The ultimate goals of your marketing and sales teams are to attract more customers, nurture relationships with existing customers, and increase revenue. Each team wants to be individually successful and also ensure the success of your brand. However, these teams won’t be as successful if they’re working on their own in a silo.
Marketing and sales teams are different, but the teams depend on each other for success. The marketing team’s key role is to support sales through audience and market research, lead generation, and marketing collateral creation, while sales teams work directly with prospective customers. Let’s take a look at some of the essential ways marketing can support sales.
Even though marketing and sales teams are different, they rely on each other to be successful and to ensure the success of your brand. So, how can marketing support sales?
Encouraging open communication between your teams can go a long way toward helping the teams support each other better. It’s essential for the marketing team to understand what content is most useful to the sales team and if there’s any content that isn’t hitting the mark. Too often, marketing teams create content and don’t have information about what happens to it after that point or if it was useful.
Your sales teams have direct contact with prospects and have essential information on their wants, needs, and questions they often ask. With this information, marketing can create collateral that more accurately addresses your prospect’s pain points and questions.
A real-time inventory management platform will give you visibility into what collateral is in demand, but to fully meet the needs of your prospects, a marketing collateral platform must work in tandem with open communication between your teams.
Buyer personas are profiles of ideal customers for your service or product. Each persona includes specific information such as age, pain points, and role in the company. These personas give marketing teams insight into their prospects’ business, roles, and problems they’re attempting to solve.
However, if sales teams don’t also have this information, they can be lost. They don’t have the key information they need about who their ideal prospects are and where to find these prospects. And this lack of knowledge is noticeable to prospects too.
According to widely cited research from Forrester, approximately 75 percent of prospects think that the salespeople contacting them don’t understand the problem they need to solve or even what their role is in their company. This can make a prospect highly unlikely to convert into a customer. Therefore, it’s incredibly important for marketing teams to share their buyer personas with their sales teams. It can be even more beneficial for marketing and sales teams to create these personas together.
Your sales team should have access to a plethora of marketing collateral to meet the needs of prospects and help nurture the relationship. All marketing assets should align with your brand’s colors, logos, and brand voice. To ensure consistency across these materials, your brand guidelines can be housed in your real-time inventory management platform, where marketing and sales can quickly and easily access them.
By having a full suite of collateral available to your sales team, they can have materials for each stage of the process, which can help avoid awkward exchanges when checking in on a prospect via email. For example, premium content such as an e-book or infographic can be included in a check-in email to a prospect. To further automate the process and avoid lengthy approval and editing processes, your marketing team can create template materials that your sales team can customize as needed.
With the right centralized marketing collateral platform, you’ll have valuable insights into which assets top-selling sales representatives are utilizing. This information can help marketing teams know what marketing collateral is in demand and frequently utilized, thus allowing them to create effective, optimized content for your sales teams.
Housing your marketing assets in this same platform is also essential. Your sales teams can easily access the materials they need and customize them as needed, and your marketing team can ensure your materials have consistent branding and a unified message.
However, it’s important to keep your collateral organized and updated. This will ensure your sales team doesn’t send outdated assets.
Ensuring your marketing and sales teams have what they need to work together seamlessly is key to a successful collaboration. A centralized brand and marketing collateral platform will allow real-time inventory management while maintaining brand consistency. Contact us today to learn more about our powerhouse marketing collateral platform, brandstash.