by Gail Gardner
Republished from Forbes, February 18, 2017
In most businesses, there’s a huge disconnect between sales and marketing. Because sales teams usually exist as an island, content marketing teams have no way to influence sales. And then apart from sending leads to the conversion funnel, marketing never knows what happens to those leads once they’re sent.
It’s a sad trend because the two teams—content marketing and sales—are actually more powerful together. Sharing marketing perspective with sales can unlock breakthrough profits for your company.
Content is, by its very nature, the foundation of your company. It provides information, breaks down difficult concepts, and helps better prepare your sales team for the task of selling to your audience.
Your sales team, on the other hand, can provide the most powerful insights into your audience. Talking to potential buyers on a daily basis, your salespeople know your target customers best; they can help direct your content marketing strategy by sharing what they know about your customers.
Here are three ways your content marketing and sales teams can boost each other’s growth.
1. Let Your Content and Sales Teams Collaborate on Brand Uniformity Guide Creation
There is nothing worse for a brand than a sales team that doesn’t understand the status quo for a brand’s messaging and goals, yet it happens all the time. A salesperson can become very single-minded, only thinking of his or her numbers and commissions, and seeing sales as a personal mission.
That is not how it should be. Each individual’s actions affect the entire business. Brand uniformity increases lead generation and conversions. It ensures that once a potential customer is in the conversion funnel, they will feel safe and confident to move forward.
In more practical situations, brand uniformity means that your leads will feel less inclined to hang up on you when they hear your company name. We also want leads to be less likely to delete an email with your company name in the “From” field.
Encourage your content team to create a brand identity guide for the whole company to use. Use your business plan to develop your brand identity guide and then share them both with your entire team.
What is a brand identity guide?
The brand identity guide should include your logo, brand colors, tagline, company mission, and values. Don’t forget any keywords (including words that should be banned when discussing your company with potential or current clients). Some essential keywords to include in the identity guide are:
- Exact words that describe your products and services, both internally and in public. (Too often internal product and service names go public, creating confusion.)
- Industry terms to use and to ban. (If you were to sell marketing services, for example, terms to ban would be “directory submission,” “search engine submission,” and other outdated terms that could signal to a client that your company might not be quite up-to-date with the industry.)
- Best terms to describe your company’s value proposition. (What makes your company better than your competitors? What makes your offering unique?)
Examples of brand identity/brand uniformity guides
For a good example of a comprehensive brand uniformity guide, review this document [pdf]. It is primarily about visual branding, but it also tackles writing and positioning as well as communication guidelines.
New York University has a more advanced guide. It includes document templates, wording samples—everything needed to represent the NYU brand. Even small businesses should develop this type of guide and adhere to it in all marketing materials and communications.
Remember to include social media and visual brand guidelines. The SlideShare “Visual Brand Guidelines to Manage Social Media Accounts” from Origzo provides tips.
Get input from your sales and customer service teams
Make your sales and customer service teams part of the guide by allowing salespeople to contribute their ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. This makes perfect sense since both teams are on the front line of customer interaction.
Sales actually talks to real people every day, discussing their needs, struggles, and choices. They know which sales-triggering words usually work best and the ones that could scare customers away. Their contribution can make your guide much more effective and useful.
Your marketing team will benefit from the guide as well. Consistency will grow brand trust and loyalty, and hence will make communicating with future customers much easier. It’s always easier to convert prospects into customers when there’s a solid brand behind the pitch.
Use webinars and Slack to enable collaboration
Webinars can bring your sales and marketing teams together to brainstorm ideas. Use these tips for effective webinar demonstrations as a guide to developing presentations for the teams so they start out on the same page. Then have them share their ideas live on camera.
Try using Slack for more effective collaboration. Unlike standard team management tools, Slack promotes the atmosphere of friendly discussion. There are no tickets and deadlines, but it can actually help your teams to get to know each other better and come up with more creative ideas. Slack also has desktop alerts and mobile apps so you can communicate with your teams instantly.
2. Give Your Sales Team Something to Look At: Using Content Marketing Materials in Sales
Your content marketing team likely has plenty of materials that can help your sales team close more deals. The key is to encourage knowledge and content exchange between the two teams. Have one central location where materials can be accessed. Using one of these project management solutions is a great way to get started; read the post to determine which solution would be most effective for your business.
Customers like to have a steady view of the brands they are considering, and their impressions come from the marketing materials they have seen. Traditional advertising relies on this fact, and it is no less important in the digital age. Just because the medium has changed, it doesn’t mean the core strategy has.
Your sales team can customize their sales pitch by working off the base message that’s already been released and match the content to which customers have been exposed. Instead of creating a new message from scratch, which can potentially taint or confuse that message, the sales message will stay consistent with your brand. Doing this ultimately makes the sales team’s job easier too. Having a launching point already in place is half the job.
Marketing perspective case study examples
When the sales team for one of my collaborator’s clients began using promotional and marketing content in their sales pitches, things changed in a big way. Their networking emails featured videos that had been released on the company’s YouTube channel, and linked to blog posts containing visual marketing images they had created.
Their click-through rates went through the roof and the number of responses they received noticeably increased. They also saw improvement in engagement, which clearly demonstrated how important content can be in sales, even in a direct manner.
This strategy allowed the sales team to directly connect to the expertise held by the marketing team, which had a clearer view of the brand message. The authority of the sales team grew in the eyes of the customers and that led to greater trust.
Create an internal communications channel
Setting up a regular internal newsletter is one of the best things you can do to keep your sales team informed. Try these ideas on how to keep your teams connected. Consider using internal quizzes, surveys, and desktop tickers and alerts. Create a mobile channel to plug your team into internal communications.
Since your sales team is involved in customer interaction and knows your audience best, encourage them to share content ideas and feedback. Pick their brains to get some content assets created. Be sure to include how-to videos, an on-site FAQ, an industry glossary, and especially case studies showing the effectiveness of your products or services.
3. Make Your Sales Team Part of Your Keyword Research Process
Keyword research is an integral part of content marketing, so it’s something your marketing team cannot do without. But has it occurred to you that it’s also an effective tool to increase your sales?
Think about it—keyword research makes it possible to see:
- What exactly your potential customers are searching for
- Which questions they need answered
- What struggles they come across when looking for related products or services
The problem is that keyword research can be quite overwhelming. Your content team is likely to come across hundreds of new phrases monthly. Your sales team can hardly afford the time to join your content marketing experts on this journey.
Keyword research collaboration tool
The key is to use a good tool to organize the process. Serpstat is a great marketing collaboration tool with a very powerful keyword research component. You can create projects and sort through keyword sets. Add a salesperson to the project, and they can see exactly what you want to share with them.
Your sales team can help your content department expand their keyword list by providing input such as:
- Questions they get asked on a regular basis
- Concepts that tend to puzzle your audience
As with content ideas, your sales team is likely to provide some invaluable input into the interests and struggles of your audience. A well-equipped sales team is the first step to boosting your company sales. It’s the low-hanging fruit, too, because you already have a lot of the marketing materials developed.
All you need to do is to encourage knowledge and content sharing within your company and provide solutions to make it faster and easier. Hopefully, the above tips will help you start the process of giving your sales team access to the marketing perspective of your company.
People Who Serve More Sell More
Still not quite clear on how to integrate sales and marketing? This excellent video presentation explains the future of sales and marketing, and how companies need to be positioned: