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The Montagues versus the Capulets, the Hatfields versus the McCoys... and, yes, adding Marketing versus Sales to the list of historical feuds seems appropriate.

On average, businesses with positive alignment between Marketing and Sales teams achieve 20% revenue growth per year, whereas enterprises with poor alignment experience a 4% revenue reduction, according to HubSpot.

So, how do we get this intra-departmental strife under control?

Marketers should embrace the lead handoff as the beginning of a new phase that requires its own content strategy focused on supporting Sales as it attempts to convert leads into customers.

By implementing a post-lead strategy, you can positively influence sales conversations and business outcomes. Supporting the sales team after the handoff creates a shift: The sales organization, overall, becomes more effective and ultimately sells more products or services.

The following are some ways marketers can maximize lead conversion after the handoff.

The Right Content

As marketing professionals we often think about the buyers, their buying process, and their place in the pipeline. As a result of that mindset, however, the salesperson tends to get second billing. Sellers can benefit from having the right internal sources to use at the right time in the sales process—materials that help facilitate a fruitful sales conversation and serve as a way to tee up prospect-facing material.

Think about how your materials not only help to engage the prospect but also aid sales in having high-quality selling conversations that help them qualify prospects, stay on message, and differentiate appropriately.

The key is developing a combination of sales aids relevant to the buying process:

  • Make Sales assets relevant to where the seller is in the organization. Ask yourself questions such as these: What products/services are they responsible for selling? Are they new to the organization or are they senior staff members? Do they sell to specific buyer personas or vertical markets or both?
  • Sales assets should also be relevant to the buyer's journey and the sales cycle. Sales aids should, for example, be available at the specific points in the sales cycle where they are most relevant. If these aids are tailored for the prospect type and point in the sales cycle, that's even better yet.
  • More and more organizations are finding a way to automatically recommend content so that reps don't have to search through hundreds of docs (or across portals and management systems) for what they need. Best-practices include pushing this content through the seller's system of choice—often the CRM, where they already spend the majority of their time.

Finally, when creating the actual content, think about providing marketing collateral that can be delivered in short internal bursts of relevant information that is easily accessed.

As many cognitive psychologists have pointed out, it is better to learn and retain small chunks of information, frequently, than big chunks, infrequently.

Mapping the Buying Process to the Sales Process

Engaging a prospect at the earliest stages of the buying cycle, such as during the awareness or education stage, is very different from doing so in later stages, such as consideration and decision.

Remember that in the early stages of the buying cycle, the goal is to make prospects aware that there are solutions to issues they might be facing and to promote your company as a thought leader. Assets might include whitepapers, contributed articles, social media posts, and the like.

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How to Create a Post-Lead Content Marketing Strategy

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Chanin Ballance

Chanin Ballance is CEO of Veelo, an award-winning cloud-based marketing and sales performance platform. Chanin is a frequent speaker on the topics of learning and retention, brain science, mobile engagement, and sales enablement solutions.

LinkedIn: Chanin Ballance

Twitter: @chaninballance