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Why Marketing and Sales Need to Collaborate on Content Strategy

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    Marketing and sales tend not to have a reputation for collaboration—in terms of partnerships, the two are more likely to inspire comparison to King Kong and Godzilla.This is a big problem. Without a sales content strategy – a plan that targets leads through strategically segmented and valuable content throughout their entire decision-making process – your sales process simply can’t win.

    On top of that, there’s zero collaboration and communication between sales and marketing. If sales doesn’t give marketing visibility into what type of content is needed, marketing can’t create the content that makes a big impact with buyers. That leads to fewer sales wins.

    3 ways to differentiate

    The solution? A content strategy for sales and marketing together. The International Data Group estimates that when marketing content is not relevant to potential buyers, this disconnect reduces the vendor’s chance of closing a sale by 45%.

    Your marketing department needs to work with sales to understand what they need. They need to form one revenue team that proactively and collaboratively drives sales enablement. When sales and marketing capitalize on each other’s strengths, your marketing content is actually relevant to your buyers. It effectively guides them along the sales process.

    Successful sales and marketing content strategies streamline the process of planning marketing content, customizing it for individual buyers, and distributing it effectively. A simple marketing content strategy template isn’t going to get you success. What will get you success is a platform that takes all the resources and tools for selling and marketing and puts them in one easily accessible location.

    MarketScale’s analytics dashboard, along with its content distribution tools, empower B2B sales and marketing teams with the information, insight and technology they need to succeed.

    As you pursue data-driven decision-making for the future of your marketing initiatives, consider the following concepts as areas where MarketScale can help:

    • Measurement and comparison of cross-channel marketing, enabling marketers to optimize their investments
    • Content KPI, analyzing content engagement by format (Blog, Infographics, Podcasts, Video, Social) and category, product, etc.
    • Industry analysis, identifying booming (and latent) industry verticals for each product. With this data we often enable more profitable growth in markets untapped by competitors.
    • Identify End-of-Life (EOL) product on the downtrend. While these products are often profitable ‘last-man-out’ strategies, they can also be utilizing important marketing resources that could be allocated to more promising marketing investments
    • Key account identification, measuring engagement and reporting on website traffic at the company level
    • Salesforce CRM Integration (and other popular CRM) for activity reporting, sales KPI and financial metrics
    • Social Media listening integration for proactive response
    • Marketing automation and e-mail marketing integration for engagement statistics and more
    • Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) through more accurate demand forecasting, saving costs, lowering lead times and adding value through a more efficient supply chain

    With accurate data, a custom dashboard (some clients put it on a flat-screen TV in their office) and collaborative insights, you can ensure that you won’t have to navigate your competitive industry without the vision you need ever again.

    Learn more about how MarketScale can support collaboration between your sales and marketing teams.