Everyone knows the theory - when sales and marketing operate in silos, results suffer. Misaligned goals, inconsistent messaging and disjointed customer experiences undermine the goals of both teams.
At the extremes, marketing and sales stop talking and both operate in their own worlds. Marketing crafts content that looks and sounds great but may be wide of the mark in customer terms. Meanwhile, sales do their own thing. They pull together their own materials that are filled with powerful and effective messaging but are off brand, often ugly and may only work when delivered by a talented sales professional.
In organisations with outstanding results, a bursting business pipeline and a customer base that feels understood, sales and marketing make love, not war.
Alignment is essential for sales and marketing to feel the love. It begins with everyone laying their preconceptions aside and acknowledging a fundamental truth:
Sales know what prospects are asking. Marketing knows how to tell powerful stories.
Collaborating to give target audiences the information, insights, products and services they want depends on the following four steps:
1. Creating unified buyer personas
Sales and marketing must agree on who the ideal customer is. Co-developing personas ensures both teams target and speak to the same audience with consistency and in the language they respond to best.
2. Jointly develop content
Start by talking to top-performing sales professionals to gather sales insights, find out what content they’d like and how they’d use it. Co-create content that addresses real objections and educates buyers in the context of their motivations.
3. Implementing closed-loop reporting
Establish feedback loops to get hard data on results, measuring how marketing activities influence sales outcomes. Use CRM data to refine strategies and optimise content and outreach.
4. Talking regularly
Target audiences’ pain points and motivations shift with the winds of financial, political and cultural change – and frontline sales teams will understand and keep pace. This means marketing and sales conversations must happen regularly so that marketing content always hits the sweet spot.
Target audiences’ pain points and motivations shift with the winds of financial, political and cultural change – and frontline sales teams will understand and keep pace. This means marketing and sales conversations must happen regularly so that marketing content always hits the sweet spot.
Over twenty years ago, asabell began by creating marketing materials directly commissioned by a sales team[KH1] . Aligning the needs of both B2B sales and marketing teams means everyone benefits and both teams want to use the content. We’ve never forgotten our roots, and always champion getting the sales perspective during a briefing process.
Get in touch to talk through our tried-and-tested processes for delivering B2B marketing content that sales teams will be eager to use.
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