Sales and Marketing Alignment

B2B marketing consultant and author Pam Didner, and MarketMuse Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Coyle discuss how to connect the dots between sales and marketing. Discover how to identify marketing elements to use as part of the sales discussion and integrate marketing tools through account-based marketing.

How to Leverage Existing Marketing Elements to Support Sales

It all starts with creating an inventory of your existing content and then conducting an audit. There are multiple ways marketing can support sales through onboarding, sales training, and product-specific training. If marketing is working on a messaging framework, collaborating with sales operations makes the job that much easier. Marketing can also help new sales hires better understand and implement the company brand.

What Can Marketers Do to Understand Sales Better?

Getting salespeople to change their behavior is like searching for the Holy Grail. Depending on the initiative or the tools being launched, expect to see no more than a 50% success rate for behavioral change. However, offering a reward that aligns with behavioral change can work wonders.

How to Map Marketing Content to Sales Needs

Sales collateral takes diverse forms such as short one or two-page pieces, long-form content, and video. It’s content you use in communicating with your prospect to showcase your product and facilitate the buying decision.

Content marketing materials tend to be marketing-centric and not sales-oriented. However, there’s usually some cross-over of which sales can take advantage. Mapping that content to the various sales stages makes helps salespeople know that it’s available and how to use it.