The sales team can serve as a critical link between the customer and the marketing team. Marketing can and should leverage the sales team’s connections and ideas to create, distribute, and enhance content marketing initiatives.
Below are several strategies marketers can use to work collaboratively with sales teams to improve content marketing effectiveness.
Collaborate with Sales to Create Content
Salespeople are your eyes and ears on the front lines. Establishing an open relationship with your sales team can expose your marketing team to a world of new insights and content marketing possibilities.
Salespeople can tell you what prospects are looking for, what they like, what they dislike, and most importantly, what questions they are asking. Learn from their past successes and failures. Use this information to create effective content that speaks to your prospects’ pain points and helps sales close deals.
Bring the sales team on early in the process, if possible. Sales can be a great resource when building target personas. They are usually very excited to be part of the process and share their knowledge. Once you develop the personas, present them to the sales team and incorporate their feedback.
Empower Sales to Use Content Effectively
For each piece of content you create, give sales a quick overview of how the content can be used. Inform salespeople of the goal of the content, the persona(s) it targets, and the buying stage in which it should be used. Consider arming the sales team with social posts and email content they can use to promote each piece.
When salespeople are involved in content creation and armed with use cases, they are more likely to use marketing content when and where appropriate.
Listen to Sales to Improve Marketing Content
Many salespeople think content provided by marketing needs improvement. The only way to close this gap and create great content that both sales and prospects will find effective is to facilitate an open feedback loop between sales and marketing.
Marketing teams must be open to receiving constructive feedback from sales. The sales team can identify which content is resonating with prospects, which personas are reacting positively to content, what needs further refinement, and what misses the mark.
It’s time to end the battle between sales and marketing. Technology marketing teams that collaborate openly with sales will see the most success in engagement, conversion, and retention.
