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Marketing and sales are two entirely separate departments, and for too many businesses, they operate completely independently of each other. This can cause a lot of chaos, as ultimately marketing and sales alignment is essential for everyone to succeed.
When your marketing and sales team are successfully working together, marketing won’t just bring more leads to sales, but the team can deliver higher quality and better-qualified leads to the sales team. This can actually shorten the sales cycle while simultaneously giving the sames team higher-value leads, so more high-value deals are won faster. If you want to boost revenue, this is the goal.
So how can marketing help with sales acceleration? In this post, we’re going to talk about what the marketing team can do to help with sales acceleration strategies for massive revenue growth.
Strategic alignment is all about getting your marketing and sales team on the same page. They need to be working towards a common goal, which means:
This will be different for every brand; you need to understand your business’s customer journey and what your sales pipeline looks like.
Keep in mind that it’s not uncommon for prospects to end up confused when sales reaches out, because they were looking for something they thought you offered only to discover that the actual product is different.
This often happens when marketing goes hard promoting a specific feature that some audiences look for, like a free basic plan, only for leads to realize the free plan is either highly limited or a free trial. When this happens, you’re not driving the right type of leads, and everyone can end up frustrated.
When marketing and sales coordinate, this problem is typically eliminated, because you’re able to successfully create urgency around the pain points and needs of your actual target audience.
Think of the wealth of knowledge that content producers, sales, and marketers can bring to the table. Make sure that the strategy you’re using is well-documented and stored in a central content management system like Content Camel for easy access.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) details exactly what your target audience looks like. It’s like a buyer persona for B2B brands, and it will often focus heavily on firmographic fit. If you need help getting started, check out our free buyer persona template.
Marketing and sales often end up focusing on different audiences, because they’re looking at different KPIs. Marketers may look at which campaigns generate more clicks or low-cost clicks and lead form completion, while sales looks at the number of leads that convert. Make sure that both teams are aligned on what your ICPs actually look like.
Your ICP is going to help you better understand your target audience’s true frustrations, fears, and pain points. This is key to creating urgency in marketing campaigns that will generate leads that can become customers, and that’s an essential aspect of sales acceleration.
It will help you close the gap between where customers are and where they could be, as opposed to just a basic “brand promise” or a simple “value proposition.” You can have harder-hitting campaigns that reinforce pain points, using feedback from the sales team to keep the finger on urgency in both lead generation and lead nurturing marketing campaigns.
As your team gets on the same page about the strategy they want to use and the audience they want to target, they can create a more seamless buyer’s journey that better qualifies more of the right type of leads.
It’s crucial to remember that there’s a fine line between being too heavy-handed with selling and not being assertive enough, and collaboration between marketing and sales can help with that. While your sales team is reaching out regularly with offers and to offer assistance onboarding, marketing materials and autoresponders can continue promoting different features, benefits, or use cases of the products in question. You’re staying relevant and educating the lead, which makes sales’ job much easier.
Remember to anticipate pain points and highlight your unique solutions. A strong digital marketing funnel and an aligned marketing and sales strategy is key here. You’ll know who is responsible for what so that everything is working like a well-oiled machine.
Consolidating your efforts is going to be a huge part of creating a seamless buyer’s journey. It will ensure that you:
Make sure that all of your resources— both internal and external— are saved in one place so the entire team has access. Content Camel allows your team to categorize and label content, search through your library, collaborate, and even request new content.
Cross-department collaboration on the digital sales funnel (which is often a task that’s owned by marketing) is so important here.
You’ll get fresh eyes on all your content, which can strengthen the weakest parts of both the sales and marketing touchpoints. Clear and ongoing communication strengthens the entire customer journey, because you can set up stronger marketing touchpoints that better bolster the sales team.
You may, for example, realize that retargeting ads to dropped-off leads can increase re-engagement significantly. Or, sales may discover that a well-timed offer using auto-responder campaigns after users use a certain feature in your SaaS tool is vital to success.
Look at what’s driving high quality leads and which touchpoints are most impactful to helping the sales team close more deals. Together, with collaboration from both teams, you’ll discover insights that may have been otherwise missed; these are powerful optimization opportunities.
Keep in mind that sales will know what questions or objections leads have when they reach an account manager. Use that to have the marketing team create content that qualifies leads automatically; if they’re able to come to sales fully educated about your product and why it’s a great fit, you can eliminate leads that will never convert and increase the number of high-value leads in your pipeline simultaneously.
Marketing works hard to introduce your brand to cold traffic, build interest, and then send them to sales. And while some lead forms only ask for a contact’s name and email address, marketing and sales collaboration can determine what information will best qualify leads upfront. That information can then be added to lead generation forms for sales acceleration.
Hootsuite, for example, requests additional information for users who want to access their Digital Trends Report. They require a business email, a contact’s information and job role, and the company’s name, size, and industry. This information can tell sales how high intent these leads are and how aggressively to follow up.
Sales will know which qualifying information is most important, so this is an important part of the collaboration process.
Sales will need different types of content than what the marketing department needs. They will, for example, typically need client battle cards, product walk-throughs, brochures, pitch decks, and more.
In many cases, the marketing department is responsible for creating these materials. You should have a process in place so your sales team can request content and identify how urgently they need it back, so there’s an integrated workflow in place between the two departments.
And keep in mind that neither team can use content that they can’t find. That’s where that central content management system comes into play; instead of having some content stored in different locations online, have all of it (including content on your site and content that lives in Google or Word docs) stored into your content management system. Organize it by industry, stage of the sales funnel, topic, product line, and more. This is why a content management system is a crucial sales acceleration tool that you need to add to your sales enablement tech stack.
The first thing you need to do is to organize all of your content (including content from both sales and marketing, as there’s often some overlap), and to then conduct a content audit.
A content audit is a systematic review of your entire library of content, including the following:
You want to understand what you have, and what your team needs. You may realize, for example, that you have plenty of marketing and sales materials for clients who work in the marketing industry but almost none for those in the healthcare industry, which is another core target audience you’re trying to reach.
It’s often a good idea at this stage to assess the performance of your existing content, too. Look at what content is driving in traffic, and which content is most successful at driving leads. Look for lead generation forms completed and clicks to product or contact pages in your web analytics tool.
Marketers are no stranger to A/B tests— also known as split tests— as it’s a central part of their job. They should run tests for their campaigns looking at the KPIs that matter to both the marketing and sales teams.
Marketing, after all, typically focuses on the number of clicks and leads generated. Sales, however, will focus on the quality of the leads and the number and value of deals closed.
Have the teams collaborate to come up with a set up KPIs that they both agree on for assessment, and keep a close eye on which campaigns and platforms are successfully driving the highest quantity and the highest quality of leads.
Cost does matter— the lower the customer acquisition costs the better— but it’s definitely all about quality here. While marketing has a tendency to prioritize lower acquisition costs, that sometimes may result in lower quality leads, so evaluating this together can improve the entire sales and marketing funnel.
Marketing ultimately owns sales enablement, so it’s important that the team shifts their focus from their scope of work to prioritize sales acceleration. By keeping sales as the priority, which what their job is truly about, you’ll see your business’s revenue boom.
Marketing and sales collaboration can help buyers buy by creating a seamless and highly informative customer journey, giving them exactly what they need at the right time so that the sales team’s job is much easier. Make sure that your data is in place to optimize the entire journey on both the marketing and sales side, and you’ll be good to go.
Ready to align your sales and marketing teams once and for all? See how Content Camel can help!
Get the most out of your content and deliver trackable results
Marketing can benefit from the following sales acceleration software:
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.