Sales teams frequently disregard marketing materials despite their potential to attract and retain customers. This oversight leaves marketers puzzled and frustrated. If you're struggling with this issue, you're not alone. Let's explore why this happens and how bridging the gap between sales and marketing can lead to increased conversions and revenue.
Poor Communication and Collaboration
Smooth coordination between marketing and sales isn't a new hurdle. When communication breaks down, sales will unfortunately miss out on valuable content. And if they feel unheard from past collaborations, they're even less motivated to engage with marketing materials.
Advice: Have an open-door policy for communication with your sales teams. Regularly update them on new content initiatives or potential content ideas and seek their input to ensure alignment with their needs and goals. Grab a beer together, some of the best ideas are hatched at the pub!
Misalignment with Sales Objectives
Your content may not be noticed because it doesn't sync up with what the sales team needs. Make sure your content speaks directly to their challenges and goals. Align your content strategy closely with theirs and with what their customers need.
Advice: Stay connected with the sales team through regular meetings to hear their challenges, understand their goals, and learn through their customer interactions. Join pitches and discovery meetings to capture insights directly from customers. This ensures your messaging is finely tuned and your content highly relevant, aiding their selling at the right time in the sales process.
Failure to Demonstrate Results
Sales teams are results-oriented, and they thrive on tangible outcomes. If your content marketing efforts lack measurable results or fails to demonstrate a clear impact on lead gen and conversion in their eyes, they’re unlikely to invest time in using it.
Advice: Implement and communicate analytics and tracking mechanisms that are going to measure the success of your content marketing campaigns. Showcase key metrics such as increased lead generation, lead quality improvement, and conversion rates to prove the effectiveness of your campaigns and content.
Content Overload or Irrelevance
Too much irrelevant content can make Sales tune out. Sales teams are always swamped and juggling priorities, and if they think using marketing materials takes too much time or they've got better ways to hit their goals, they'll easily pass it by.
Advice: Streamline your content strategy to focus on quality over quantity. Tailor content to different sales funnel stages, providing them with the right resources at the right time. Map your content to coincide with customer renewals or other accounts-based marketing needs to optimise the relevance and timeliness.
Insufficient Training and Education
Sales teams might ignore your content if they don't fully understand its value or how to leverage it in their client interactions. Lack of training on the benefits and use of content can hinder adoption.
Advice: Provide training sessions to the sales team on how to effectively use and promote content in their sales pitches and Social Selling activities. Highlight customer success stories and real-world examples that showcase the impact of content marketing on closing deals.
Difficult to Access
We’ve all been frustrated by being asked to provide something that we painstakingly communicated or sent multiple times, right? With the volume of content you are completing, it can be easy to miss or get lost in an Inbox.
Advice:
Having an internal repository for marketing assets boosts your odds of clients and prospects seeing your valuable content. With a DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution, Sales always has the latest materials at hand. Plus, it provides analytics on asset usage, empowering smarter content decisions.
It's no secret that bridging the gap between marketing and sales is essential for the overall success of a business. By staying in lockstep with your salespeople, you’ll create a more synergistic relationship, maximising the impact of your content marketing efforts and their sales conversions.
Comments