7 Easy Things Marketers Could Do To Align and Enable Sales 

Hey you, hotshot marketer, ever wondered how easy life could be if all your marketing prowess converts into profitable sales pitches? Or even better, into conversions? Ah, wouldn’t that be bliss?

 

But that’s not how things work right? Your content gets lost, it does not convert or worse, no one even knows what you did! Now where do you think all this goes downhill? Oh, it's the sales team, they did not do THE job. Typical! 

 

Now, wait. Take a hundred steps back. Did you ever pause to reflect how YOU, as a marketer, can align with and enable the sales team?

 

If YES, what follows is just for you!

 

If NO, then drop all that you are doing and read this NOW! 

 

Sales and marketing or rather Smarketing is one of the vital parameters that determine the growth of any organization. As the word suggests (read insists), it is ideal that both these teams function on some level as a single entity in order to achieve optimum results. But instead they work rather distantly from each other, as separate ‘departments’. 

 

What seems so simple is often the hardest to achieve!

 

What is sales and marketing alignment?

 

Sales and marketing alignment is the process of coordination between sales and marketing teams to achieve shared goals of revenue growth.

 

With the approach of ‘smarketing’, businesses can expect to improve their customer targeting and processes, and increase their product sales through team collaboration.
 

When this happens, sales enablement becomes second nature and it empowers them to act more productively. This alignment takes that leap and bridges the gaps. 

 

Importance of Marketing and Sales Alignment:

 

Sales Forecasting: Proper alignment makes sure that both teams work with the same data and goals, leading to more accurate predictions and planning.

 

Easy Lead Hand-offs: With ‘smarketing’, leads that are handed-off from marketing to sales have more potential and are more in-line with the sales team’s ideal candidate. This leads to better conversion rates and reduces friction.

 

Content Effectiveness: Marketing can receive direct feedback from sales on which types of content are most effective in closing deals, leading to more targeted and effective content strategies. -

 

Capitalizing on Missed Opportunities: Through alignment, both teams can capitalize on no opportunities being missed due to miscommunication or differing priorities.

 

Seamless Product Adoption: With sales providing feedback to marketing about customer needs and responses to their product, marketing can create targeted campaigns that address these points and improve product adoption rate.

 

Unused and Wasted Content: Alignment benefits marketing efforts and content as they are more likely to be used by sales. This ensures resources are not wasted.

 

No-more Blame Game: The on-going feud between sales and marketing would be permanently wiped out as both departments would share responsibility for successes and failures.

 

Faster Sales Cycle: A collaborative tactic would streamline processes and smooth out the sales funnel, reducing the time from lead generation to deal close.

 

Enhanced Customer Experience: With a unified approach, the business is able to maintain an enriching customer experience.

 

Measurable ROI: With there being shared goals and KPIs, the impact of marketing efforts on sales results is more measurable. Therefore, ROI can have precise measurements.
 

6 Simple Ways to align sales and marketing?

 

Setting Common Goals and Objectives: 

 

Both sales and marketing should have common goals that align with the overall business objectives. It's essential to organize joint planning sessions where decisions and next steps are collaboratively planned and agreed upon.

 

This approach reduces future conflicts and ensures a unified direction for the entire organization.

 

Analyzing customer retention patterns is a good starting point. By understanding what works effectively, both teams can work together to replicate successful strategies.

 

Furthermore, efforts should be directed towards building a customer experience that fosters meaningful conversations and enhances retention rates.

 

Develop shared KPIs and metrics that align with both teams' goals. This creates a culture of accountability, as both teams can work together towards common objectives and clearly see how their efforts contribute to the business’s success.

 

Using a Single Platform: 

 

Centralize all analytics and utilize a single channel platform, to enhance alignment.

 

Now there are several tools to achieve this but we'd personally recommend you to use a tool that would help you with the following features as these are the most sought after features that will be helpful in aligning your sales and marketing teams in one place It generates insights on content data automatically, such as analysis of content that effectively closes deals, generates leads, etc.

 

By serving as a central repository for content, these platforms nurture collaboration and reduce miscommunication.

 

By consolidating efforts within one platform, teams can synchronize their activities more effectively, facilitating seamless coordination and enhancing the overall customer experience. This unified approach minimizes redundancy, maximizes resource utilization, and promotes a unified brand image across all touchpoints, ultimately driving greater efficiency and effectiveness in achieving shared objectives.

 

Producing Better Content that Enables Sales:

 

You create this daily. It is your bread and butter. But, not all the content that gets churned out can help generate and close deals. It is more likely to become, well, useless, untouched or never even heard of. But, with the right strategy, you as a marketer can help bring change. 

 

Marketing teams should gather insights from the sales team about what content has been the most effective in converting potential clients through the sales funnel. This data can also be achieved directly through sales enablement platforms. 

 

Using this, marketing can create targeted content that relates to customer needs and enhances the overall client experience.

 

Define clear cut plans. Know your audience persona and make something that your GTM teams can proudly take to the market and confidently close the deal. Content has the power to speak, impress and close deals by itself. So get on with that now! 

