Anthony Greer

7 Ways Your Sales Team Can Help Your Marketing Team If you’re looking for one of the best resources for content for your marketing team, you don’t have to look any further than your sales department. Marketing and sales teams achieve the best results when they work together. One of the benefits is that the marketing team will then be able to make content tailor-made for the sales team. However, this relationship is a two-way street. Sales teams need customer-centric content from marketing, but for marketing to write that content effectively, they need a little help from their sales counterparts. Here are seven things that the sales team can do to help the marketing team curate better content: Forward Customer Concerns E-mails Salespeople’s inboxes get inundated with customer questions that usually start with “How do I” do something. Having to answer the same question over and over again can be frustrating and tiring, and sales should take note of it. Talk to your sales team about forwarding some of the most FAQ e-mails to the marketing department so that they can address it with educational content. Not only do these e-mails lay the groundwork for an excellent “how-to” blog, but they can be utilized in other forms of content as well, such as e-books, video/web tutorials, and expert guides. Organize a list of the questions brought up by customers in these e-mails. Meet with your team to determine which forms of content marketing can best answer these questions—the more variations, the better. Also, include the sales team in this process so that they can express how they would use the content to guide potential customers to buy. Listen in on Customer Calls Assign someone on your marketing team to listen in on customers calls. Have them listen to a several a day for a week or two while jotting down a list of common customer concerns. Just like with e-mails, this helps develop content that answers these questions, such as an FAQ section, to put these concerns to rest. After doing this, you will already have the most common concerns resolved before your initial customer interaction. Also, your potential customer is then provided with more information that can guide them faster to the sale. Revisit Sales Content Talk to your sales team about the content that they have used in the past and why. The content that marketing creates should be easily accessible to the sales teams, either with software like ours, Cloud, Dropbox, etc. Sales reps often have a routine. They likely use select pieces of content from the pool available to them based what they believe will convince their customers to buy. Talk to sales about what content they use, what they don’t use, and why. By understanding their methods, you’ll be able to create more content that is better fitting to their needs. For the content that doesn’t get used, you can either find ways to fix it while keeping the needs of your sales team in mind or nix it altogether. Learn from the Competition Analyze the sales teams of your competitors. Learning about what your rivals are doing will help you determine what content is working for them. In turn, you can then meet with your sales team and talk about your research. This will likely rouse the sales team to action and inspire them to work harder to achieve a competitive advantage (after all, no one wants to be #2). Talk with your sales team about what other companies in your market are doing successfully. Analyze how much traffic is their social media campaign is bringing them and figure out how many hits their webinars are getting on YouTube. Are these ideas tangible for your company’s product or service, and is there a way to improve upon what your competitors are doing? Have your sales team take these ideas into consideration and figure out how that content could work for them in their own way. Both of your teams may discover that an immediate advantage you have over your rivals lies in your ability to work well together. Sales Teams in the Field Salespeople can spend a lot of time in the field and need their content to be tablet and mobile-friendly. The content they use on these devices may differ from the content they prefer in the office or while interacting with potential customers online. Have your sales team talk about what kind of content they use in the field and what marketing can do to make it mobile-friendly. Have Sales Help Create Clearer Buyer Personas Because sales teams interact more intimately with customers, they have a clearer understanding of the buyer personas that they are trying to reach. Having unclear buyer personas can result in the marketing team creating content that sales don’t really need. Sales teams really need marketing content that connects with buyer personas on an emotional level. To do that, sales needs to give the marketing department a very detailed understanding of the customers that they are trying to reach. When SLPR examined their brand and buyer persona, they created a fictitious bio about their target customer. The bio included information like: • Where she lived • What TV shows she watched • What her occupation was • Where she liked to travel • What she did on weekends • What her favorite holiday was and why They ended up with so much detail about their target customer that they could write a story about her, which then connected their customers—and the marketing team—with the brand. Analyze the Sales Cycle Your sales team should have a system in place that tracks performance throughout the sales cycle. Not only does this allow managers the ability to analyze and measure their team’s performances, but this could also reveal the effectiveness of certain marketing content as well. For example, if several members of the sales team are having issues getting customers past the evaluation stage of the buyer’s journey, the content provided for that stage needs to be improved. A post-campaign report needs to be written and analyzed to determine the efficiency of the content provided. Then, the marketing and sales teams should meet and discuss where the problem areas are and how best to resolve them. Several of the tactics above can assist with the resolution stage. After new content is generated, measure the sales team’s performance again and determine if the problem has been fixed. In short, marketing can create better-fitting content for sales when the sales department provides them with information about their needs and the needs of their customers. What have you learned from your sales team, and how has the content curated by your department helped improve a sale? Leave a comment below.