The rift between sales and marketing is one that has been long standing in the B2B world. As someone fairly new to the B2B marketing space, I’ve come to find that despite this “rift”, some of my greatest learnings thus far have in fact come from across the pond.
My message is this: there is a lot of untapped knowledge living amongst your sales team. Take advantage. By doing so, here are three things you can learn:
1. The pain points of your target audience (personas)
Sure, you’ve done your research and built out your personas. But how can you validate these or build upon them? Your Sales and SDR teams are a great place to start.
Sit in on qual calls and demos with prospects who are relevant to your personas. You will get real time feedback on what issues they are having, and specifically how you can position and talk about your product in a way that better serves them.
In turn, you will also effectively help sales get better at its job; account execs and SDRs can strengthen their ability to get to know prospects better by building a more complete understanding of who they are speaking with, based on marketing’s personas and the knowledge you share with them.
2. The types of content to be creating for all buyer journey stages
Schedule bi-weekly or monthly meetings with both account execs and SDRs to check in on what pieces of content seem to be resonating with prospects. Not only will you have a better handle on the types of content and topics to be producing, but also the when and where the context works best, and with whom during the selling cycle.
3. How to get better at the handoff between marketing and sales
Knowing when to pass a marketing-qualified lead to sales has become somewhat of a science by now, but communication across departments can increase this success, and a huge part of this communication should be marketing data.
Sharing marketing data with your sales team regularly will help to provide more clarity in the handoff between departments. With so much at your fingertips though, what data should you share?
Take a look at The Top 5 Reports Your Sales Team Wants from Marketing, a great starting point for what marketing data and reports you should be sharing with sales.
