How can marketing actually help salespeople?

You (a salesperson) don’t value marketing. Why?

Because marketing isn’t focused on the right things (they’re likely doing some of these things).

So what should marketing be focused on to earn your respect as a salesperson?

If you work for a B2B company with a complex sale, three things:

1. Sales-ready leads
2. Improving the sales process
3. Providing you sales enablement content

Sales-ready leads

This is what you want most from marketing, right? If so, here’s how you want to go about getting the value you want out of marketing.

Make sure you have the right resources in place

Sort of goes without saying, but if the capabilities aren’t there, you don’t stand a chance. Even with the right resources in place, this will be hard. You need marketing people in place that can:

1. Understand your complex solution
2. Empathize with your customer’s needs
3. Analyze data

Agree upon criteria for what’s considered a sales-ready lead.

Don’t dictate it. Don’t let them dictate it.  You both need to truly agree that the criteria is reasonable for both of you.

It can evolve over time, but you need a reference point to go back to in order to point fingers at the criteria, not at each other.

At the most basic level, a sales-ready lead generally (there are exceptions) meets these 3 basic criteria:

1. Appears to be a good fit for your company.
2. Has a need (could be large or small).
3. Has expressed interest in talking to someone from your company.

How to identify fit:

The answer “I know one when I see one” is a fine first reaction, but to get to the point of creating a marketing machine, you’ll need to articulate this in more detail. A good marketer can tease the necessary observable/find-able characteristics out of you. The most basic criteria might include:

1. Industry
2. Role
3. Company size
4. Geography

Beyond these basic characteristics, what else makes someone a good fit for you (from their perspective, not yours)? You’ll need to work together with marketing on pain points, concerns, etc. This will be helpful for content creation, which you’ll need to support.

What’s a need look like?

The most straight-forward and preferred version of this is an explicit statement by the potential customer of having a need that you can (likely) help with.

If that’s not achievable, in some cases you may start to defer to implied need based on behavioral data (eg. the potential customer viewed a particularly indicative article)  or situational information (eg. the company is going to be standing up a new manufacturing facility over the next year). This isn’t the preferred mechanism because the buyer psychology of an active request puts you in a way better position than you pushing yourself on them.

What does expressed interest look like?

Usually filling out a consultation form or specific interactions with a chatbot.

Again, if that’s not available, in some cases you may defer to implied interest based on behavioral data.

Be honest with yourself that this is a two-way street with marketing

What matters most to you is leads that meet the agreed upon criteria. What matters most to marketing after the lead gets handed to you is:

1. Response time – how quickly you follow-up (on first outreach) with a lead that has reached out with a need. Required response time is determined by customer expectations, not by you as a company. It’s likely to continue to shorten.
2. Follow-up – How well you follow up after the first outreach is important as well because you’re not necessarily the customer’s top priority.
3. Keeping the CRM up to date – the data you capture is useful not just for the current opportunity, but also:
   • for future opportunities
   • as a feedback mechanism into the marketing machine to generate new leads by helping influence where to invest more and where to cut.
   • See What data to capture in your CRM, and why.

Working together as a team – support marketing so that they can support you

Being on the front lines with direct interaction with the customer, you’re in a unique position to provide insight and knowledge for the marketing machine. Is marketing getting the support it needs from you for developing content and understanding customer needs? If you want sales-ready leads, marketing will need your time and attention. You should be working together as a team.

Helping sales improve/optimize the sales process

If done well, a marketing person can offer great feedback to sales to help improve the sales process.

Why?

Because a good marketer is a very good listener and extremely empathetic. That means they’ll really focus on both (1) the words and (2) the timing of what is said during the sales process. They also tend to have a longer-term view of sales.

Here are some ways marketing can help improve the sales process:

1. Identifying sticking points / inefficiencies throughout the stages of the sales process.
2. Improving the clarity of the messaging on your website to improve the quality of leads
3. Identifying and developing new content to generate more sales leads
4. Identifying and developing sales-enablement content that either supports the conversations you’re having over and over or reduces the number of those conversations you have to have.

Supporting sales with sales enablement content

Some content is great for engaging potential customers early on. Other content helps answer questions that support the sales process. The latter is sales enablement content.

It’s not always the most exciting content, but it’s useful for helping you do your sales job. It’s content you can point the potential customer to and either talk to during a conversation, or refer to in an email afterward. It can either help explain or validate.

Some example sales enablement content topics:

• Explaining how your company works with clients
• Contract types
• FAQ pages
• Case studies
• List of capabilities

See Digital marketing for sales support for more on this.

Next Steps

Think you’re ready for some changes to your marketing? You’re going to need to work together as a team, you’re going to want common goals, and you’re going to need someone to drive the bus to make improvements. Reach out and we can chat about how to get started on your journey.