Despite marked differences, marketing and sales are both trying to show love to the buyer. Their goal is to convince the buyer of their product’s or service’s value, help them become a customer and then keep them as a customer. But the lines can get a little bit blurry. Who is supposed to do what when it comes to providing content experiences? And how can you provide them, jointly and seamlessly? Here’s a look at what it takes for marketing to fuel the sales team with content, so that everyone can win.
The Problem Today
Historically, marketing has largely “owned” content, leaving sales to request it when they need it or go trying to track it down themselves. This is a problem for many reasons, particularly when employees are spending 1.8 hours a day looking for content pieces (according to McKinsey). In an eight-hour workday, that’s almost one-quarter of the day; time that could – and should – be spent elsewhere.
This also leaves marketing and sales in an awkward handoff or even power struggle, one at the mercy of the other and certainly not working in cahoots. So, the answer is clear: marketing and sales must come together in providing content and creating a consistent experience. But to do so, marketing must fuel sales with the right content.
Organize Your Content Library
The crux of the solution really comes down to organization. You have the content, but who knows where it lives or how it’s categorized? Imagine how it feels for a salesperson to go in search of a specific white paper, only to get lost down the rabbit hole of other white papers intended for other buyers at other stages of the buying journey.
To prevent this, and help your sales team find the content they need quickly, organize your content library. Use tags to group content pieces together based on the specific structure that matters most at your organization. For example, you might tag each piece of content with its format, topic, persona, use case, need, industry and buying stage.
Then, when a salesperson goes to pull a particular content piece for a prospect, they can do so in a matter of minutes. Not only do they save time in their own day (and their fellow marketers’), but they also save the prospect time by getting them what they need right now.
Learn & Improve
When we venture out into a new way of doing something, like orchestrating content to fuel our sales team, we’re all bound to make mistakes. But that’s ok. Mistakes can actually be very useful tools; however, only when you use them as a teacher. When you review your mishaps in order to realize what went wrong, you learn something so you can improve next time.
The same applies here. If you don’t notice when a tactic goes south, you’ll never know to try a different tactic. And this is why the right metrics and insights are so important. For example, your sales team should be able to go into your analytics to see what content pieces have worked in a specific stage of the buyer journey before, and then mirror that for a current prospect in the same stage. Having access to marketing metrics and content metrics analytics allows them to identify what’s working from a sales perspective, and then refine, learn and improve from it.
In order to give buyers the information they need to buy, marketing must first give sales teams what they need to share relevant, timely content. Once you have this interplay mastered, you’ll be amazed by just how much time is saved, and how much marketing and sales are able to truly serve buyers – together.