Reaching Across the Aisle: How to Maximize Sales Effectiveness

Reaching Across the Aisle: How to Maximize Sales Effectiveness

In some ways, the American business model mirrors our government. We divide labor into different categories, set up hierarchies within each department and within the organization as a whole—and, like our government, a lot of our inefficiency and ineffectiveness come from departments not working together.

Sales and Marketing were frequently comparable to two warring political parties in the worst ways: their goals are different, they communicate poorly with each other, and they frequently lose sight of shared interests and the greater mission.

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from those dark times: nowadays, 38% of CMOs say aligning and integrating Sales and Marketing is a top priority.

To keep this excellent trend chugging along, we’ve put together this list of things Marketing can do to help grow Sales effectiveness:

  1. Work Across Departments to Improve Training

Work with both Training and Sales to figure out what you can do to improve customer conversion—then shore up those weak spots with the right knowledge aids and collateral. If there’s no interdepartmental effort to identify where the problems lie, the training department won’t know how to most efficiently allocate dollars and hours—or worse, end up wasting effort where none was needed.

  1. Match Support Content to Each Stage of the Buying Cycle

Engaging a prospect at the earliest stages of the buying cycle, such as during the awareness or exploration stage, is very different from later stages, such as evaluation and negotiation. Sellers need their support content customized accordingly. Identify gaps at each stage of the cycle where sellers need support, then work to create the right assets to close these gaps, such as quick training bursts, messaging and question examples, customer testimonials, and other aids that enable better selling conversations.

  1. Make Content Access Easy

Just because you’ve uploaded content to a portal doesn’t mean your sellers can find it. According to IDC, salespeople waste an average of 7 hours a week hunting for the right content. More sophisticated sales enablement tools, like Guided Selling™, can save sellers some serious time by intelligently recommending relevant content in real time. When integrated with a CRM platform (such as SalesForce or MS Dynamics), these tools intelligently pair collateral with reference materials—all keyed to prospect data, sales stage, transaction type, buyer persona, and more. Best of all, marketers can ensure sellers are using the right content at the right time.

Marketing and Sales both bear the responsibility for their persistent divide. However, when Marketing reaches across the aisle to smooth Sales learning processes and provides content that helps improve selling conversations, the result is a win/win: increased revenue growth for the organization.

To read more about how you can apply this approach to Marketing, read our free guide, “How to Increase Lead Conversion with Better Sales Effectiveness.

How to Increase Lead Conversion with Better Sales Effectiveness

 

,

Correlating Content to Closed Deals, One Buying Stage at a Time

Correlate Content to Closed Deals

If you want to grow your business, you need to close more deals—which means converting more leads to customers. We know Marketing is instrumental in building up the lead funnel, but it has an equally powerful role in supporting Sales after prospects have become qualified leads, too.

How? In a multitude of ways, but one of the most significant is determining which pieces of content give the biggest bang for their buck, and which pieces just aren’t pulling their weight, and need to be retired.

A handful of sales enablement tools and apps now give marketers visibility into usage and value. Integrating these tools with your CRM system can provide rich insight, like which pieces of content are most used in closed deals, or correlating the usefulness of different content types with buying stages.

These tools often feature feedback functionality, allowing sales reps to rate the content they found most helpful. This data, combined with usage information, can help drive more intelligent investment in sales support efforts.

For example, if a particular product positioning paper is strongly tied to high-dollar wins for the quarter, but sales reps rate it only 3 out of 5 stars, that’s probably a sign it’s a high-value asset that could benefit from an update.

The bottom line here is that Marketing can use the information to boost lead conversions because they can now make intelligent, evidence-based decisions about content creation, rather than guesswork, or excessive influence by the loudest team members.

Discovering what content actually works to help close deals helps you give your team the tools they need to be more successful—and that’s a beautiful feedback loop we can all get behind.


Read more about how Marketing can support Sales post-lead handoff in “How to Increase Lead Conversion with Better Sales Effectiveness.”

better-sales-effectiveness-brief-CTA-270px