There have been long-standing arguments about who the most “important” department in business really is. Is it the sales team, who essentially earns and drives revenue? Marketing, who helps create leads and grow brand awareness so that anyone is even familiar with your company? Customer service, who works as the face of the company and the voice of help when there’s a missed shipment or product malfunction? What about the IT and technology teams, who help administer and run all the technology related to running the business, including the website?
The truth is that the business only works when all of these teams work well. It works even better when the teams work together. One of the most important team alignments is sales and marketing. Sales depend on marketing to grow awareness of a product or service, as well as help customers, understand why it’s relevant to them, but without the actual communication and outreach from sales, B2B deals don’t get closed.
The best tools to Empower sales team? Content
Marketing work to empower sales by developing content for their sales teams to use further down the funnel to help grow credibility and industry knowledge. Giving your sales team the most relevant content to help them inform and conversate with customers empowers them with the assets they need to build better relationships with clients and empower sales.
Empower sales team by Creating more effective and quality content
Here are the top ways that marketing can create content and processes that enable a business to business sales teams and works to empower sales.
1. Communicate new content updates to sales
It’s not enough to create great content if your sales team doesn’t know that it exists. Don’t wait for someone in sales to wander over and ask about the billboard they saw on the drive-in. You should have regular meetings with your sales team to discuss everything your team working on, from new campaigns, new assets in the market, or newly published internal assets like instruction videos, whitepapers, or customer testimonials. Your content is much more effective when your sales team knows both its purpose and its availability.
2. Be able to answer the following questions
Content doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and while your team probably understands the context around it, your sales team might not. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful for them, though. During your content updates, try to give some idea around the why of each piece of content and be able to explain details like:
- Who was the content created for? Was it a sales ask? Is it part of a bigger campaign? Is there a particular account, audience, or persona that its meant to appeal to?
- What form does the content take? Video, infographic, radio ad, etc.?
- Where can sales find the content? Is it a thought leadership piece the CEO is posting on their professional blog or press release that can be shared via link? Is there a content repository where all assets live that everyone has access to? Remind teams about it.
- For bigger content launches – like podcasts, webinars, or ebooks – discuss both when it will be launched and what the overall goal of the content is. More information will empower sales teams. You don’t need to cover every detail for every blog post, but you should be able to quickly communicate the why behind most company content.
3. Improve your content library
To truly empower sales, you need to make sure your content is not just relevant to their accounts, but also accessible. Many companies organize their content libraries by type (whitepaper, blog, webinar, sell sheets, video, instruction sheet, testimonial) and others organize it by buyer persona or part of the marketing funnel. Make sure however you optimize your content library, it fits with the needs of your sales team – otherwise, your carefully created content will go to waste.
4. Perform content audits
Regular audits and assessments help you understand both what assets are missing from your content mix that could be beneficial to empower sales team, as well as help, identify the content that isn’t being used and understand why. Your audit should ask questions like:
- Can sales easily access the content you create?
- Is it tagged and organized in a relevant way that sales know and understands? tagged by persona, topic, industry, or stage of the funnel?
- Are there gaps in the content library that you can address? Ask your sales team what they need that they don’t have or how you can help them answer common customer concerns and questions so they feel more empowered as someone with answers and a solution.
5. Consider non-customer-facing content
One of the most overlooked content considerations is quality training content. While some sales leaders write and develop their own training and other businesses have a specific team that handles all the employee training, marketing shouldn’t be discounted from this process. Marketing teams (because they’re tasked with the development of customer-facing product-related marketing materials) can often help develop new product training material to help sales stay on top of their industry and product knowledge.
If you want to empower sales, you need to create the best possible content strategy. Content is an integral part of enabling sales to do their best work, as the content is the medium that works to communicate with and convince customers. Finding the best ways to distribute content to sales teams and creating the best content for them to use with their customers needs to be a priority of every marketing team.
