getting sales what they need without going insane
Hello my dear friends,
It’s been a bit! A reminder: new cadence for Catch All is every other week. Weekly is… a lot and I commend those who can maintain a weekly newsletter along with *gestures at surroundings*
Here’s a brief outline of today’s edition:
- the content battle between marketing and sales
- specific tactics and systems marketing can implement
- how the teams can work together to prevent burnout and frustration
Breaking down the dynamic between marketing and sales
If your marketing team is small, then it’s likely your sales team is a similar size, if not a little larger. A huge challenge here is availability to create content.
Marketing has a hard enough time creating content across websites, blogs, social, email, paid media, and so much more, that it is very easy for sales to be ill-equipped with content when working a deal.
At minimum, marketing content should proactively answer questions your prospects will inevitably have. And that’s like 50% of sales’ job: navigating questions and providing strong answers that drive towards a closed won deal. So without the content, sales’ job becomes much harder.
If they don’t have the content they need, you know what happens? A few things:
Marketing gets frustrated because they get pulled away from existing projects
Sales gets frustrated because their job is harder now which means less revenue (which means less commission)
They ask marketing and say it needs to get done asap. And because it’s coming from sales, the common startup culture is that all priorities must be dropped to help drive revenue.
Nothing is worse than getting a request that sounds like this joker
Quick side rant on all this:
We’ve all heard the same thing in a startup: “Leads must be generated and revenue must be realized… yesterday.”
This is incredibly challenging to navigate, especially in B2B where 95% of buyers just aren’t in the buying phase for your product.
Hopefully you’re in an organization that shares common goals and ownership over traffic, leads, and revenue is shared when possible. Because those 2 directives - leads and associated revenue - are often targeted at marketing leaders, regardless of company size and there’s a lot of confusion as to who should responsible
(I talk about this in regards to ABM on twitter and in a past edition)
What many non-marketing startup leaders do not understand is marketing is not going to solve every single problem sales is facing. And it’s critical everyone understands and believes that, no matter how obvious it may seem.
Marketing still has their own goals. Consistency is so critical to accomplishing those goals. Getting roped into every sales request to satisfy 1 warm prospect is not sustainable, even if it helps the company meet their monthly target.
(rant over)
All that being said, there are tactics marketers can do to satisfy both their own growth needs, as well as sales. This works especially well in small teams where you can only dedicate so much time to a piece of content.
Repurposing content is critical for any small marketing team and so many companies don’t take this additional step to give sales what they need AND keep content aligned across both teams.
Repackage your marketing content for sales.
And I don’t mean taking your existing marketing content and changing the design, copy, format so it works for a sales team and how they communicate. Give them the exact same blog, video, or case study you created and tell them where to use it. And make sure they read it.
A few examples:
Your blog post covering top trends in your industry is great content to begin outbound campaigns from your SDRs
That product video built for your website is a wonderful attachment to your rep’s email to a warm lead before a demo
The case study you finally sold to leadership is all done. Make sure sales is adding it to all relevant post-demo or proposal emails
By placing your marketing content more directly into the sales funnel, you accomplish a few things:
Ensure your content strategy and cadence is in lock-step with sales. Even if you don’t have a long-term content plan, this makes sure everyone is not running off in different directions and marketing is controlling the overarching direction.
Get better insights on how your content is performing. Views and downloads are all great to know but by bringing sales into it, you can create feedback loops on what content is getting replies or clicks. Many marketing and sales platforms will also feature analytics on documents sent to prospects. (This is also why I think SDRs should almost always fall under marketing but that’s another day…)
Mitigate those “asap” requests from sales. If you are consistently creating assets for your own efforts, then sales should be benefitting. They will likely come to you with new ideas but at the very minimum, they understand there is a consistent flow of content coming they can use and should be able to make it work. Frustration happens when little is shared across marketing and sales. If sales is not reaping the benefits, they are likely to be more critical when their request gets denied or delayed.
My friend and fellow fantasy football competitor Bridget said it very well…
Repurpose. Reuse. Recycle. And I realize now these are synonyms.
At the end of the day, sales is gonna be sales and tweak things to how they want. And that’s usually okay! They should have ownership over their work because they are hunting down prospects and trying to rack up commission. And by equipping them with the same content you are already promoting, everyone wins.
Additionally, the inverse of this approach is almost always a good move in my experience. If sales needs a brand new asset like a competitor breakdown sheet or something, that is marketing content too. Post that on your website, bake it into nurture sequences for high-value, warm leads, etc. etc. All goes back to finding those overlaps Bridget mentioned.
What else can sales and marketing do to prevent burnout and frustration?
This doesn’t just apply to content production but here’s a few tips based on very real experiences.
Marketing should be prepared for these requests from sales. They WILL happen.
Meet with sales regularly, without non-marketing or non-sales leadership, to discuss KPIs, content ideas, feedback from prospects/clients, etc. Sales is a goldmine for insights that enable marketing.
Establish Service Level Agreements between the two teams. These can be used for a variety of things like growth experiments, sharing responsibility on KPIs, and even content production. For example, if sales brings X number of content needs, Marketing is responsible for executing on Y of them.
Note: this shouldn’t be “content for content’s sake”, each idea should be evaluated for relevancy, effectiveness, and repurposeability (that’s definitely a word) across the entire funnel.
That’s it for this edition! Hope you liked it. And if you work in sales and you were offended, I’m sorry (sorta). Teams have to work together and that means understanding each other!
See ya in 2 weeks.
-Connor