How many of you out there are making sure your marketing teams are talking with your sales teams? In the past, I’ve heard a lot about the marketing department staying in the marketing department, and the sales department staying in the sales department. The result? Marketing feeling like Sales doesn’t capitalize on the leads that are sent, and Sales feeling like Marketing is sending bad leads.
How do you fix this? Have them work together!
There are a few different types of content you can use to help the company move forward:
- Gated content (content people get in exchange for an email address or some other info)
- Case studies
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Email drip campaigns
The content you create should do 1 of these 4 things:
- Overcome objections - This helps so that the sales people don’t have to keep addressing the same questions on the phone over and over again. People are also looking for solutions when searching the web. Perhaps you can provide an answer!
- Educate prospects - This is all about building trust in your brand.
- Prime your prospects - Help them know what you’ll be talking about next. Prepare them for the sale.
- Provide valuable info - Don’t waste their time. Make sure the info you are creating is relevant for your audience.
How do you create more Sales and marketing alignment?
- Make communication easy through internal Slack channels or other methods
- Hold brainstorm sessions together
- Create an outlet for the sales team to easily suggest content topics and ask them if they’d like to author that content. Using surveys is a great and easy way to get this information.
- Have the marketing team shadow sales calls - You can learn a lot about the customer that the sales person may miss.
- Use knowledge extraction to create content from the sales team - Interview the sales team and give them credit. Set them up as the expert.
- Build trust, align the goals, share wins, make sure they understand the motivations of each other’s teams
2 ways to Make it easy for sales to use your content
- Send updates about published content and give them suggestions on how to use the content
- Create a resource bank - create searchable content the sales team can use. Case studies, working with us, our products, helpful topics
Here are a couple of to-dos:
- Survey your sales team about common questions the lead is having about your product or service
- Schedule a knowledge extraction meeting to pick their brain more about the sales process, objections, and things that could help move the sale forward.
- Create 3 pieces of content that answer your client’s most pressing questions.
- Ask the sales team to use these 3 articles as much as possible over the next 30 days.
Do it!
You won’t see a ton of results in 30 days, but you will be able to get some good feedback and buy-in from the sales team about what’s working and what isn’t.
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