SALES LINKED TO MARKETING
Imagine for a moment that your brand promise is a Ferrari. The engine (Engineering) is built for precision and speed; the interior and systems (Product Management & Marketing) are exactly what you want and are designed to be comfortable and easy to understand; and the service and support (Product Delivery) are out of this world. Now imagine the exterior (Sales) of the Ferrari. If it was rusted, had peeling paint, and dents – would you be as inclined to purchase or even look beyond the exterior to the great interior and performance advantages?
The best marketing, product management, development and customer support can be wasted if the sales team fails to deliver an experience that is aligned with the other functions. Like a well-oiled machine, the entire customer experience should deliver upon the brand promise at every engagement. A knowledgeable sales team or a transaction that delights the customer is likely to impress and will be favorably remembered. Equally, if the sales team is full of dents and rust, you can expect your prospect to have a negative association with the product and company. How often have you heard people say how much they love a product, but hated the sales process or the person who sold it to them?
There is nothing worse than putting a stellar product with great marketing and support in the hands of incompetent sales personnel. When putting together a sales enablement program, marketers should be thinking about the overall customer impression and experience that would lead to improved conversion and a positive brand engagement. The difficulty is that arming the sales team to effectively deliver is a multi-functional responsibility that involves the entire company. (Download the eBook below to help design your program.)
Improve Your Sales and Marketing Alignment
Download our 5 Step Lead Scoring Workbook to learn how to create an effective and efficient lead scoring system both teams can agree on.
25|25 Marketing can help in a variety of ways. Having representation on our team from Sales, Marketing and Product Management gives us the unique ability to tackle sales enablement programs from a holistic perspective. We understand the requirements and dynamics of a well-run sales training effort and how each of these functions should contribute with sales support.
Making the transition to a fully-integrated sales and marketing pipeline is a critical step in delivering a well-organized marketing program for effective marketing ROI measurement.
Learn more about sales enablement by 25|25:
Workbook: Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is one of the easiest ways to gain alignment between Sales and Marketing, and it helps with understanding which marketing tactics are supporting pipeline growth. Quality leads managed and nurtured appropriately can lead to a 33% decrease in costs.
Blog: The 3 W's of Gated Content
Aligning your sales and marketing effort through the use of gated content is one critical step to creating a lead scoring system. Learn the what, why and when of how to use gated content in Part 1 of this 3-part blog series.
Top 5 Things to Know about Lead Generation vs Demand Geneneration
Tips to help B2B marketers bring value to the sales team
HOw we can help:
Sales Process Implementation
We can audit your existing processes by conducting focus groups, interviews, material reviews (and the delivery mechanisms) and workshops with the sales organization that will help you fine-tune your sales training programs. By evaluating customer feedback and benchmarking the process to identify and address critical gaps, you can allocate resources more effectively to target areas for improvement while reinforcing your areas of strength.
Pipeline Development
We have experience helping organizations develop an integrated marketing and sales pipeline complete with documentation, lead scoring workflows, Service Line Agreements and implementation using technology platforms such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation systems. Working with your team, we identify the requirements and desired outcomes that will help the organization track and measure the activities leading to a sale.
Sales Tools and Materials Development
We can project manage and help create the supporting communication materials for both internal sales training programs and externally-facing sales tools such as case studies, value calculators, presentations, demonstration scripts, print materials, online training programs, etc.
Sales Training
Facilitation of sales training programs can be of tremendous value for companies that would like to create more structure in their sales enablement effort or would simply like to be able to regularly measure the results. Whether you are starting from scratch, need a complete overhaul, or would simply like some outside support to help you design critical success factors, we can tailor an experience that's right for the maturity of your organization.
Additional Resources
- Forbes Article: "Sales Content vs. Marketing Content: Do you know the difference?" by Josh Ritchie - May, 2017
- Blog Post: "What is Sales Enablement and How Did Forrester Go About Defining It?" by Scott Santucci - August, 2010
- Infographic: "Sales Force Enablement Metrics" as re-published by Jason Jordan of SalesForce.com - April, 2014