4 Ways Marketing Teams Can Help Salespeople Crush Quota

‍The success of any business largely depends on the ability of sales and marketing teams to work together effectively. This connection must be deeper than the marketing department providing sales reps with brochures and PDF attachments. Marketing can help sales reps understand their target market and ideal customer profile. They can also provide insights into the buyer’s journey. In this article, we will discuss four ways that marketing teams can support salespeople to achieve their goals.

The growth potential is immense when sales and marketing are aligned on strategic goals. However, many companies struggle to maximize marketing efforts by not coordinating the campaigns. A segmented relationship between sales and marketing creates inefficiencies that cost companies millions in lost revenue. Fortunately, there are several ways that marketing teams can support salespeople and help them to achieve the company’s sales objectives.

Market Research and Ideal Customer Profiles

Often, sales reps are tasked with winning business in a specific vertical. They are given a broad audience to sell to, like enterprise IT directors at software firms. Marketing departments have detailed data that, if shared with sales, would provide valuable insights for winning new business. The marketing department can help sales reps understand their ideal customers by providing them with data on their best customers. This data can include information on these customers’ demographics, needs, pain points, and buying habits.

Marketing departments can also create customer personas, fictionalized representations of the ideal customer, to help sales reps understand their target audience’s characteristics, goals, and motivations. These personas can guide the sales reps in their communication and sales strategies, helping them better connect with and advise their potential customers.

This level of detail is more than providing sales reps with marketing materials, such as brochures, presentations, and social media posts. Marketing collateral is fine for generating interest and highlighting the benefits of the product or service. However, the more detailed the data, the more it’ll help sales reps better understand how to effectively communicate the value of what they are selling to their target audience.

When marketing departments share detailed data with their sales team, sales reps can gain a deeper understanding of their ideal customer and develop more effective sales strategies. This detailed data will be a catalyst as to “why” customers should move forward in the sales cycle, not just “how” to move them forward. We’ve worked with companies in the past that provide leads to their sales team, but the reps do not fully understand the trigger events that will turn a lead into an SQL.

Prevent Content From Being Siloed

Marketing departments are pumping out new content every day. Often, sales reps need help understanding the best way to deploy the content. Typically, sales reps use a new piece of content, fail to achieve an immediate result, and then forget about it. This leads to the content being forgotten in the content library with all the other disregarded marketing collateral. Marketing departments can prevent content from being siloed and never used by salespeople by taking the following steps:

1. Align content with the sales process: Marketing departments should create content that aligns with the sales process and addresses the needs and concerns of potential customers at each stage of the sales process. This will help ensure that the content is relevant and valuable to salespeople.
2. Make content easy to access and share: Marketing departments should make content easy to access and share by using a content management system (CMS) or similar sales enablement platform. This will help ensure that salespeople can easily find and share the content they need.
3. Provide training and support: Marketing departments should provide salespeople with training and support on how to use and share content effectively. This can include training on how to use the platform and tips on how to customize and personalize content for different audiences.
4. Encourage the use of content: Marketing departments should encourage salespeople to use content in their sales efforts and provide them with the tools and resources they need to do so. This can include providing salespeople with access to a library of pre-written content or templates they can use to create their own materials.

By following these steps, marketing departments can help ensure that salespeople use marketing content effectively to support their sales efforts and drive results.

Marketing Should Have a Lead Quota

Sales success is a function of the number of opportunities generated and the closing ratio. The more leads each sales rep has to work, the more sales they can deliver. Yet, many marketing departments do not have a lead quota. Marketing departments should have a lead quota for several reasons. Let’s explore.

One reason is to ensure that the marketing team is generating a sufficient number of leads to support the sales team and meet the organization’s overall revenue goals. Marketing is a broad category and, therefore, can have a broad definition of measuring success. I’ve been in meetings where the conversation was around impressions, views, and clicks. When I asked, “How many leads did we generate?” The reply was, “The campaign was designed to build awareness.” Awareness is great and certainly serves a purpose, but ultimately sales reps need leads.

A lead quota can also help marketing departments track their progress and measure the effectiveness of their lead-generation efforts. As someone leading an organization, I have no problem approving a request for a marketing budget when I’m shown how effective the last campaign was at generating leads for the sales team.

Having a lead quota can help marketing departments prioritize their efforts and allocate resources toward activities that are most likely to generate leads. For example, if the marketing team has a lead quota of 100 leads per month, they may prioritize activities such as email marketing campaigns, social media advertising, and content marketing efforts that are known to be effective at generating leads.

The lead quota will help motivate the marketing team to focus on lead generation and drive results. On the other hand, they may de-prioritize activities with a lower likelihood of generating leads, such as trade show attendance or sponsorships. Overall, having a lead quota for marketing ensures the team is meeting its metrics and helping the sales team meet its sales quota.

Create User-Friendly Systems

There have been times while working with a new client where I feel sorry for the sales reps. I feel like asking, “Did you create the most complicated process on purpose?” Of course, I never do, but there are so many steps the sales reps must follow it turns selling into an administrative role. Sales reps like simple.

There are several ways that a marketing team can create user-friendly systems for the sales team:

1. Identify the needs and goals of the sales team: The first step in creating user-friendly systems is to understand the needs and goals of the sales team. This involves working closely with the sales team to understand their daily tasks, challenges, and the minimum number of tools they use to do their job.
2. Choose the right tools: Once you understand the sales team’s needs, you can choose the right tools to help them be more productive and efficient. This could include customer relationship management (CRM) software that integrates with the sales enablement tools. Software fatigue is real, and more is not always better.
3. Provide training and support: It’s vital to ensure that the sales team is comfortable using the new tools and systems you’ve implemented. Provide training and ongoing support to help them get up to speed and feel confident using the latest tools.
4. Regularly review and update the systems: As the needs of the sales team change over time, it’s essential to periodically review and update the strategies you’ve put in place. This could involve adding new features, integrating with other tools, or making other changes to ensure that the systems remain user-friendly and practical.

Overall, the key to creating user-friendly systems for the sales team is to work closely with them to understand their needs and to regularly review and update the systems to ensure they are meeting the team’s needs.

Conclusion

Marketing and sales teams are two critical functions within every organization. When these two departments are working efficiently and effectively, they have a significant impact on profitability. However, to achieve their goals, both teams must work collaboratively. Fortunately, when marketing shares data, ensures collateral is used properly, meets their marketing lead quota, and creates user-friendly systems, sales success is not just possible—it is guaranteed.

How to Optimize Your Cold Calling Strategy Beyond Words: How Your Voice Can Make or Break Sales Success