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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.