In this 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals.
How easy is it for your sales team to locate that perfect asset and deliver it to their prospect at the most opportune time? Have you ever found a sales rep stuck in this situation only to be left with the option of writing her own collateral? As a result of this, how did her customer relationships fair out? Ninety percent of content is never used because reps can’t find it at the time they need it. If your sales team is working with poor quality content because they don’t have access to effective assets, their quotas may be down because of this issue.
When marketing-made content lies idle and unused, it makes for an unprepared sales team. Instead of having access to the right asset in any given circumstance, sales reps spend time and resources creating their own material on-the-fly. The result is underperformance and missed opportunities to effectively engage with customers. Does this sound familiar?
How do we counter the problem of the frustrations and inefficiencies that come with poor marketing content management? How do we ensure that sales reps are always enabled with the right messages at the right time? The answer is simple: synergy between Marketing and Sales. In order to be effective, there has to be a constant connection between the marketing and sales teams. Lines of communication must be kept open. In order to empower Sales, Marketing has to be committed to getting the assets to them in a simple-to-use and effective manner, and Sales has to put effort into keeping marketing in the know and on their toes. Improving synergy between the marketing and sales teams ultimately works to enable sales reps elevate customer engagement. But how do we make this happen?
The Marketing Role
There has to be a centrally located library that houses all marketing content. Instead of making reps search through multiple repositories and storage sites, there should be a content management system in place that ensures that Sales has access to a content piece every time they want it. Creating a place that houses all marketing-made content with appropriate tagging, cataloguing and search filters will ensure that Sales get the right asset, every time.
The Sales Role
The most important thing that sales reps can do to ensure that they are working with the right messages is to trust the marketing team. Marketing spends time perfecting messages from data they gather through campaigns they execute, that means that they know what they’re talking about. The initiative should be on their part to keep the lines of communication open with Marketing. Keeping in constant contact means creating synergy, and creating synergy means creating an outcome that’s more valuable when the teams are connected.
Content management is a key tool to use when wanting to really enable the sales team in the selling process. How effective are you at working with Marketing in order to find the right asset every time, on time?
