Close collaboration between the sales and marketing department is key to better sales enablement at your company. When sales and marketing efforts are aligned, your company benefits big time, especially when it comes to the quality of your sales enablement content. Achieving this harmony will involve approaching your respective responsibilities with the goals of your counterpart department in mind. Sales reps, leaders, and marketing professionals, read on to learn how to reap the benefits of smarketing at your organization.
Advice for Marketing Professionals
As marketing professionals, your responsibility is first and foremost to understand the customer. By creating tailored content that is reflective of customer preferences, you can help the sales team be better equipped to engage with prospects. When it comes to sharing content, you’ll want to create one centralized, easy-to-find location to ensure sales reps have no trouble accessing appropriate materials. Create an index with clear categories to help sellers search by type, customer profile, or use-case. It can be irritating to be constantly asked where things are located, so by investing time in creating a content library that is well-organized, you can save fellow marketers and sales reps time and energy later on. If questions do remain, however, be quick to offer guidance about how to navigate the content library to make sure sales reps can actually engage with the materials you spent so much time crafting.
Explaining the utility of the content can also go a long way here; you’ll want to encourage sales reps to go past their usual go-to content and familiarize themselves with the wide variety of materials available to them. Of course, not every single clip or file will get their moment in the sun, but it’s your job to direct sales reps’ attention toward crucial content. Make it easy for them to understand each item’s value by including markers like summaries, ideal customer profiles, and information on where to find related materials. Share updates on new content as it’s created, and give sales reps a heads up when new materials are on the way to help them plan ahead.
Finally, ask yourself what the metrics have to say about your content. Check out how often your content is being downloaded and take a look at the number of views. You should also pay attention to the broader sales context. What do account retention rates look like? What about LTV? What’s your organization’s close rate? How do sales reps perform in comparable scenarios with and without certain materials? Work with the sales team to put these measurements into context and help you determine whether the content produced is actually helping boost sales.
Advice for Sales Reps
Marketing team members dedicate a lot of effort to creating well-researched sales enablement content. But if you fail to make the most of these materials, not only will their work be in vain, but the whole team will suffer from the missed opportunities. Be sure to stay informed about updates to content and invest time in going over new materials. Talk with the marketing department about which marketing newsletters it would make sense for you to be included on. Other ways to stay in the loop are getting to know your marketing colleagues outside of meetings, keeping your tech stack up-to-date, and watching marketing webinars.
As sellers, you should also be doing your part to contribute to the content creation process, especially through your input. Your primary value add, however, will be to instrumentalize this content during sales conversations in order to build strong relationships with prospects and close more deals. Therefore it’s important to use all the resources and tools at your disposal to support your team. Attention is one sales enablement tool that makes it easy to access content pertinent to conversations with buyers. Attention integrates with your favorite platforms to pull up the perfect sales battlecard for every sales scenario using vocal cues. Having voice-activated battlecards will help you effortlessly benefit from important sales enablement content during live calls, so don’t miss out on this revolutionary sales software.
Advice for Sales Leaders
Sales leaders will often serve as the link between marketing and sales departments. Leaders will do well to keep an eye on the big picture, namely whether sales enablement efforts are working and quota is being met. Sales leaders also serve an important role in mediating disagreements. By seeking out feedback and listening to the concerns of each team throughout the sales process, sales leaders can prepare to address issues between departments and facilitate communication between two groups with vastly different viewpoints. At joint meetings, sales leaders can enhance team morale and by extension, a spirit of cooperation, by highlighting the significance of each department’s contribution and bringing attention to shared goals and accomplishments. Sales leaders should also ask themselves whether content quality is really responsible for slow periods, or whether gaps in your company’s training and onboarding program are to blame. Attention can help train your junior sales reps faster than ever through the use of AI technology. Attention not only tracks the performance metrics that truly matter, but also provides sales reps with live feedback and coaching tips. Try Attention to enhance your organization’s sales training program today.
Listen to each other
To achieve your organization’s sales enablement goals, both teams will have to maintain open communicate and listen carefully to each other’s points. Sales reps, your experience speaking with prospects is very valuable to the marketing team. Share insights about how buyers feel about currently available content, and share ideas for future content based on themes your buyers would like to learn more about. Marketers, don’t just wait for sales reps to come to you with advice. Be proactive about seeking out their thoughts on content usefulness. Is the content straightforward, easy to access and use, and relevant for conversations with buyers? Incorporate feedback into your next round of content. And sales leaders, be sure to think about how you can increase opportunities for candid inter-departmental communication. After all, more dialogue means more smarketing, which will over time translate into bigger and better deals.
