We work with various organizations with an internal sales or fundraising team, with just one or two salespeople, or even with the owner making sales. Sometimes they will have an internal marketing team, but more often than not, they outsource their marketing.

Before working with us, sales and marketing end up getting their wires crossed all too often. In the worst cases, they’re actually fighting and playing the blame game.

The reason? They’re confused about the whole point of marketing. If your company or nonprofit has anyone responsible for sales, then the point of marketing is to support the sales efforts, not to make sales.

What does that mean exactly? In general, marketing needs to help with four steps that we like to call K.L.T.V.:

• Know
• Like
• Trust
• Value

First, people need to know about your organization before they can buy from your organization. With marketing, that means having a presence where people are online and reinforcing that presence with continual activity.

Second, people need to like your organization. If your marketing is bland, people won’t like it. Show some personality and talk about your company culture. Sure, not everyone will like you, but those people would not have been an ideal prospect for you anyway.

Third, people need to be able to trust you. Social proof and trust symbols can help with that, but the real way you build trust is by being consistent over time. Be consistent with how often you update your website, post on social media, public blog articles, send newsletters, etc.

Finally, people have to value you. That means they have to believe you’re providing a valuable service or product, but also that they need to be in the market for what you’re selling. If someone knows, likes, and trusts you, but you sell commercial roofing services, and they don’t own a commercial roof, there’s no value there for them. Your marketing does need to talk about the services and products you provide and the pains you solve.

Remember, the whole point of marketing is not to do the sales department’s job for them. It is, however, to reinforce K.L.T.V. with existing prospects and even attract new prospects.