Marketers are not immune to the challenges of selling today. But sales challenges like limited access to customers, increased market competition or saturation, or a lack of visibility into sales activities present marketing teams with an need to optimize collateral for the sales process in more holistic, long-term ways. Forward-thinking marketers are collaborating with sales colleagues to overcome these challenges through content development, deployment, and measurement.
Common Challenges for Marketers:
- Limited Access to Customers
- Market Saturation
- Field Visibility
Visibility into the Field
As the field becomes increasingly mobile, global, and wireless, marketers and decision-makers have less visibility into what content, tools, and processes work in the sales field. This puts pressure on the sales teams to provide valuable, in-depth qualitative feedback when they return from the field. However, marketing teams can promote an environment of transparency and collaboration by proactively seeking out sales team feedback during the initial stages of content development and conception. This way, both marketers and reps can focus their content development efforts on what it takes to actually convert based on the specific buyer actions and motivators provided by sales. Not to mention, this type of upfront collaboration helps optimize the marketing budget, ensuring investments are made in tools and tactics that reps will actually use and that will translate to sales results.
Quantitative feedback from the field is equally, if not more, helpful in revealing what marketing efforts and tactics translate into sales results. This requires the right tools and metrics, however. Technologies, like sales enablement platforms, capture content usage data from the field and relay valuable media usage back to CRM, marketing automation, or BI systems that can provide insight into how content development can be optimized to deliver better sales results.
How Marketers Can Overcome Visibility Challenges:
- Collect real-time data from the sales field
- Connect with sales reps on what content and processes are most effective in the field
The more proactive marketers can be in addressing the variety of challenges preventing reps from closing sales sooner or more often, the greater the impact marketing can have on helping the company achieve its revenue goals. By taking a holistic and collaborative approach to considering which content formats to utilize, how they should be deployed, and how content effectiveness should be measured, marketing teams will be able to better align their efforts with the sales process and deliver what their reps need to drive more sales.
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