 

Sharing of the Content:

 

Sharing content in this context includes making the content’s existence known, accessible, and further sharable.

 

Marketing will have created content both for their use and for the use of internal teams including sales, customer success, support, and even admin. It is crucial that these teams know that the content exists and be able to access and further share the content.

 

So by using a platform where the latest content is easily available, sales teams can spend more time selling and less time searching. Furthermore look for a platform that integrates with all channels of communication used by the internal teams. 

 

This will help bridge the gap between where the content is stored and where the content is shared. It will also make it easier for marketing to ensure that only the latest version of the content is available to share.

 
Tracking the content performance:

 

When you make mistakes, you learn. And with that said, analysing customer pain points from a sales perspective opens the window toward creating targeted content.

 

As a marketer, you rely on your ability to conduct in depth analysis and research. Channel this expertise into producing content that converts. 

 

And when you use Paperflite, you have the luxury of tracking your content.

 

When we say track, we mean track every square inch of how your content performed and how long was spent on it. When you have this, you are bestowed with this exclusive opportunity to know what’s working and you get better with every copy.

 

It is important to Boost the content that converts, reactivating cold leads, removing channels that don’t do well and revamping avenues that have less conversion rates ought to be your primary focus.

 

This will help sales teams get better with every pitch.

 

Catch Up! 

 

We’ve shown you the best of everything. Although there is one more thing that is most basic but most essential - just catching up! 

 

Get to know the team and bond over happy hours. This helps solve real time problems and eases ego clashes (we all know that’s something to work on). You get to know the person behind the name tag. 

 

Participate in demo sessions, get to know the attitude of your team while they are making a pitch. Study their shortcomings and create content that enables, supports and distinguishes them. Now, here lies your actual challenge. 

 

We’ve said so many things. You might know that these are vital but how can you actually know if these work? Because at Paperflite, we practise what we preach!

 

Best practices for aligning sales and marketing:

 

Encourage Open Communication: Regular meetings and open lines of communication between sales and marketing encourage transparency in strategies, goals, and feedback.

Invest in a Sales Enablement Platform: For centralized resources, making it easier for sales to find and utilize marketing materials effectively.

Agree on Lead Qualification Criteria: Foster an understanding of what qualifies a lead, ensuring marketing passes only high-quality leads to sales.

Regular Training Programs: Educate both teams on the latest product features, market research, and customer feedback for collaborative messaging and strategies.

Customer-Centric Approach: Both teams should focus on understanding and addressing customer needs for a seamless customer journey.

 

THE ROLES AND GOALS

When you fixate on roles, goals become singular. Sales takes care of sales and marketing takes care of marketing. Sales enablement gets lost. A marketer is futuristic while a sales rep is an opportunist. Both have the potential to conquer, only while together. 

 

Industry leaders are starting to believe that ‘sales enablement’ is THE golden rule to measure the success and performance of a business. 

 

Customers have started to go after an experience rather than just a sales pitch. When this competition toughens, you as a marketer have the power to create, distribute and share content that enables your sales team to sell - the experience. 
 

What can marketing do for sales?

 

Marketing is extremely crucial when it comes to the sales funnel. Initially, it is the marketing teams that interact with potential clients through various channels.

 

They do this via raising awareness and generating interest in their products or services. As the funnel advances, their interactions become indirect, supporting sales teams with valuable collaterals and market intelligence to help close deals.

 

Here’s a few standout points where marketing helps sales:

 

• Market Research: Marketing teams gather intel about the current market. They focus on identifying customer trends which would enable sales teams to refine their audience targeting. 
• Educate the Market: Marketing teams are also responsible for addressing pain points and highlighting the benefits of a product or service. With the right content marketing and outreach techniques, they’re able to educate the potential customer market beforehand.
• Provide Competitive Intelligence: Another benefit is supplying sales teams with competitive intel, such as battle cards. These are handy tools that help sales understand their competitor’s strategies, so that they can pan-out counter strategies.
• Content Creation: An essential service is producing sales collaterals like case studies, white papers, battle cards, and brochures, which are used by sales teams to implement persuasion strategies and close deals.
• Run Marketing Campaigns: From running targeted marketing campaigns to brand awareness drives, marketing teams indirectly support the sales funnel by generating leads with a turnover ratio.
• Qualifying Leads: Through effective marketing, only leads with potential are advanced to the next stage of the sales funnel. Hence, they act as a filter for uninterested leads and directly increase sales efficiency.
• Ideal Client Profiling: How would a sales funnel function without knowing what goes into it? Marketing teams map out an ideal client profile, which is a key step in any sales funnel. It redirects sales teams’ efforts towards the most promising prospects.

 

What does sales do for marketing?

Sales teams play a vital role in supporting marketing efforts, especially since their job lies near the middle and bottom of the sales funnel.

 

If the sales funnel is a human body and marketing is the head of that body, then the sales teams can be thought of as the arms and hands.

 

They are the ones who reach out to potential customers, grasp their attention, and pull them through the final stages of the sales process.

