Bridging the Gap
Most marketing content falls short when it comes to generating actionable insights for the sales team. New research reveals ways to bridge the gap.
***BRIDGING THE GAP***
Most marketing content falls short when it comes to generating actionable insights for the sales team. New research reveals ways to bridge the gap
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How to leverage next-gen content and
data strategies to bridge the divide between
marketing and sales teams
SALES + MARKETING:
THE NEXT GREAT PARTNERSHIP
SALES + MARKETING:
THE NEXT GREAT PARTNERSHIP
In the history of great partnerships—Lennon and McCartney, Ben and Jerry, Han Solo and Chewbacca—unfortunately, “Sales and Marketing” have yet to have their moment.
Indeed, marketing and sales teams have a long history of being at slight odds with one another. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that two disciplines with completely different functions and expectations should struggle to find common ground. On the other, it does seem counterintuitive that two departments working toward the same revenue goals should find themselves struggling to collaborate.
While many have argued that this natural push and pull between the functions can often generate great outcomes (the idea being that the best ideas come from vigorous debate), recent research is showing that the tide might be changing for a legacy challenge that’s plagued most organizations.
According to LinkedIn’s 2019 State of Sales Report, top sales pros are 13% more likely to engage closely with marketing than in years past. Forty-four percent of sales executives work more closely with marketing than in years past. And those who work “very closely” or “closely” with marketing has grown 35% since 2016. The report’s key takeaway? “Marketing and sales orchestration closes deals.”
Sales teams in B2B are used to running the show”
Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of Turtl
“Sales teams in B2B are used to running the show,” says Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of content software company Turtl. “Historically, there has been limited collaboration and integration between marketing and sales, or with service functions for that matter. The digital evolution has led to the rise of low-touch purchasing and a shift of large swaths of the buyer journey away from sales. This has called for the roles of the different functions to be redefined.”
Key to this digital evolution, of course, is data. Thanks to an explosion of turn-key technology solutions now available to marketing teams of every stripe, marketers and sale teams can track and analyze their programs in real-time and most importantly, get a more objective view of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to nurturing and winning business.
What marketing team hasn’t spent hours on a piece of sales collateral only to have a sales rep decide to deconstruct it, add a page here or there and create their own version?”
Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of Turtl
“What marketing team hasn’t spent hours on a piece of sales collateral only to have a sales rep decide to deconstruct it, add a page here or there and create their own version?” says Mason. “By using data, both sides of the table now have the option to use engagement data to see which version of a document is more effective.”
Have you experienced a divide between sales and marketing teams in this way?
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While many marketing and sales teams are finally putting their boxing gloves down and putting their heads together in more collaborative ways, the perception of the marketing department as a group that’s not a key business driver can still hinder progress.
It’s one of the key reasons why Mason and his team at Turtl commissioned a Forrester Study to dig deeper into the role content and data can play in driving sales and creating a more collaborative relationship between sales and marketing departments.
The study, entitled “Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals,” offers some revealing insights into this perception challenge in B2B firms, and outlines key insights sales leaders are missing from their marketing colleagues, the most common gaps between marketing and sales priorities and how to deploy content marketing strategies that accelerate sales success and boost marketing’s profile. 1
Read the study 'Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals'
Among the study’s insights: historically, many B2B marketers miss the mark when it comes to creating campaigns that generate insights for their sales teams because of a few common pitfalls. Communication is at the top of the list.
“B2B marketers and salespeople don’t speak to each other enough,” Mason says. “They don’t jointly nail down what kind of campaign outcomes—including insights—are of greatest value to the business and for winning business. Marketing teams run campaigns that consequently focus on the wrong kind of data, like download counts, and fail to capture the sorts of insight that sales teams value the most, like buyer motivations.”
How can B2B marketing teams change the perception that they do play a central role in driving business for their sales teams? “Marketing can take a more strategic position within the business as a whole by owning customer insights and providing sales teams with information about buyers that improve the quality of the conversations had with prospects and consequently contribute to business wins,” says Mason. “A good place to start is working across functions to identify the types of insights that would be most valuable.”
The idea of driving business for sales may stoke the fires of unrest for some marketing organizations looking for a more collaborative culture, but ultimately, analyzing and then getting the most useful insights from their content campaigns not only delivers better sales leads, it raises the perception of the value the marketing team as an equal partner to sales in driving core business value.
B2B marketers and salespeople don’t speak to each other enough"
Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of Turtl
“It’s about understanding what insights are of greatest use to the business. Then it’s a matter of identifying ways to capture those insights,” says Mason. “The right technology can do the heavy lifting, but marketers also need to start developing their skill-sets and comfort levels when analyzing data, so they know how to translate the data into a language the business understands.”
PRO TIP!
3 ways marketers can prove they are key business drivers
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Look at different ways you can demonstrate ROI and impact the business bottom line through better support of sales.
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Figure out how you can provide the kinds of insights needed, whether that’s through creating a different kind of campaign, introducing new technologies or restructuring existing data.
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Prioritize data that can help qualify sales, identify cross-sales and understand buyer motivations.
