How Your Marketing Team Can Help Sales Close More Deals Your marketing team can do a lot more than simply hand over qualified leads; they can provide your sales team with data and content that can help transform hesitant prospects into loyal customers.
By Jesse Davis
This story originally appeared on Salesforce
As a B2B marketer, my mission can be summed up in a single word: enablement. Perhaps it's because I began my own career as a sales rep, but as I see it, a marketer's job is to make it as easy as possible for salespeople to win deals. Sure, this process should begin with generating high-quality leads. But simply providing sales with leads -- even great leads -- is no longer enough.
If you want your sales team to grow revenue quickly, look to your company's marketers. They can do a lot more than simply hand over qualified leads. They can provide you with data and content that can help you transform hesitant prospects into loyal customers.
Related: This Is What Happens When Your Sales and Marketing Team Don't Mesh
Here are three crucial ways that your marketers can help you set new revenue records.
Provide content with context
Content sells. At the recent American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) Conference, it was reported that 82 percent of buyers viewed at least five pieces of content from winning vendors. Quality content should not just be used before handing leads off to sales. Content (e.g. blogs, ebooks and decks) can be used by sales reps to establish their expertise and shorten those notoriously long B2B sales cycles. But reps don't always know what content is available, or when it should be used.
There are a number of sales enablement tools that do nothing but push marketing content to sales reps, and there's always Salesforce Libraries, which exists right within the CRM. A much simpler but no less effective way is to create a dynamic document that not only catalogs available content, but explains how it can be used contextually in the sales process (segmented by prospects' role and buying stage). When my team prepares such docs, we also provide links in the document to Salesforce content, so reps can easily access the content they need.
Share lead scores with sales reps
At my first sales job, I used to come into the office in the morning and waste valuable sales time trying to decide who to call first. I know that this is still the reality for many sales reps. But if your marketers are using a marketing automation platform, they can provide reps with data that helps them prioritize leads in real time. That's just one more reason why adopting a marketing automation system is critical!
Related: You Can't Win Alone: 5 Tips on Building a Stellar Team
Marketing teams that have adopted marketing automation platforms often score leads based on important behaviors that signal a lead's degree of sales readiness. These lead scores can be stored in Salesforce and shared with reps in real time. The problem is that reps are often, through no fault of their own, clueless as to what these scores mean. Marketing and Sales should work together to define lead scoring metrics and establish how lead scores should impact reps' activities. For example, one way reps prioritize leads is by sorting lead lists in Salesforce by their Pardot score. They can then contact leads with scores that pass a determined threshold.
Create real-time alerts
I believe there are certain types of engagement that instantly qualify leads for contact with sales. However, according to CSO Insights, 44.6 percent of sales reps need help recognizing potential buying signals. Marketers can help by setting up alerts to help you know the right moments to reach out. I suggest that you work with marketers to identify a list of buyer activities that communicate sales-readiness. Possible activities might include filling out certain forms or downloading specific types of content.
As an example, if I was marketing for a company selling security software, I'd create an eBook called The Definitive Security Software Buyer's Guide aimed at prospects researching solutions. I would then set up real-time alerts so that salespeople would know the moment a lead downloaded this content so they could follow up as quickly as possible.
These are just a few ways our marketing team likes to help our sales reps sell more. So if you want your sales to soar this year, talk to your company's marketers about these and other ways they can help enable your reps to close more revenue than ever.
