6 Mind-blowing Gaps Between Sales and Marketing
At the end of the day, the ultimate goal of both sales and marketing is pretty similar – drive revenue. But more often than not there are large disconnects between the two groups.
Marketing departments face an ever expanding task list. They are required to be part product expert, creative designer, content writer, data scientist, procurement specialist and general fire fighter. Sales teams also face a broad range of challenges; crowded marketplaces, complex products, rapid market changes, to list a few.
In today’s competitive and rapidly changing environment it’s more important than ever to ensure Sales and Marketing are marching to the same tune. Marketing needs to have the ability to rapidly adjust the message. Sales needs to have the tools to rapidly receive the new message.
Most importantly
Marketers need to be able to focus on marketing, not logistics or fielding manual requests.
Sales need to be able to focus on sales, not chasing down and personalizing materials.
75% of marketing assets are never used because they can be found, are in the wrong format, or are too difficult to customize. What this means. It means low productivity, lots of frustration and inability to reach out to prospects and customers with the marketing communication materials sales agents need.
Let’s take this same issue and apply it to a company with a sales force of 500 agents. What happens when 75% of the marketing assets your marketing team spent so much time to create cannot be accessed by sales agents? Sales will follow up regardless, only using their own generated marketing materials. We now sales agents are not graphic designers, meaning these marketing communication assets will probably not comply with corporate brand standards and only hurt the brand.
26% of business buyers said their sales reps were unprepared for the initial sales meeting. This is directly tied to the inability to find the marketing communication materials they need. Let’s say a company just lunched a new product and it is up to sales and marketing to make it a hit. Marketing gets right on it and spends months on copy, design and sales materials, but sales cannot find these materials and effectively communicate the features and benefits of the product during sales meetings.
41% of marketing materials request are done manually. Think of 500 sales agents manually placing orders via email or phone. Whether they need polos, shirts, mugs, pens or new business cards, consolidating these orders, submitting them into different systems supplied by multiple vendors and suppliers and tracking progress and location can take much time away from your marketing or purchasing team.
The Solution
Sales agents or affiliates should be able to easily locate the marketing assets they need, personalize them and retrieve them in the format they need. As you suspected, the solutions to this problem comes in the shape of a cloud (software). Marketing Asset management solutions allow small and large marketing inventories to be uploaded to an online marketing storefront where anyone with granted access can log in and find the marketing assets they need.
These so called Marketing Portals feature powerful personalization engines. Sales agents can easily personalize assets with custom messages, images, urls, QR codes, while marketing controls what creative elements can be modified and which ones stay locked.
Do you use different vendors and suppliers to fulfill demand? Whether a sales agent simply orders a set of pens or also need polos, shirts, stress balls and mugs for the next trade show, marketing portals handle and track the order as a single order regardless of how many producers are involved to fulfill the order.
Can you track what market assets perform better and which ones need to be discontinued? Can you track costs across inventory? If you don’t have a centralized solution, you probably cannot see what assets perform better where and what it is costing you. And if you do, your probably are spending hours in excel. Good luck.
