With the flood of information readily available to buyers about potential vendors, modern sales reps are expected to deliver insights and articulate value if they are to generate real opportunities.
The days of small talk and generic pitch decks are over. To make the sale, marketers need to arm sales teams with dynamic content tailored to a potential client's specific needs.
When preparing for any interaction with a prospect, your organization's sales and marketing teams must be in lockstep. However, nearly one in three buyers say they are presented with irrelevant information at some point during the sales process—a statistic indicative of just how siloed many marketing and sales departments are.
And yet, with today's buyers more in control than ever, the stakes and expectations are high for your marketing and sales teams.
How to Maximize the Sales and Marketing Partnership
Buyers expect a personalized, convenient, and consistent sales experience—whether it's digital or in person. Unfortunately, historically siloed sales and marketing teams often struggle to deliver the right mix of assets to answer potential questions from the buyer.
Pulling out relevant, personalized information for every pitch is a big task—and difficult to scale, especially for teams that aren't used to collaborating.
Providing sales teams with the tailored content they need for each pitch and customer conversation is possible, but the right shared tools, processes, and KPIs are needed to make it seamless.
The key is getting sales and marketing teams out of their silos and taking a fresh look at how they work together. Marketing should view sales as its internal customer, and so work to serve Sales's needs with the assets it creates.
If your prospects are often left with more questions than answers, or if you just want to do a wellness check on how Sales and Marketing are working together, keep the following five tips in mind.
1. Don't overwhelm your customer
Most sales reps have plenty of options when choosing sales content. But as marketing departments develop assets for every part of the buyer journey, sales reps are often faced with an overwhelming number of options.
Without structure, reps waste valuable time digging for what they need. Or, worse, they call an audible and create inconsistent, off-brand assets of their own.
A sole focus on quantity of sales materials is the wrong approach. Today's buyers feel bombarded with too many options: 86% of buyers say 10 pieces of content is too much, and more than 50% say even 5 pieces of material is overwhelming.
To succeed, marketing teams must focus on quality over quantity. Buyers are coming to the table more informed than ever; you can't afford to put something irrelevant in front of them.
To avoid those types of mistakes and to optimize their efforts, tap into data: Marketers can use analytics to understand what content their sales teams are using and what content is actually driving sales.
2. Make presentations a dialogue about the value your solution offers
The static deck is all but dead. Sales teams know that pitches have evolved into a less formal and more interactive event, and it's on the marketing team to help make this new conversational format flow.
As buying scenarios increase in complexity, so do products and services do. Prospects need to be guided through the process, and sales reps should be able to tailor information mid-pitch to meet a client's needs. Some of the most advanced solutions equip sales teams with interactive content that lets reps navigate dynamically throughout a conversation.
By surfacing relevant information quickly and easily, this capability can help reps focus on articulating the business impact of the solution, avoiding "we will get back to you" answers that stall a sales process.