 

Working closely with the customers, sales teams gain firsthand information and insights, which in turn help in developing better marketing strategies.

 

Here’s a rundown of what sales does for marketing:

 

• Client Pain Points: Sales reps are responsible for connecting with the clients and etching out their personalized profiles by asking the relevant questions. This includes understanding their specific challenges and pain points, and sharing them with the marketing team so that they can tailor their content to directly address those concerns.
• Real-world Application of the Product: There’s no one better than Sales teams to understand the real-world applications of their product or service. They’re equipped with examples of practical scenarios which they pass on to marketing teams. With this information, marketing is able to develop relatable and accurate use cases, testimonials and success stories that attract customers on a personal level.
• Exploration of New Markets: Sales teams are the social butterflies of any organization, keeping this in mind, they interact with a wide variety of clients and prospects. They bring a whole different perspective as they can easily identify opportunities in new markets or applications of the product/service that the marketing team may not have considered. This allows expansion into new marketing demographics.
• Content Validation/Feedback: With extended reach into a customer’s preferences, another valuable operation is providing feedback on the effectiveness of marketing content and campaigns. Sales teams have access to the customer’s opinions on the success of marketing content, hence, they can contribute to refining and improving marketing materials.

In essence, the sales teams’ role in supporting marketing efforts is not just supportive but integral. Successful conversions by the sales team can lead to repeat customers and referrals, which in turn, feed back into the top of the sales funnel, creating a cyclical process that benefits the entire organization.
 

 

Best softwares that enable sales:

 

 

Paperflite: A real time end to end sales enablement and content management software that gives you analytics that matter, helps sales reps find exactly what they are looking for and provides quite literally everything your team needs to make conversions happen. 

• Content analytics and reporting: Offering statistics on each content piece's performance, aiding teams in understanding what resonates with prospects. - provides data including: views, shares, downloads, time spent, top content sharers, content that generates leads and closes deals.
• Prospect Involvement Insights: Monitoring prospect engagement, identifying hot leads, and enabling customized follow-up plans.
• CRM Integration for Revenue Insights: Integrated with a CRM, Paperflite provides insights into revenue generated by specific content, linking engagement to revenue outcomes.
• Smart Content Recommendations: Utilizing AI to suggest relevant materials based on prospect interactions and preferences, Paperflite ensures sales teams receive valuable guidance for enhancing their engagement strategies.
• Instant Access with Live Updates: Providing real-time updates, Paperflite ensures that sales teams can access the latest materials immediately. This feature guarantees teams always have up-to-date information, allowing prompt responses to prospect inquiries.
• Collaborative Content Creation: Facilitating collaborative content creation among team members, Paperflite promotes teamwork and leverages collective experience to produce high-quality content.
• Ai capabilities: SEEK Powered by Generative AI, Paperflite employs advanced algorithms to sift through diverse content formats, providing a comprehensive picture based on user queries. This AI-driven feature streamlines information retrieval, transforming how revenue teams find and utilize information in the sales enablement industry.
   

Pipedrive CRM:

 

An award winning software that will help you track real progress and is a cloud based CRM. It will help you recognise and capture unique opportunities, 

• Centralized platform: It provides a centralized platform for managing leads, contacts, and deals, enabling sales representatives to prioritize their efforts and focus on the most promising opportunities. 
• Customizable pipeline: PipeDrive offers customizable pipelines and workflows, allowing teams to tailor their sales processes to fit their specific needs and preferences. This flexibility ensures that sales strategies are aligned with organizational goals and objectives.  
• Automation: PipeDrive offers automation capabilities, such as email tracking and scheduling, which help sales professionals stay organized and maintain consistent communication with prospects. 
• Reporting: Furthermore, its reporting and analytics tools provide valuable insights into sales performance, allowing teams to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

 

Seismic:

A sales enablement software that helps you store, organise and edit lead capturing data. Helps teams access information instantly and enables them to target customer conversions. 

• Content Management and Personalization: Seismic offers a centralized platform where sales teams can access and customize relevant content for each stage of the buyer's journey. This includes a wide range of content types, such as presentations, documents, and videos.
• Analytics Capabilities: Seismic provides advanced analytics tools that allow sales leaders to track content performance and identify opportunities for optimization. These analytics include metrics such as engagement rates, content usage, and effectiveness in influencing deals.

 

HubSpot Sales Hub:

A powerful sales enablement CRM software that helps manage sales pipelines and shapes data into a single integrated platform. 

• Sales Automation: HubSpot Sales Hub automates repetitive tasks such as email sequencing and lead scoring, freeing up time for sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. Additionally, it offers automation for tasks like data entry and follow-up reminders.
• CRM Functionality: Sales Hub's CRM capabilities enable teams to track interactions with prospects, manage contacts, and forecast revenue more accurately. This includes features like contact and deal management, email integration, and customizable pipelines.

 

Just leaving this here

 

After you’ve read this, you are enabled as a marketer, thereby helping your sales team win the battle. When you are wondering if a software is something you need to get them there, reach out to our team at Paperflite and book that demo!