Fix sales & marketing misalignment for the best sales support process
10% of your revenue. That’s how much sales and marketing misalignment costs B2B companies each year. This issue has become impossible to ignore.
We’ve seen too many inefficiencies fly under the radar and hold companies back. Our expertise in through-channel marketing and field sales support enables small marketing teams to support distributed sales forces at scale.
3 min read
Mark Stecker : December 11, 2018 at 11:15 AM
What’s the most important job for your marketing materials? Helping your sales reps to make stronger, more effective pitches. If there’s a disconnect between the marketing message and the salesperson’s pitch, customers end up confused, unsatisfied, and unwilling to buy.
The big question is: how do you make sales and marketing work together instead of against each other?
I'll cover four key factors for creating effective B2B marketing materials that will help increase sales. But first, let’s do a little quiz to analyze the current state of your marketing materials.
To find out if you’re using the wrong marketing materials, check your success indicators:
If the answer to any of these questions is “no” or “not enough”, it’s time to reevaluate and improve your marketing materials.
Effective B2B marketing materials essentially have three jobs:
To communicate the benefits of your offer effectively, a collaborative approach between sales and marketing is necessary. When a sales strategy is created, marketing needs to be in the same room, developing the content and helping sales reach objectives and goals.
To start this collaboration, you need to spark a conversation between sales and marketing. Set up a meeting where sales can ask marketing directly which materials work best, and marketing can learn client pain points and other insights firsthand.
A key factor to productive meetings with both teams is open and honest conversation. This article from Business.com provides 9 tips on running productive meetings.
Remember that the conversation between sales and marketing should be ongoing, not a one-time thing. The sales path is never straight, and having a steady flow of feedback from sales and the marketplace allows marketing to adjust accordingly.
The ultimate goal of marketing materials is to boost revenue. Here are the four factors that will help your marketing materials effectively increase B2B sales:
Aligning both departments can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing. That’s a tough number to ignore. To produce the right materials for sales, marketing must be strategic in their choice of messaging, which is best done with feedback provided from sales. This is your first step toward creating alignment, but obviously, there’s more that you can do. Download our white paper The true cost of the status quo to learn more.
Few companies have analytical data for what reps are using in the field and how successful those materials are. By compiling usage statistics for each piece of content marketing produces, you’ll get a clearer picture of what’s working and what isn’t. You can take this a step further by gathering feedback from clients, which will allow marketing to continually improve content based on real client opinions.
If marketing materials aren’t in clients’ hands when they’re ready for them, they’re useless. For marketing materials to be effective, they need to fit the prospect's stage in the buyer's journey. Sales reps can't just use one pitch; they need to deliver at the right time, in the right medium, and with the right message.
A lack of lead nurturing and attention to the buyer’s cycle can be fatal for your marketing investment. With 79% of marketing leads never converting into sales, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to your buyer’s journey* and take control of your content.
*New to the concept of the buyer’s journey? Check out HubSpot’s quick definition.
The right sales material must be quick and easy to customize for your particular prospect. This allows reps to respond quickly and use custom pitches—two practices that improve the likelihood of making a sale.
One great way you can customize your content is by using Triptych. Triptych is a sales content management and channel marketing enablement platform that allows sales reps to customize, order, and provide feedback on all sales materials while giving marketing the data they need to strategically manage and produce better content.
Learn more about what Triptych can do to empower your business on our features page.
The best marketing materials move the sales process forward with the right customers, incorporate helpful customer feedback, and close deals.
In this article, we talked about how you can improve your marketing materials and increase B2B sales by:
By following these four steps, you’ll help sales and marketing work together and create marketing materials that exceed business goals. That’s something everyone in the business can get behind.
10% of your revenue. That’s how much sales and marketing misalignment costs B2B companies each year. This issue has become impossible to ignore.
B2B firms want to scale up—quickly. To do so, they need to think like Amazon.
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