Which comes first, marketing or sales? This isn’t a question of importance. It’s a question of job function. Inevitably, your marketing department is better suited to court the potential customer, while your sales department should take the reigns deeper into the sales funnel.

Yes, it’s important to receive input from your sales team when your marketing team is putting together a lead nurturing campaign, but they certainly don’t need to be involved every step of the way. In fact, being involved before it’s proven that someone is really interested in your product or service is a waste of their time as their skills should be honed around closing a deal, not acquiring interest.

Here are five reasons why your marketing department should take the lead in nurturing and the sales cycle.

5 Ways a Marketing Team Can Help Nurture Leads

1. They Know How to Create Engaging Content

Let’s face it, marketers know how to create compelling content that engages their audience. And content forms the basis and drives your lead nurturing programs. So whatever type of content you plan to include in your lead nurturing program, whether emails, blog posts, webinars, and/or whitepapers, your marketing team will have a direct hand in it.

1. They Know How to Target Communications

Your marketing team has the most knowledge regarding the segmentation of your sales leads, so they can best target a particular audience and offer them unique content when they communicate with them. And leads want to receive personalized emails: according to Statista, in 2016 the open rate for emails with a personalized message was 18.8%, compared to 13.1% for non-personalized emails. In addition, on average, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads, much of which has to do with personalization.

1. They Know How to Grow Your Business

Your marketing team knows how to craft convincing emails that help attract and retain customers. In fact, according to a recent survey of retail professionals around 80% of respondents said that email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention. Again, much of this comes back to personalization and tailoring content to customers’ needs, which your marketing team has a pulse on, based on where your customers are in the sales funnel.

1. They Are In Tune with Social Media

Your marketing team is tuned in to all of your social channels, which provides them with direct access to your customer’s opinions of your brand and competition. By being so attuned to what they want, your marketing team can further familiarize themselves with your leads’ profiles, which can help them pinpoint your leads’ interests and serve as an additional way to nurture relationships with them.

1. Nurturing Is Their Business

Long gone are the days when marketers crafted clever messages that subliminally tried to lure prospects into buying a product or service. Today, it’s all about being transparent and telling a story that your leads can relate to and believe. Content is now a valuable and effective way to tell your company’s story, and marketers know how to tell it best. Sharing product information with today’s knowledgeable and informed leads at the appropriate time and frequency has become an art form for marketers.

Your marketing team is the straw that stirs the drink when it comes to your lead-nurturing campaigns.