One of the key elements of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is sales and marketing alignment. Businesses that have disjointed sales and marketing teams are falling behind. Meanwhile, brands that have sales and marketing teams that support one another are experiencing significant growth.
When sales and marketing teams are not in alignment, it can result in wasted resources and expenses. According to research, B2B brands that have disjointed sales and marketing end up wasting 60–70% of their content, and around 75% of their leads never end up converting.
In contrast, reports show that a successfully aligned marketing and sales team can lead to 32% higher revenue, 38% higher win rates, and 36% more customers. Alignment also leads to closing bigger deals and helps generate higher brand awareness.
To align sales and marketing, there must be a shared system of strategy, goals, and communication between these two departments. One specific way of doing this is by having marketing teams listen to sales feedback and then using that feedback to create more effective marketing messaging.
How Sales Feedback Can Benefit Marketing Messaging
There are many different ways to create a feedback loop between sales and marketing. You can have sales and marketing teams share information and communicate in meetings. You can use communication tools like Slack and create channels specifically for salespeople to share their feedback with marketing. Having your marketing team sit in on sales calls can also help them receive direct feedback that can give them insights on what kind of messaging might better address buyer needs and pain points.
The system or approach you take to ensure your marketing team is receiving clear feedback from sales can vary depending on what works best for your teams. However, the goal should be to encourage collaboration and communication as much as possible so both teams can learn from one another, particularly so marketing can utilize sales feedback to improve marketing messaging.
Having your marketing team listen to sales feedback can help you:
1. Discover zero search volume keywords
Most brands work off of the same keywords that everybody else is already using. However, your sales team is likely receiving questions from buyers and customers that make for good keywords. And others likely have those same questions. Using new keywords that aren’t yet ranking and being used by competitors but that are relative to customer concerns can give your content a competitive advantage.
2. Create the right sales enablement content
As your salespeople speak directly with customers, they likely have a good idea of what content would be most useful to give to customers during calls or over email. Sales enablement content increases value for leads and gives them the information needed to help the sales team close deals faster. By listening to sales feedback, marketing can create more informative and valuable sales enablement content for the sales team to use.
3. Identify key messaging
Again, as the sales team interacts directly with the customer, listening to their wants, needs, and concerns, they can provide that feedback to marketing. This will enable marketing to create messaging that speaks directly to their target audience or ideal customer profile ICP).
4. Speak to your customer’s language
Nothing can help your marketers better understand the language of your customers than sitting in on sales calls and hearing customers speak. It’s not uncommon for marketing content to be filled with unnecessary, flashy jargon. By listening to sales calls and feedback from those calls, marketing can create messaging that has more clarity and speaks directly to the language of your buyers.
Sales and Marketing Alignment for Growth and Increased Revenue
If you want to experience the increased ROI and growth that can come from Account-Based Marketing with sales and marketing alignment, Cogo & Co. can help.
Take our Growth Readiness Scorecard to receive a score on your sales and marketing approach with customized results, detailing how you can improve your results quickly and easily. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
