Current State of the Selling Process
The reality of today’s sales process is that sales reps just aren’t using the content supplied by marketing teams. In fact, a recent study by IDC states that as much as 80% of the content created by marketers isn’t used by sales reps (Source: Sales Force, 2015). You might be wondering, what exactly is wrong with our content? Today we examine this challenge and why sales reps should not be creating content.
According to Sales Force, 3 reasons why sales reps aren’t using content supplied by marketing teams include:
- The fact that they aren’t aware that the content exists;
- They don’t have the time to look for it; and
- There is too much content to sift through (Source: Sales Force, 2015).
New to content marketing? May I suggest reading this post I wrote about The Current State of Content Marketing. Click Here to read more.
Instead of using the content created by marketing teams, sales reps are wasting time that they could be using to sell to come up with presentation material. According to ROInnovation, sales reps spend 2.4+ hours a week looking for marketing collateral, 5.8+ hours a week looking for customer-related material, and 6.4+ hours a week creating presentations (Source: ROInnovation, 2015). Clearly sales reps are wasting valuable time creating content where their role should be to personalize/tailor the content that marketing gives them and present it in an engaging and informative manner to customers.
The Need for Sales and Marketing Alignment
The solution to this very problem is better alignment of your sales and marketing teams. Sales and marketing alignment is about one thing: communication (Source: Act-on, 2015). If both departments can’t learn how to work together as a unified team, speak the same language, and exchange information, then all of the technology in the world won't make a difference (Source: Act-On, 2015). If sales teams communicate effectively with marketing, in turn marketing would be able to make content easier to find and create more tailored content.
Sales and marketing must understand the importance of each other's roles. When it comes to marketing, projects are often long term, with an end goal of strong branding and generating qualified leads (Source: Marketo, 2015). Sales reps on the other hand move at a much faster pace than marketing, as they tend to have quotas and sales goals to meet (Source: Marketo, 2015).
When it comes to generating leads, marketing and sales departments must be on the same page. Arguably, sales reps ignore up to 50% of marketing leads (Source: Type A Communication, 2014). Why don’t sales reps follow up on marketing leads? Marketers think that generating leads is a numbers game, while sales say that generating leads is about understanding and solving business problems (Source: Marketo, 2015). Sales and marketing alignment means better qualified leads, more follow-ups by sales reps, and more revenue. In fact, B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth, and 27% faster three-year profit growth (Source: Type A Communications, 2014).
Sales and marketing alignment also means that marketing can better understand the customer’s decision process, and as a result produce better marketing materials for sales presentations. According to Kapost, “at each stage in the decision journey, 77% of buyers expect different content to reflect where they are in their journey “ (Source: Kapost, 2015). If sales reps don’t fill marketers in on what the buyer's thought process is at each stage of their decision journey, how are they supposed to create digital content to support them? It stands to reason that organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoyed 36% higher customer retention rates (Source: Type A Communications, 2014).
Want to learn more about the importance of sales and marketing alignment? May I suggest you read our post, “Why use Sales and Marketing Alignment, and 5 Best Practices”, found here.
How Sales Enablement Gives Sales Reps More Freedom
Using a sales enablement solution allows for sales and marketing alignment while giving sales reps the opportunity to customize sales presentations. With the help of digital sales aids, sales reps can use mobile sales enablement to customize presentations on the go.
Using the content uploaded by the marketing team, sales reps can choose content that they believe is most relevant to their customer prior to the sales presentation.
More importantly however, sales enablement acts as a contextually relevant digital content repository. The challenge of wasted time looking for content is eliminated when a digital sales aid puts the right content for that customer in front of the sales rep before any searching. This happens right from the marketing team. Not knowing whether content exists is a stickier challenge. Sales reps may have missed the email, or lost the tab in the intranet, but sales enablement makes all content findable and searchable. Further, it allows for custom tags to be associated with all content and only keeps the most up to date content available to sales reps.
Interested in learning more about sales enablement software? My I suggest reading my previous post, “How to Determine the Right Sales Enablement Software”, found here.
Finally, sales enablement is integrated with data analytics. Sales and marketing have access to metrics that can tell them what content is being presented, to whom, and how much time is spent on the content. This allows for sales and marketing alignment given that marketing is able to see what content customers are actually interested in, and therefore will be better able to tailor the content.
Instead of focusing on generalized content, marketers must focus on supporting the goals of the buyer and helping them along their decision journey (Source: Zambito, T., 2013). Using sales analytic software also enables marketing to understand what content is important to customers at every stage in their decision journey. This is crucial as it helps to eliminate the creation of unneeded content, and thus contributes to a more optimized content library overall.
[RELATED CONTENT] If you found these three reasons impactful, I think you'll really enjoy the eBook we put together which illustrates all the trends which are influencing challenges being faced by sellers, marketers, and C-suite level executives in B2B across every industry.
Want to see what real sales enablement looks like? Feel free to book a demo and let us show you how to start generating some real return on those marketing dollars.
