New Office by Phil Whitehouse | CC BY 2.0,
In the past, we’ve talked about how strong alignment between your sales and marketing teams is crucial to the success of an organization. As content creators, it is essential for marketing teams to produce content that sales teams actively use and find helpful. Content that hinders their performance might be disconnected from the daily challenges a sales team faces. It might have too much detail or an unclear focus. The challenge for content creators remains: how should marketing equip salespeople without burdening them, and how should content engage prospects without alienating them?
Here are three tips for improving sales collateral and strengthening alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
Clearly Define Content
The first step towards improving sales collateral is to clearly define the purpose of the content. Who is the target audience, and what should they gain from this experience? Do we need to create something brand new, or can we re-purpose similar content to prevent redundancy? Is this piece of content educational or promotional?
This may sound like a no-brainer, but when you have dozens of similar materials floating around, some pieces can quickly become unhelpful. This can happen when materials are organized around their format, rather than their function. It is much more effective to label a piece of collateral by the circumstance it should be used in, rather than simply putting e-blasts in one folder and case studies in another. You don’t want your sales reps sifting through dozens of similar documents right before a meeting. For every bit of collateral that is generated, you must carefully assess the objective, your target audience and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Keep It Brief!
Today, potential customers will likely already have access to some of the content that your sales reps provide them. Bombarded with extra information, the tendency is simply to shut down, say “no thank you,” and move on. The answer to this problem is to have a succinct, straightforward approach when building collateral, encouraging your customers to seek out additional resources themselves. It is crucial to recognize what the prospect may or may not already know so your materials provide them with the information they need. Don’t get too bogged down in the details. Today, customers are very savvy; if they are interested, then they will fill in the gaps themselves. Your customers will value the simplicity as much as your sales reps will.
Establish a Feedback System
In order to determine if your collateral is successful, there must be a system in place to track its effectiveness. Without an established feedback system, it becomes incredibly difficult to know if sales teams are even using this content at all. Creating a process by which marketers can monitor the responses to sales collateral will not only strengthen the content itself, but also greatly improve alignment between sales and marketing teams.
Transparency between departments can be difficult, and the relationship between sales and marketing can sometimes be an adversarial one. Improving sales collateral can be an essential step for bringing these two departments together while demonstrating value to customers.
What is your organization doing to improve sales collateral?
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