week

One solution I often recommend is to establish a weekly 30-minute standing meeting between key stakeholders. These stand-up meetings don’t have to be complicated. In fact, each meeting agenda can be built by addressing three simple questions:

  • What progress have we made since the last meeting?
    • What insights can sales team members provide that are valuable for the marketing team?
    • What is the marketing team working on that would be helpful for sales team members to know?
  • What is the plan going forward?
    • Are you gaining traction on sales conversations? What can the marketing team do to support those conversations?
    • What parts of your strategy need to be tweaked? What new ideas should you consider implementing?
  • Blockages
    • What information do you need from the other team to do your job well?
    • Where are you getting stuck? What potential problems do you see?

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to spend time focusing on what matters the most for your business. If you have a major event coming up, you could focus the stand-up meeting on how you’ll set up meetings at the show. It’s OK to be flexible on the topics covered, as long as everyone has a clear sense of next steps.

Sales and marketing stand-up meetings are one of the most important things a company can do to create alignment and foster face-to-face collaboration between the two teams. Don’t let it become a simple review of the existing marketing programs and schedule. Instead, use the time to collaborate and problem-solve together.