Let’s talk about a sales and marketing problem that most companies have struggled with for years. I’m not talking about lead generation, market share, or customer retention, although it does impact each of those things and much more. I am referring to the abyss that separates Sales and Marketing.

Take a look at a typical day in the life of both Sales and Marketing to see if you can relate …

A day in the life of a marketer

A marketer works hard to generate leads for his sales team. Optimize conversion opportunities on your business website, deliver email campaigns, create landing pages, and offer valuable private content. Your work generates a steady stream of leads, which immediately passes to the sales team. Because after all, more leads is better, right?

Our marketer works hard every day to create valuable marketing content and sales support materials. She emails the sales team to notify them of each new content as it is finalized. It even uploads each new item to the company’s Dropbox account so everyone can access it.

Ah, sweet success!

But not by much …

Your blood boils when you learn that your sales reps haven’t even looked at the leads you’ve been generating. You shudder with frustration when you discover that most of the sales team is somehow unaware of most of the content that you have created. How can this be possible?

Marketing feels undervalued and ignored.

A day in the life of a sales representative

Across the Grand Canyon of Sales and Marketing, a sales representative spends his day responding to urgent requests from prospects, traveling from meeting to meeting, communicating with customers, reacting to unexpected changes with buyers; his is a life of chaos and constant change. .

Often times, you need content to meet the immediate needs of your prospects. However, this creates frustration because the materials you have access to are not the materials you need. They are out of date or worse, they don’t even seem to exist. This often means that you end up creating content on the spot. This takes time that she simply does not have. You can’t understand why Marketing isn’t producing the content you need.

To top it all, you get endless notifications from Marketing about new leads to follow up with, adding pressure to your already stressful day. You don’t have time to keep up with communication with your own prospects, much less a list of new Marketing prospects. Also, marketing leads never seem to be qualified and following up on them always seems like a waste of time.

Sales Feels Misunderstood and Unsupported by Marketing.

Sounds familiar? That’s what I thought.

Unfortunately, this situation is incredibly common. Marketers are not alone in their feeling of being undervalued and ignored. In fact, Sales will never act on up to 80% of marketing leads. And according to the American Marketing Association, a whopping 90% of sales content is never used in the sale.

Sales reps are justified in their frustration, too. The CMO advice found that instead of selling, marketers spend more than 40% of their time creating their own messages and tools. Also, according to HubSpot, only 27% of leads sent to marketing sales are first qualified.

Pretty sad statistics, right? So why is it happening? It is that abyss that I mentioned earlier between Sales and Marketing. These two teams are largely disconnected and it’s taking its toll on the companies they work for.

It’s time to close the gap and align sales and marketing once and for all. Although you probably agree, you may not fully understand why is so important or what can you do about it.

Why Sales and Marketing MUST Align

Reason n. # 1: your customers see it

According to IDC, up to 57% of customers feel that salespeople are ill-prepared or unprepared for initial meetings.

Could it be that these sales reps didn’t have the resources they needed to properly prepare for these initial meetings? After all, these meetings with prospects are very important to sales reps – they are key milestones in the sales process! The vast majority of sales reps surely want Be prepared for them so that they can be as successful as possible. They just didn’t have the content they needed to prepare properly.

Sales reps need content to effectively engage potential customers and close sales. But not just any content will do. They need content that responds directly to the needs, challenges, and preferences of potential customers. And they need to be able to access the most current versions when they need it.

To do

Take the first step toward Sales and Marketing alignment and speak directly to sales reps. Work to clearly understand the challenges they face throughout the sales process. Ask them about the gaps they see in your marketing content. Try to understand how they need to access content and when and where they need it most. Try to find out what marketing support has worked and what has not, and why. Listen to their feedback and list the ways you can best serve your sales reps.

One strategy I like to use is asking sales reps to write down the questions they frequently get from potential customers. Then use this list of frequently asked questions as a list of content that you can create to directly support sales reps the next time they encounter these types of inquiries.

The important takeaway here is that marketers can take the first step toward Sales and Marketing alignment by starting a simple conversation with sales reps. Ask them what they need and find a way to deliver it.

Reason n. # 2: lead overload

When sales and marketing are out of alignment, inefficiencies are likely to occur. As in the previous examples, Marketing is most likely generating leads that Sales will never touch. With the increasing adoption of marketing automation platforms and their ability to help marketers do more than ever, marketers are able to generate many leads. Cool. What’s not so great is when they just pass them on to sales.

Why is this such a big problem? When sales reps get more leads than they can physically follow, they get overwhelmed … and those leads get neglected. Here is an example:

Let’s say you’ve strived for a lead generation goal of 30 leads per rep per week. That sounds great! That is, until you realize that each rep typically has about two hours per week to follow up on leads, and each lead typically requires about 20 minutes of follow-up. Now you realize that each rep has the ability to follow up with only six leads each week. You’ve been working hard to send them 30.

Do you see the problem here? In this scenario, you would send them 24 more leads than they can physically handle. Each. Unique. Week.

What I thought was a great marketing success was actually overloading sales. And it was leading to neglected leads.

To do

As briefly mentioned in the previous example, one of the first steps in solving this problem is to speak with your sales reps and sales leadership directly to understand the realistic number of leads that each reps can make each week. Then adjust the number of leads you deliver accordingly.

This does not mean that you like trying to generate fewer leads. No way. Instead, it means you may need to nurture and qualify them better before handing them over to Sales.

More work for marketing? Maybe. But wouldn’t it be worth it if your work was actually used? By nurturing leads before you deliver them to Sales, you increase the chances that the leads you actually deliver will become customers.

On average, according to a Demand Generation Report, fed leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-fed leads. Additionally, companies that excel at lead development generate 50% more leads that are actually ready to sell. Even better, these leads produce a third of the cost of companies that aren’t so good at nurturing leads.

Spend some time getting a better understanding of sales and each rep’s ability to follow up on leads. Then refine your lead development process to improve quality and rethink the number of leads you deliver to sales.

Reason # 3: Revenue has been wasted

When sales reps spend time searching or creating content, this not only doubles marketing efforts, but also steers them away from important sales opportunities. And those wasted opportunities add up to wasted income, a lot of it.

Consider this: An IDC study found that by saving a single sales rep just 60 minutes of prep time each week, a business could realize additional income generation $ 300,000 or more by repetition! In a company with just 10 reps, that’s $ 3 million every year. If you have 100 reps, that’s a staggering $ 300 million per year.

If just 60 minutes of prep time can translate to $ 300,000 in revenue, imagine how much potential revenue is wasted in your organization as sales reps struggle to find the content they need.

To do

Clear clutter. As you work to build a better relationship with your sales reps and establish more frequent and meaningful communication, look for ways to reduce clutter – in both lives.

Very often technology can help here. There are apps available today to help manage content. Anything from Google Drive to Basecamp, Dropbox to Salesforce, any number of tools can serve as a virtual marketing library for your content. Each one is available anywhere and on any device with an internet connection, so sales reps should have no problem getting the content they need when they need it.

If you can commit to making only the latest versions of content available in this marketing library, ask your sales reps to commit as well. Ask them to retrieve these updated versions of content whenever they need it, rather than using outdated content stored elsewhere or creating their own.

Close the gap between Sales and Marketing. Contact Sales to better understand your challenges and needs. Work together to better serve your customers. Sure, it will improve your business and probably increase income, but it will also improve happiness in your workplace, and can you really put a price on that?

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