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Sales managers often perform as drill sergeants who deliver impassioned speeches to ignite their troops of salespeople. The sales manager position implies duties of coaching, training, implementing and other one-way forms of communication.

Marketing and Sales have always had to work together. It’s a game. Marketing is the point guard, setting up the play and passing the ball to the sales team at the perfect moment for the slam-dunk. But, setting up that “perfect play” is often easier said than done.

One of the main hardships of being unable to streamline the marketing and Sales process has to do with content. In fact, 41% of salespeople don’t know which marketing content to use, how to use it, or when to use it. Understanding which content to use and when to use it is a key element in every customer touch point. Luckily, there is a tool that can help solve this problem. 

Before the advent of technological advancements in the sales process such as various sales enablement tools, sales reps used to operate as lone-wolfs. They would either generate their own leads or wait for aggregated leads to be sent to them from the marketing department. From there on out, they would start the communications process all on their own, conducting customer research and figuring out what content would be most relevant to present to the prospect.

When things go wrong and sales opportunities don’t materialize, you might jump to berate your salespeople, especially if the buyer dropped out after speaking with them. You resentfully ask the sales team if they’re up to date on your flurry of e-mails filled with case studies, or if they aren’t properly using your new and improved sales portal? You shake them, thinking you’ve given them every sales enablement tool they could possibly need, and you begin to wonder if maybe they’re just ignoring you. You bury your head, sigh, and think about hiring a new sales team. Maybe you have a group of duds?

Instead of assuming your salespeople are failing you, explore the idea that maybe you are failing your salespeople. Your salespeople are in the trenches of conversation with your potential customers. They’re working hard to make a sale, and if they are not using your current sales enablement solutions to do that, it’s probably for a good reason. The tools probably aren’t useful to them. They would know! If your reps are ignoring your new and improved portal in favor of outdated slides and data sheets, the portal that you are providing them is probably not as engaging as you thought. 

The digital age has provided us with thousands of tools, one being sales enablement, to help us determine how our sales and marketing teams are performing, what content is converting and how people are responding to our message. But, tools can only tell us the raw facts and data. Humans still need to be a part of the equation to decipher and analyze. Even then, we might not know why someone decided to come to us in the first place; did they accidentally click a Facebook ad or were they intrigued by your CTA on another webpage? When it comes down to it, we’re still dealing with people and the power of “personalization” is going to continue being prevalent.