The power of Salesforce Engage comes from the mutually beneficial relationship cultivated between Marketing and Sales AND from placing effective, relevant marketing collateral in the hands of your sales people. But what if your organization, like many, struggles with this relationship or knowing what type of content your sales people need? Never fear! In this blog post, we discuss just that. We give you four tips that will not only strengthen your relationship with sales but will also ensure you’re providing them with content that works.
Tip 1: Talk to your sales team
The best way to ensure you’re providing your sales team with relevant, time-saving Engage email templates and engagement programs is to talk them! Start by asking:
- Who’s your target audience?
- Are you hunting (prospecting), farming (nurturing account relationships), or both?
- What types of emails do you send?
- Are there times or reasons you would need to send more emails than normal?
- What emails or interactions do you want automated?
- What other daily tasks do you want automated?
All this information will help you create the most relevant content – content that not only gets used by your sales people but content that helps them close more deals faster!
Tip 2: Create Engage-specific templates and Engagement programs that are easy to Find and identify
We all know it – our sales people run at lightning speed. They have phone calls to make, meetings to schedule, meetings to attend, deals to close, and of course, the dreaded quotas to make. Sales is definitely not for the weary. Given this, the shear amount of information they need to process can often be overwhelming. So knowing which marketing or sales collateral to use in any given situation can make a huge difference – turning what would normally be a challenge into an opportunity.
Make Engage-specific templates and engagement programs easy to find:
- By making them CRM visible.
- Titling them in a way that makes sense to your sales people.
Ex: Offering_Audience_Date or Team Name_Outreach Type_Date
For more tips on naming conventions, checkout the article, Best Practices: Naming Conventions, on Pardot’s Knowledge Base or this blog post!
Tip 3: Create Engagement Programs with A Purpose
If your sales people are largely prospecting, create Engage-specific nurture programs for early on in the buying cycle – programs that build value over time, keep your product and company top-of-mind, and allow your leads to discover value for themselves. Some common engagement programs that do this are: 30, 60, 90 day nurtures, customer stories and case studies, industry-specific information.
If your sales people are largely managing accounts or established relationships, create Engage-specific nurture programs that focus on new products and features, upcoming events, and how your product can be used across different business units within an organization. Some common engagement programs that do this are: special promotions, competitive information, event invites and follow-up.
Tip 4: Provide Training to Your Sales Team on How to Use Engage Or Engage-specific content
The ultimate goal of Salesforce Engage is to put the power of marketing automation and insights into the hands of your sales people. That can’t happen if your sales team doesn’t know that Engage or Engage-specific collateral exists. Once you have a strategy in place and collateral created, proactively:
- Offer to provide training to sales users.
- Identify a power user or product champion in sales and train them to train other sales users.
- Use internal newsletters to send out pro-tips and best-practices and to make sales aware of new Engage templates and engagement programs.
- Reward your users and evangelize successes.
- Make list views public so that users can easily send Engage Campaigns.
For more information on using Salesforce Engage, visit the Getting Started series.
