Case studies, landing pages, emails, presentations. You know content is critical for your sales team. And if they don’t have what they need, you lose the attention and interest of valuable leads at the most crucial points in their decision-making process.
But who’s responsible for building up your sales team’s toolkit? Cue the finger-pointing between sales and marketing.
Here are three steps to stop the blame game and start engaging more prospects, setting more meetings and driving more revenue.
Before you even start creating content, your teams need to know who you’re creating it for and what they need to hear to make a purchasing decision.
Connect with your audience.
Dust off your buyer personas and have your sales and marketing teams update (or create) them together. This gives both sides a deeper understanding of who they’re selling to, the challenges that audience faces and how your solution helps overcome them.
Your teams will also need to dive into the audience’s preferences. Do they prefer videos? Attending webinars? Reading success stories? And don’t forget about channels. Are they scrolling LinkedIn, networking at events, checking their email?
The more you know about your buyers’ motivations and how they gather information, the better equipped you are to develop content that aligns with their needs, anticipates their questions and overcomes their objections as they move through the buyer's journey—giving your sales and marketing teams a leg up in the sales process.
Speak your audience’s language.
You may have a great product or service. But if your sales team doesn’t know how to talk about it in a way that matters to your audience (and your marketing team doesn’t know how to create content that pulls them in to learn more), your buyers will never stop long enough to hear about it.
Developing a unified message helps your teams clearly understand what the audience is trying to overcome or achieve and communicate how your solution can help them do it.
Here are the five questions your messaging should address:
- What does your target audience want?
- What stands in their way?
- What’s your solution to their problem?
- What specific value does your solution deliver?
- Why are you uniquely positioned to deliver it?
Align sales and marketing efforts to help your sales team engage and educate prospects and close more deals.
Target your content.
Content should be more than noise. Targeted sales enablement content shows your buyers that you’ve done your research, you understand their current situation and you have a proven solution to deliver the results they’re looking for.
And that attention to detail helps your sales team (and your company) stand out in a sea of competitors.
Test and refine your message.
Don’t set it and forget it. Your marketing team should ask for constructive feedback about the messaging being used. Is it relevant and compelling? Or are there crickets?
This two-way communication between sales and marketing allows you to tap into your sales team’s first-hand knowledge of your target buyers and create content that directly relates to their needs.
Sales reps have the best information on what objections and recurring questions appear in the conversations with leads. This feedback loop between sales and marketing is crucial to optimize and shorten your sales cycle.
Measure the effectiveness of your sales enablement through strategic campaign analysis and support.
- Define clear objectives
- Establish relevant metrics that align with your objectives
- Track content engagement to gauge effectiveness
- Capture sales team feedback and insights
Then leverage the data to quickly determine what’s working, what’s not and how to fix it so you can be more deliberate with your campaign activities and continuously improve your sales enablement efforts moving forward.
You’ve got this. And if you don’t, we’re here to help.
See how our sales enablement solution helps sales and marketing teams do more.