In an ideal world, your sales and marketing teams are a unified force to be reckoned with. The reality is that drift naturally occurs. It is important to periodically bring the teams into alignment. Without alignment, the marketing team will most assuredly be missing the target despite their best efforts. Your sales team is front and center with your customers, whether virtually or in person. As such, they have intimate knowledge of what your customers are currently worried about, experiencing, searching for, and ultimately buying. This information is critical to get back to the marketing team so that old content can be updated, and new content can be properly framed for current market conditions and challenges.
Drift Happens
This misalignment happens because it is normally very slow process. Time and distance between sales and marketing perpetuates the drift. It is critical for the sales team to view the marketing team as a sales enablement resource. When they and their content are perceived as a resource for growing sales, the impact of the effort is increased exponentially.
Top 10 Questions
One of the best strategies for understanding your customers’ current challenges is to ask your sales team to list the 10 most asked questions they receive in their meetings or in emails. Odds are that once you gather the top 10 questions, you will uncover new ideas for content creation that will likely answer a host of new challenges that your solutions can serve. By gathering the input from the sales team, they will have buy-in on the content creation and marketing efforts, likely empowering them to use the content in their sales process more often.
Terminology
In order to create or modify content, it is important for your company to be speaking the same language as your customers. As solutions and technology change, so does the language of the industry. Be sure that the teams are exchanging intelligence on the proper terminology to be using. Aside from speaking the same language and staying relevant, terminology updates on your website and blog will improve search engine optimization.
Processes
As the marketing team gathers intelligence on prospects who visit your website, blog, watch your videos, and engage on social media, it is important to remain clear on when visits become leads to be handed over to the sales team. Handing a contact over to sales too early can waste time and upset a prospective customer. Likewise, handing over contact information too late can wind up with a lost opportunity. Both teams must clearly understand the paths that customers take online and provide input as to when a contact becomes a lead.
Schedule the Next Alignment Session
This is not a one and done exercise. Prevent alignment drift and schedule your next session sooner than later, and then create an ongoing routine meeting at least twice per year. It’s not necessary to include the entire sales team in these meetings, but a diverse group of at least three field salespeople is helpful.
Ready, Set, Align
Step 3 is to align your sales and marketing teams. The reality is that over time, much of the marketing content will become less relevant and could age if not updated with input from the sales team. Regularly scheduled discovery sessions will keep your content and solutions fresh and relevant to a modern buyer.
If you need help with any aspect of the team alignment process, Vector Firm is here to help. From planning to execution, our team can help you through each of these steps.
Get started today by contacting our team for advice.
