By Chanin Ballance, CEO, MobilePaks
Savvy marketers recognize that generating leads and nurturing prospects through the funnel is no longer enough. Often sales teams need nurturing too – or at least support with scripts, questions to spark dialogue, position statements, playbooks and customer facing content. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, the No. 1 reason companies don’t hit their sales quota is because salespeople don’t know how to articulate value. This means, marketers need to be enabling “reps with the knowledge and assets required for better conversations.”
By Chanin Ballance, CEO, MobilePaks
Savvy marketers recognize that generating leads and nurturing prospects through the funnel is no longer enough. Often sales teams need nurturing too – or at least support with scripts, questions to spark dialogue, position statements, playbooks and customer facing content. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, the No. 1 reason companies don’t hit their sales quota is because salespeople don’t know how to articulate value. This means, marketers need to be enabling “reps with the knowledge and assets required for better conversations.”
Stop Playing Hide and Seek with Content
It’s not that marketers aren’t producing great content. On the contrary, sellers often have access to pretty awesome content, but just don’t know how to find it or use it. Because marketers are not traditionally trained to develop content for sales enablement, they tend to focus on creating customer collateral such as PPTs, whitepapers, PDF guides and datasheets. Unfortunately, such content may be difficult for sellers to quickly absorb, find the key messages to focus on, and/or apply in a real prospect conversation. In fact, SiriusDecisions reports that up to 70% of marketing content is never used by sales.
Furthermore, IDC research tells us sales people spend an average of seven hours a week searching for content and reference material. Marketers need to help sales people search less and find more by centralizing and maintaining one reliable source that’s easy to access both in the office and on the road through a tablet, smartphone or CRM.
Make it Memorable
Likewise, the content needs to be developed in a way that sales reps can digest, remember and apply. So, what does this look like? Playbooks and sales battlecards are essential, but they tend to be massive documents that reps won’t read. Instead, marketers should break this information into short interactive bites of knowledge that are easy to digest and retain. When possible, it is a good idea to use audio and video, as well as knowledge checks, to boost engagement. In addition, in case they do forget, making sure this information is searchable and accessible from any device allows reps to easily find the exact right information at the exact right time.
Measure Sales Use As Well As Customer Interaction
While most marketers are obsessed with metrics such as email click-through rates and organic lead generation, they often have very little insight into what content the sales team is using and how well it’s working. In order to ensure that the material they are creating is helpful, they need visibility into what content sales reps are accessing, how they are using it and if it is effective.
Luckily, there are a growing number of new tools on the market helping marketers to design great content for sellers, as well as manage it and gain visibility into use and value. A few of the leading products already integrate with CRMs and Marketing Automation Systems for better lead management. This way data is funneled back to the marketing automation tool and contributes to the lead score so marketing leaders can track sales and prospect engagement to determine the best return on sales collateral support. This enables marketing managers to better predict which leads will convert because they will be able to see which pieces are resonating with sellers and prospects.
Keep it Central
That said, the marketing team is typically already struggling to keep up with their content creation goals and often turning to external sources in order to support their initiatives. So, the solution needs to simplify the process for them as well. For example, MobilePaks enables marketers with a single cloud-based location to store content centrally and syncs with other repositories, so that changes made to a Pak are automatically reflected everywhere that Pak is viewed, including CRMs such as Salesforce. This helps to ensure that sellers have access to marketing collateral that is up-to-date and on-message.
Marketing teams are using more sophisticated tools and techniques to generate, qualify and nurture leads before they hand them off to sales to close the deal. But marketing’s involvement shouldn’t end there. In order to help sales convert these precious opportunities into customers, they need to empower sellers with the right content at the right time.
Chanin Ballance is CEO at MobilePaks. She frequently writes and speaks about learning, mobile engagement, sales enablement solutions, and more.
