Marketing and agents should amplify each other
When your marketing team sends emails to prospects who are also being contacted by agents, one of two things happens. Either the communications reinforce each other, building familiarity and trust, or they conflict, creating confusion and undermining the agent's relationship.
The difference comes down to coordination.
The coordination problem
Without coordination, common issues include agents contacting prospects who just received a marketing email with different messaging, marketing offers (discounts, promotions) that undercut agent quoted prices, prospects receiving redundant outreach from both marketing and an agent simultaneously, and agents being unaware of marketing campaigns that their prospects are seeing.
These problems frustrate agents, confuse prospects, and waste effort on both sides.
How to align
Share the marketing calendar
Give agents visibility into upcoming email campaigns. Tell them what is going out, when, to whom, and what the call to action is. This lets agents time their outreach to complement rather than duplicate marketing messages.
Coordinate messaging
If your marketing email highlights a specific benefit or case study, let agents know so they can reinforce the same message in their conversations. Consistent messaging across channels builds trust. Contradictory messaging destroys it.
Segment carefully
Consider excluding agent managed prospects from certain marketing campaigns, especially promotions or discounts. If an agent is working a deal at full price and the prospect receives a discount offer from marketing, the agent loses credibility and potentially the deal.
Use marketing to warm prospects for agents
Marketing emails can prime the market for agent conversations. An educational email sequence about the problem your product solves makes the agent's follow up call easier because the prospect is already thinking about the issue.
Give agents marketing content to share
Provide agents with your best email content in a format they can share directly. A great blog post, an insightful case study, or a compelling product announcement gives agents a reason to reach out that feels helpful rather than sales driven.
Handling inbound leads from marketing
When marketing generates leads, have a clear process for routing them to agents. Define the rules for which leads go to agents vs your internal team (if applicable). Set response time expectations. Track conversion rates on marketing generated leads vs agent generated leads.
Feedback loop
Ask agents what they hear from prospects about your marketing. Are prospects referencing your emails? Are they confused by anything? Do they find the content helpful? This real world feedback from the field is invaluable for improving your marketing effectiveness.
Agents are your eyes and ears in the market. Their perspective on what marketing resonates and what falls flat is more reliable than email open rate statistics alone.