6 Reasons Why Transparency Matters in Marketing and Sales
Transparency in marketing and sales plays a vital role in your ability to convert new leads, earn trust from your customers, and grow your business. In today’s business landscape, where buyers are more informed than any other time in the past, they value honesty and authenticity from brands and are quite able to spot when it’s missing.
By embracing transparency across your internal marketing and sales operations and in your external communications with customers, you can foster stronger relationships, build a more trustworthy brand, and achieve sustainable growth.
Let’s delve into some of the key reasons why transparency must be a priority in your marketing and sales strategies, and how to make sure it’s maintained at all times.
Quick Takeaways
- Transparency fosters trust, which leads to higher conversions and more repeat business.
- Marketing and sales teams are more engaged when transparency is encouraged in your company’s culture.
- Transparency boosts your brand reputation, which has a direct impact on online brand awareness and overall market sentiment about your company.
- Over time, transparency in sales and marketing reduces customer acquisition costs and increases profitability.
You’ll Keep Customers Longer
No one likes being “sold to,” and when you oversell or over promote the benefits of your solutions, it can create unrealistic expectations that can doom your relationship with a customer after they initially convert.
The truth is that implementing new solutions for a business usually comes with a few bumps along the way, and there will be an inevitable gap between time of purchase and time to value (even when you do your best to shorten it).
In addition, customers need to uphold their end of the bargain to earn the expected ROI on new solutions by doing things like employee training, integration with current marketing and sales tools, and execution of the change management needed when new tools are introduced at any company.
Don’t try to paint a perfect picture or ignore obvious action steps and potential challenges that exist between Point A (making a purchase) and Point B (realizing value long term). B2B purchase decision makers are tasked with the job for a reason—they’re smart—and they’d prefer you be honest with them from the get go.
When you give them honest information about what’s required to succeed with your solutions, potential challenges they may encounter, and even limitations of your product that you recognize and are working to improve, your potential customers will trust and respect you more.
And that trust? It’s critical to customer loyalty and retention. According to a recent study, about three-quarters of consumers say that when they trust brands, they’ll continue to buy from them even when competitor products become trendy or get great reviews. Nearly 60% say they will continue to buy from trustworthy brands even when something goes wrong with their products or services.
The takeaway: Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They just want you to be honest.
Your Team Will Be Bought-In
With a tip of the hat to Jerry Colonna, we often end team meetings by asking these questions:
- What are you not saying that needs to be said?
- What are you saying that is not being heard?
- What is being said that you’re not hearing?
This gives less vocal team members an opportunity to voice their thoughts in a conversation that they didn’t have to initiate, and it opens an approachable door to honest communication.
An engaged team is so important to the health of your company because they’re the ones on the frontline. Transparency in sales and marketing, then, must be upheld as much internally as it is in your external communications to buyers and customers.
Giving employees the ability to be totally transparent with their boss, with each other, and with customers is an investment that will pay big dividends. Transparency across your marketing and sales teams is also particularly important, as alignment between the two teams has been proven to boost revenue, brand awareness, and average deal size.
Potential Buyers Will Believe You
Today, B2B buyers are well informed. They do research on their own and complete more than half of their vendor due diligence before they ever reach out to sales teams. If you over promise or even stretch the truth when it comes to performance and numbers, it’s likely they’ll know.
And if buyers don’t think you’re telling the truth, they definitely won’t want to do business with your organization.
Know that buyers come to initial sales conversations already having gathered lots of information about your industry and your company. Provide accurate information that matches up with what your company shares on your website and other marketing materials, as well as what’s available in industry research.
Small details like statistics that match up or honest discussion of customer ratings can go a long way. When buyers know they can believe you about the little things, they trust you to take on the big things (like helping them solve problems using your solutions).
It Boosts Your Brand Reputation
Your brand reputation—the way your brand is perceived not only by customers but also peers, investors, and other key stakeholders—is impacted by how much people feel they can trust you. Transparency, as we’ve already discussed, is critical to earning that trust.
The ripple effect of a strong brand reputation built through transparency in marketing and sales is significant. It impacts the way your brand is discussed in public forums and on review sites, which in turn directly impacts whether potential customers will choose you (more than 90% of B2B buyers use reviews to help them decide), and how well you’ll rank on search engines (Google’s algorithm, for example, uses sentiment indicators to analyze reputation and use it as a ranking factor).
Your Bottom Line Will Benefit
The positive effects that transparency in sales and marketing have on your business—customer loyalty, greater trust, engaged employees, and a better brand reputation—eventually translate to higher sales revenue and profitability.
For one, the ability to retain customers at a higher rate has a direct impact on your customer acquisition costs, as it’s more expensive to constantly earn new business than to keep customers you already have.
In addition, customers are willing to pay more for products and services from brands they trust. Transparency, then, can enable you to increase your profit margins and earn more revenue from upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
It’s Good Business Practice
Outside of the many specific benefits it has on revenue, retention, profitability, and growth potential, there’s one primary reason to make transparency in marketing and sales a priority at your company—it’s plain old good business practice.
You want your customers (and anyone who comes in contact with your business) to know that it operates in good faith. Maintaining full transparency is one powerful way to make that happen.
Over to You
Even the highest levels of transparency in sales and marketing won’t have an impact if your message doesn’t reach the right audiences. A strong outbound marketing strategy is necessary to reach your target audience and convert leads consistently.
RevBoss specializes in helping our clients implement focused, targeted outbound marketing strategies that generate high-value leads and drive pipeline growth. Our outbound email software and lead generation services are custom-built for startups, consultancies, marketing agencies, and other B2B organizations.
Want to learn more about our solutions? Schedule a quick call with us and find out how we can help you win more clients.