1 Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals, an October 2019 Turtl-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting
3 WAYS TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY
3 WAYS TO MAKE THE MOST
OF YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY
According to the Forrester study1, 94% of B2B firms struggle to generate insights from their marketing content. And although most marketers believe they are central to driving business, not as many sales leaders agree. One of the main disconnects is content delivery and performance; most marketers think they’re generating quality data and insights to their sales colleagues, but 63% of salespeople said insight into the relative interest of the buyer in their business proposition is of top importance, while fewer than half of the marketers surveyed identified this type of insight as a priority. It’s a problem that bubbles all the way to the top of most organizations.
Do you struggle to generate insights from your content?
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“CMOs really need to pay attention to the difference in priorities when it comes to the types of insights sales teams consider most useful,” Mason says. “Better alignment between functions on the kind of buyer insights that matter will help marketing understand where they might need to evolve the types of data and insights they are capturing, and will help marketing more clearly impact business wins.”
Understanding and then leveraging the important role content can play in your organization is one way to ameliorate this pain point—fast. Mason offers three ways B2B marketers can use content to bring on this transformation:
1. USE CONTENT TO EMBRACE ‘THE CONVERSATION’
Smart B2B marketers know that the days of “telling” their customers about their products and services are over. For today’s customers, it’s all about the two-way conversation. Smart content marketing platforms can transform that old school didactic experience into an interactive dialogue with the customer that yields great data. If your marketing and sales teams are still set on “telling” customers about their products and services, versus engaging with them, it might be time to embrace… the conversation.
“Interactive content prompts the reader to take action when navigating the piece, which in turn provides points of measurement that reveal more about their motivations and drivers than passive content, which they simply scroll through,” says Mason. “Also, because the reader has to take action, they engage more consciously with the content. It’s like having a conversation, rather than giving readers a lecture.”
2. USE CONTENT TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
Smart marketing platforms can help sales and marketing departments begin to speak the same language—a language that’s based on data (i.e. facts), that can lead to better-informed campaigns that generate sales. “Content platforms help with data capture and can provide an objective view of what drives more revenue, says Mason. “As long as everyone is working from the same scorecard, content marketing platforms can help both sales and marketing organizations identify what is making the biggest impact and do more of it.” The right platform can also lead to more efficient workflows, greater consistency in the quality of output, reduce the cost of production and improve—as well as demonstrate—ROI.
3. USE CONTENT TO BOOST YOUR DATA IQ
High-performing content strategies require a strong—and clear—vision for which insights are of greatest use to your business. But not all marketers feel confident in their ability to reverse engineer those insights into a data strategy. A smart, data-rich content platform can do much of the heavy lifting and, in the process, can help many marketers better understand their data along the way, “but marketers also need to start developing their skill-sets and comfort levels when analyzing data, so they know how to translate the data into a language the business understands,” Mason says.
Interactive content prompts the reader to take action when navigating a piece"
Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of Turtl
1 Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals, an October 2019 Turtl-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting
Data can be the “D”-word for some marketers, but the more the marketing team can embrace their analytical skills, the better poised they will be to position their function as a key business driver.
“Invest time in going through the data, ask questions of it, look for patterns,” suggests Mason. “The more you learn about your buyer the more effective you can be when positioning your offering and winning their business.”
Businesses can come up with an objective view of what works by testing and collecting as much data as possible, the more granular the better, especially when it comes to engagement data. “Knowing which topic within a report a buyer spends the most time reading can tell you about the challenges they are looking to overcome, which you can position your offering against,” Mason says.
What kinds of information and data is typically missing from most B2B marketing campaigns? And where do B2B marketers usually struggle most when it comes to fueling the sales cycle?
“Marketers have been focusing too much on vanity metrics like download counts and clicks, none of which help you continue the conversation with a contact in a meaningful way,” Mason says. Certain data can reveal qualitative insights about a reader. Engagement data, such as time spent reading a given chapter, can reveal people’s interests, priorities and needs, which can help you paint a clearer picture of their motivations and where your offering best matches up. Sales can use this to structure conversations in a more personalized manner.
According to the Forrester study 1, B2B marketers tend to do better generating results in the early stages of the sales cycle. “Top of funnel results are easier to achieve,” Mason says. “The types of insights you gather at this stage are broad brush and less specific to your product offering.”
Say you run a webinar on IT security within the legal industry; you know that the people who sign up for the webinar are interested in this topic. You know from your signup form what their job role is and which company they work for. This is useful for nurturing contacts (sending them more content about IT security in legal, or stuff related to their job role), but too broad to drive a tailored conversation.
Make sure you execute the campaign with the appropriate tracking and measurement in place to quantify that impact and then review and compare it with others”
Nick Mason, Founder and CEO of Turtl
Marketers get better at analyzing which content campaigns are most impactful by defining the impact they want it to have and what the teams they’re supporting need. “Make sure you execute the campaign with the appropriate tracking and measurement in place to quantify that impact and then review and compare it with others,” Mason says.
1 Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals, an October 2019 Turtl-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting
