How Content Marketing Technology Can Solve Your Sales Enablement Woes. But there was room for our process to improve. Our communication mostly consisted of informal meetings, where details could get lost in translation. Plus, we needed more visibility throughout the content production and sales distribution processes. Why not use our software to run a sales enablement publication? By formalizing the process, the sales team really had to think and be explicit about the value of each request. However, once the sales team pitched story ideas and asset requests through the platform, the marketing team gathered a concrete understanding of what was missing (and what wasn’t). Finally, after assets were distributed to the sales team, we could turn to Contently Analytics to see which content was most effective. Since the sales enablement publication has only been around for a few months, there’s still room for more collaboration. But we’ve already seen the value of aligning marketing and sales through technology.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Marketing and sales, despite working toward a common revenue goal, struggle to align. Marketing brings in the leads, but sales doesn’t like them. Sales sells the product, but marketing doesn’t like how they sell it.
Molly Soat, editor-in-chief at the American Marketing Association, puts it best: “Aligning sales and marketing teams is a problem as old as the corporate structure.”
As a B2B software company, Contently is not immune to this challenge. We believed our content was a valuable sales enablement tool, and we had regular communication with the sales team. But there was room for our process to improve. Our communication mostly consisted of informal meetings, where details could get lost in translation. Plus, we needed more visibility throughout the content production and sales distribution processes.
To shore up the alignment between teams, we decided to test out a solution. Why not use our software to run a sales enablement publication? We had the technology to create a new internal operation only accessible to the sales and marketing teams. So, in a matter of 15 minutes, we did. Here’s how it worked.
Formalizing an informal process
After we added the sales and marketing team members to our new “Sales Enablement” publication, we set guidelines to ensure communication was simple and clear.
Below you can see the way we formatted guidelines for the sales team to submit asset requests. In addition to including the creative concept, we had each sales rep record their names, title, the intended audience, and the asset type.
In the past, this process was largely unstructured. A salesperson might make a passing request for a deck, but without documented details, the execution would often break down.
By formalizing the process, the sales team really had to think and be explicit about the value of each request. It also ensured that we could produce…
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