How to Create Synergy Between Sales and Marketing Teams

Enabling Bigger Sales Through Better Marketing

As we move through the first quarter of 2016, the predicted marketing trends from the end of 2015 are beginning to emerge.

In today’s hosts-only show, Randy and Chris explore Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Predictions for the State of Marketing in 2016, and discuss a key trend predicted by Matt Heinz and several other thought leaders: Sales enablement.

While many marketers throw away that term, claiming it doesn’t relate to them, Randy and Chris argue that it’s a huge part of a marketer’s responsibility.

Why, you ask? Well, with content marketing on the rise and so much content available, it’s the marketer’s job to ensure that the right content is given to the right customer at the right part of the funnel. That’s because content shock isn’t just a term that applies to consumers and marketers, but also to the sales reps using it to sell products and services. Randy and Chris suggest tools and resources that can make this easier for you.

At the end of the day, these two teams are closely linked, whether they like it or not. And when sales are low, marketers need to take a long hard look at those numbers and figure out where they contributed. Being a prolific content creator just makes it that much more imperative to support your work by backing up your sales team.

In This Episode:

• Why “micro-marketing” is a new requirement for the job
• How marketers can help your sales reps
• How to create and use an asset catalog to your advantage
• How to increase communication and transparency between your sales and marketing teams
• Creating and using best tools to help your sales reps
• How to effectively use multi-purpose content hubs

Quotes From This Episode:

“We’re sitting on tons and tons of assets. We have eBooks, analyst reports, presentations, videos, customer stories. It lives everywhere. The thing that we’re facing as a marketing team is that we can’t honestly expect someone to go through and piece together all the different things that should be in someone’s journey.” —@cnmoody

“People are mystified when you say sales enablement. I think we like to say, ‘That’s not our responsibility.’ But with the creation of all this content does come great responsibility. We can’t just expect people to find it. I always like to say this isn’t ‘Field of Dreams’. You can build something amazing. It doesn’t mean that people will just automatically come.” —@cnmoody

“Marketing still needs to set that tone. They need to ensure they’re creating the right journeys and helping guide the sales people to find the right assets at the right time.” —@randyfrisch

“I’ve seen reps say, ‘I know there’s this eBook that exists. I’m going to search for it via the Google search at Google.com.’ They’re searching what Google has indexed. Google is indexing over time. It’s not indexing what’s relevant today—what the marketing team has blessed to be the most important or successful asset today. They’re simply saying, ‘Here’s stuff that’s ranked really high in the past.’ I just think that’s a really scary way given all the effort we’re trying to put in as a marketing team.” —@randyfrisch

Resources:

• Oracle’s The Future of Modern Marketing: 2016
• Jive Collaboration Solutions
• Box Collaboration Tool
• Uberflip’s Email Embedding Tool: Shout
• Enterprise Sales Tool: Outreach

What do marketers and sales reps have in common?

Having both already answered the question of what they wanted to be as children, Randy closes with an insightful thought about the personal journeys of marketers and sales people alike.

“The reality is that anyone in marketing has a bit of sales inside of them. (highlight to tweet) Maybe we don’t want to be the people on the phone dealing with the customer and dealing with the contract, but we all get excited about getting to that close, getting someone so excited about content or an advertisement or whatever it is that got us into this marketing world in the first place. It was the idea that we can use great messaging, great ideas to get people over the line or to get them more engaged and wanting to see more.”

One can’t exist without the other; it’s all about enabling each other to succeed!