Many marketing and sales articles begin with a nod to an old cliché: that marketers and salespeople work in silos, taking separate, out-of-sync approaches to a common goal.
This article is no different.
It’s easy to see shreds of truth to such clichés. And one area where this disconnect commonly plays out in many organizations is content strategy. The marketers may cook up an idea for a blog series highlighting various employees or promoting a slick new product feature. They keep it in-house, from ideation to publishing, and ideally they monitor performance and engagement on the backend.
Many times, however, when such content gets published, sales teams view it as off-target or ancillary to their overarching initiatives—which, they’ll tell you, are to generate, nurture, and close leads. (They say “leads” and “collateral” and “marketing pieces” a lot.)
Discover a shared content direction
Solving for overall synchronization between Marketing and Sales is not something that typically happens overnight—or over the course of a blog series or two.
But there is a way to at least ensure that both teams are satisfied with the direction of the content strategy.
In most companies, Sales and Support are the main departments with an ear to the ground—interacting face-to-face or voice-to-voice, with customers. Their experience hearing customer pain points, objections, and use cases is regular and broad-reaching.
The marketing department, meanwhile, is trusted to give the brand a face and a voice. On the content side, messages and angles are conjured up from a variety of places—sometimes the C-suite, sometimes Google, sometimes the Sales bullpen, sometimes the competition, and sometimes nowhere but the eccentric recesses of the content writer’s brain.
A deep, true consideration of the intended audience, however, should always be the major consideration for content marketers:
What, exactly, are your prospects and customers really talking about? Are they still talking about this? Are they ready to talk about this? What questions do they really need answered? What confuses them?
You could take an educated guess. But if that guess ends up resembling anything close to, “Nine Benefits of Using My Game-Changing Service or Product,” you’re probably off-base. Don’t let the me-monster creep into your content (and don’t use “game-changing” as an adjective).
Why not take the guesswork out of it? Get together with Sales, and ask what kind of questions they’ve been hearing lately. They’re the ones in the wild with customers, gathering intel and absorbing information.
Find the intersection between customer feedback and search or social trends
Of course, whenever you’re asking for outside collaboration, there’s always the potential for anecdotal, tangential answers to surface, and those may not be all that useful.
What do you do when your sales team answers your call for collaboration by pointing you down a rabbit hole? “I had…
