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
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.
“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.”
Look at different ways you can demonstrate ROI and impact the business bottom line through better support of sales.
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.
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
