Anyone who’s anyone in the martech space these days knows that sales and marketing alignment is not only a hot topic, but a goal that marketers everywhere are striving for. It’s been proven that organizations who are effectively integrating marketing and sales functions see a significant lift in revenue—and whether you’re in sales or marketing, dollar signs get everyone excited.
At Uberflip, I’m happy to say our marketing and sales teams are more aligned than ever, and that’s really started with our sales and marketing leaders taking the time each week to map common goals and track progress.
But beyond shared strategy sessions, what can you do today as a marketer that will empower your sales team to succeed?
Close More Deals By Leveraging a Content Library
Here’s a little activity for you: Walk over to your sales team right now and see how they’re searching for your content. Chances are, rather than using an internal wiki or a spreadsheet, they’re going straight to Google and searching for the content on your website. We can say yikes to this, but this isn’t really their fault.
The trouble is, sales reps aren’t as immersed in content (creation or distribution) as the marketing team is, so it can sometimes be difficult for them to decide which assets they should share with whom—or even know where to find them.
To help your sales team decide what content to share, build up a content library with assets that may help them engage prospects. I’d recommend grouping this content based on the persona it’s geared towards, the stage of the buyer journey it engages, the topic, and the resource type. At Uberflip, we use our product to group content into buckets that sales can select and share from, but with a bit of extra effort, you can achieve a similar result using an Excel spreadsheet. Group your content by tabs, include the title and link, and sales can share away.
In addition to getting sales to actually use your content, another bonus is that you can control exactly what’s “approved” to share. If something becomes outdated, remove it from the library! That way, prospects will be sent your best content first, rather than something that may reflect outdated branding or messaging.
Ultimately, building up a content library makes all marketing-approved content easily accessible, allows sales to search by persona or funnel stage, and gives marketers version control. What more could you ask for?
Use Insight From Sales to Power Marketing Strategies
Have you considered tapping your sales team as a resource to influence your marketing campaigns? Your sales reps spend their days constantly engaged with your target market. They hear their challenges, their questions, and their objections day in and day out, which actually puts them in the optimal place to influence your marketing messaging. The problem is that our marketing teams don’t often do this.
To close the gap between sales and marketing, our VP of Demand Generation and her team sync weekly with our sales reps to ensure our sales team is informed of new content, our teams are aligned on goals, and that marketing is providing them with everything they need to succeed.
On top of this, all of our sales calls are recorded using Chorus, which allows us to go back and hear any objections or questions that were asked by prospects during demos. These give us some actionable takeaways when it comes to how we frame our product in our marketing.
Think about it: Is there a particular challenge your sales reps hear about that your business can easily solve? Use that to inspire your next ad campaign. Is there something your sales team always gets asked? Update your website copy to get that question answered before people even get to sales. Is there a misconception about your tool or area of business that makes people hesitate? Plan a webinar or write a blog post debunking it.
People often tap their customer community for insights, which is awesome for product-specific things, but less so when it comes to engaging new business. Plus, you’ll probably find that prospects will be a lot more frank when it comes to what they think of you and your sales and marketing tactics.
Personalize the Journey for a Better Content Experience
Times have changed—it shouldn’t just be your marketing team that’s concerned with content experience — you’ve got to get the entire organization on board if you really want to make an impact.
Before speaking to sales, it’s likely that your prospects have seen a ton of your marketing messaging — from social posts, to webinars, to email nurtures, to display ads. And because those things are coming out of your marketing department, there’s a pretty good chance all of them have been beautified by a designer, reviewed by a copy editor, and polished to near perfection.
Once those leads get passed on to sales though, more often than not, they’re getting served a totally different experience. Rather than beautifully designed communications, they’re getting a run-of-the-mill email from a sales rep. In order to keep leads engaged, you’ve got to continue providing them with a great experience. That’s what they expect from you now!
The easiest way to do this is to encourage your sales team to make each prospect feel like they’re the single most important potential customer with — you guessed it — personalization. In their outreach, reps should be recommending pieces of content based on what each prospect is tweeting about, suggesting they join LinkedIn groups based on their interests, or leveraging a tool like Datanyze to get insight into what tech each prospect is using. These are small things that can make a big difference when it comes to the overall experience.
Apart from creating the perfect personalized email, there are other tools on the market that can help you create better experiences on the sales side—from Vidyard’s personalized video outreach to various content integrations. No matter what your sales team decides to go with, it’s essential to keep the experience top of mind.
Align Your Teams, and Content Can Help Close Deals
Aligning your sales and marketing teams to start leveraging content to close deals is definitely one of those things that’s easier said than done, but it’s also totally worth the effort. Once you start leveraging content across the entire buyer journey, you’ll be able to see the true power of it. Content can not only convert, but it can close. It’s time to arm your sales reps with it!
