July 16, 2018
There should be a clear link between your sales and marketing teams. They shouldn’t operate in silos and they absolutely shouldn’t have some kind of inexplicable vendetta against one another.
Thankfully, we now live in a world that offers collaboration tools that make it easier than ever for sales and marketing to get on perfectly.
Take the humble business website, for example. If you’ve selected the right content management system (CMS) for yours, both teams will be able to contribute to the content marketing effort, and that’ll make a huge difference to both team cohesion and the way in which you promote your brand.
Chances are, your marketing team will already be deeply invested in the website’s CMS, but the sales staff are probably less so.
Here’s how to get the latter engaged in one of your business’s most important tools.
Here’s a question for you: has your sales team ever seen your CMS? They might have been demonstrated it when you were going through the buying process, but that was probably the last time they laid eyes on it.
You know how powerful and how easy-to-use it is, but if you don’t share that power with other teams in the business, you won’t get enough value from your CMS.
Keeping the website updated and regularly publishing blog posts needs to be a company-wide effort if it’s to be sustainable and successful.
If the process you go through for brainstorming blog titles rarely leaves the marketing office, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Every week, schedule a meeting between sales and marketing with the sole goal of identifying new content ideas for the blog. Sales visits, calls or new wins might be all the inspiration you need to write a killer new post that will engage with your audience.
Better still, schedule one blog post each month to be written by the sales team, and use this meeting to brainstorm ideas. The more involved they are in the content marketing process, the more they’ll want to contribute wholesomely to your website.
As a salesperson, there’s nothing quite like receiving an amazing testimonial from a new customer whom you spent a significant amount of time acquiring.
Often, these testimonials take place over the phone or via brief email exchanges, and are consequently lost forever.
With a CMS that’s easy to use and add blog posts to, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to turn those testimonials into brilliant marketing assets, so remind your sales team they can do an awful lot more with the satisfying conversations they have with happy customers.
Buyer personas are vitally important when it comes to creating web content that talks to the right audience, but they’re too often developed entirely by the marketing team.
What’s more, buyer personas change as customer behaviour evolves, and it’s often the sales team that’s more likely to have first-hand experience of this.
Marketing and sales should work together regularly to review existing buyer personas and update them accordingly. From there, content for the website can be adjusted and re-tuned to the evolving customer and their buying journey; you’ll always be one step ahead, as a result.
By involving the sales team as much as possible in the content marketing effort, the money you invested in your content managed website will quickly deliver a very healthy return indeed.