Does your content strategy support the sales strategy and training?
If you want to create powerful connections between marketing efforts and revenue generation, aligning your marketing and sales departments is a good place to start. Your website, collateral, and digital marketing should create value with messaging that’s in line with the conversations that close deals.
How do you know if your marketing and content strategy is aligned with sales conversations? The best thing to do is to have marketing start asking questions about four specific topics.
Discuss the Right Topics
In order to do thorough research, it is preferable to discuss these topics with sales agents individually and then compare answers to create the most impact. However, it can also be done with several salespeople or a whole sales team. Either way, make sure you are asking questions on the following topics to open up a new world of collaboration:
Topic 1: Ideal Customer
Who is our ideal customer? What problem(s) are they trying to solve? How do we solve this problem?
The goal here is to vet the key information on your ideal customer such as their role, what’s important to them, and what challenges they face at work for a B2B company. For B2C, important info could be age, lifestyle factors, values/beliefs, and location. This topic adds context for understanding their pain points and what drove them into their buyer journey. The final discussion point will get you the gold: the unique way the products or services resolve their customers’ pain points and add value. Document the answers in one or more customer profiles or personas.
Topic 2: Sales Strategy
What are some of the conversations that you have found to be effective for closing deals? Do they vary depending on circumstance?
Find out which benefits or features are the most attractive to the ideal customer. In other words: What’s really making a difference with customers? We want to make sure that we prioritize content creation that doesn’t just make noise, but creates value.
Topic 3: Sales Enablement
How and when do you use marketing materials and the website when interacting with prospects? What would make the existing materials more impactful?
A major indicator of misalignment is not using collateral or the website, which leads to salespeople creating their own sales tools. The consequences of this include:
- Uniformity of messaging declines and the risk of distributing inaccurate or ineffective content increases
- Visual brand inconsistencies develop due to varying design skill
- Even if the material is effective, its impact and reach are usually limited since only one or a handful of people are using the material
Topic 4: Sales Empowerment
What’s missing? What would make your conversations easier? Do you have ideas for collateral pieces that would make you a deal-closing powerhouse?
Here’s where you find out how marketing can make a difference for the sales team. This is where the magic begins. Taking inventory of what sales needs and creating a plan for filling the gaps and layering in a content strategy that reinforces their conversations is transformative. To clarify, putting content that supports sales at the center of your marketing strategy drives transformation and marketing ROI. It sets the messaging priorities and inspires marketing to elevate and amplify your most powerful messages in new and exciting ways.
Final Note
At Gladiator, we are in the business of strategic victories. We do this by making powerful connections between sales and marketing. We start by asking questions and continue to nurture our relationship with sales over time. We make sure your marketing plan strengthens the bond between sales and marketing while changing the trajectory of your business.
