You’ve invested in sales and marketing teams, but are they working together? If your sales reps are still scrambling to find the right materials, using outdated one-pagers, or creating their own content, you’re leaving money on the table.
When sales and marketing operate in separate silos, it leads to inconsistent messaging, lost productivity, and missed opportunities. The most successful companies today have an integrated approach where the two teams are collaborative partners.
Marketing is a multiplier for your sales efforts. By strategically using your marketing budget, you can empower your sales team with the tools they need to be more effective and successful in closing deals.
We’ve compiled a list of actionable steps your sales and marketing teams can take to get both teams working together for company success.
1. Leveraging Technology and Data For Efficiency
Use data to drive the sales process. Marketing can build systems and platforms that can give your team an advantage by leveraging insights. These insights help inform strategy and messaging so that sales is working with relevant information.
Centralizing Assets
A marketing team can build a centralized hub that is easily searchable and updated. This ensures your reps always have access to the latest materials.
Implement Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools don’t just generate leads, they prepare them for the sales team. By tracking engagement and user behavior, marketing can identify the warm prospects and hand them over to a sales team member at the right time. This allows your sales reps to enter into conversations with insights about the potential customer.
Utilizing Sales Lists
When sales and marketing share data, everyone wins. By sharing lead and customer lists, marketing can run targeted campaigns, retarget specific audiences, and analyze user behavior to provide to sales for better follow-ups.
2. Creating Content That Sells
Marketing’s expertise in content creation can give your sales team materials that will resonate with the customer on a deeper level.
Develop Customer-Centric Content
Sales teams hear stories firsthand as boots on the ground. They know what prospects are asking and what objections they might have.
Marketers, on the other hand, excel at taking those insights and mapping them across the buyer’s journey, turning pain points and questions into clear messaging and solutions. Together, we can then create content that’s not only informed by real interactions but also more effective and impactful.
Dynamic Content
While one-pagers and PDFs are still necessary, marketers are creative. We bring fresh ideas and formats that make the sales process more engaging, such as testimonial videos that help build trust, interactive calculators that demonstrate real ROI, or infographics that visually simplify complex data.
Storytelling
Sales teams hear customer stories firsthand. Marketing knows how to take those stories and shape them into compelling narratives. We can weave features and benefits into brand stories that connect with prospects on an emotional level, which can help build deeper connections. With collaboration, marketing can turn everyday conversations into sales tools.
3. Strategic Collaboration
Sales and marketing are most effective when they operate together. By fostering collaboration, you can create a powerful feedback loop that creates continuous improvement.
Gathering Market Intelligence
Marketing is receiving customer feedback and analyzing market trends. We can gather these insights and feed them back to the sales team, helping them tailor their sales approach and address customer needs more effectively.
Closing the Loop
The marketing-sales partnership is a two-way street. Sales knows what’s working, and what’s not. When there’s consistent communication between sales and marketing, we can identify which tools are most effective and refine existing ones.
Analyze and Optimize
Collaboration doesn’t stop after launch. By analyzing the performance of marketing campaigns and sales activities, both teams can use the data to refine their strategies and improve efficiency.
Bringing It All Together
Tapping into marketing’s expertise and bringing it into your sales process isn’t just about creating collateral and making things look better – it’s about making them work better. When you bring the strengths of sales and marketing together, teams are more efficient, messaging hits better, and leads turn into customers.
Want to equip your sales team with better marketing strategies and tools? Partner with McCracken to build sales collateral that connects and converts.
