Your sales team should feel empowered to share and create content for your business. Do: Create a Process for Gathering Their Ideas Your sales team have their own impressive skill set, but marketing writing is not necessarily part of it. In order to gather their input, don’t ask them to think like a marketer. Gathering responses to these questions will help your marketing team understand and meet the sales team’s needs. While the marketing team creates the social media persona and posts for the brand, salespeople can cultivate their own followings and voice on social channels. For more on the specifics of how to use social media as a part of the sales process, check out this webinar. However, your marketing team has worked hard to create a brand identity, complete with a set voice and look, and you want to be sure that any content your sales team does create is working in harmony with the marketing team’s strategy. That’s why it’s helpful for your marketing team to provide salespeople with brand guidelines and templates. Your marketing team should also put together a template for the types of communications your sales team will use regularly (and that includes things as complex as pitch decks and as simple as the formatting for their email signature line). Part of building trust in your brand is establishing consistency in the way you communicate.
Content creation falls squarely in the domain of your marketing team, right? Yes, it’s true that marketers set strategy and create the content that supports that vision. But no team is an island, and in reality, it’s the sales team that is out there interacting with prospects and customers each and every day.
Your sales team should feel empowered to share and create content for your business. Here’s how you get them involved in the process, and the dos and don’ts for making the system work.
Do: Ask for Their Input
Your marketing team might be the wordsmiths of the group, but your sales team are the boots on the ground. They’re out there talking to prospects every day. They hear the same questions, hesitations, and sticking points over and over again.
When creating your content, you want to be sure that you’re proving to prospects that your business is the best one out there to solve their problems. The sales team understands better than anyone what those problems are, and how to communicate your solution.
You should be turning to them for advice and input. They’re the people who can point the marketing team in the right direction and help them create the type of content that will be most meaningful and helpful for your audience.
Do: Create a Process for Gathering Their Ideas
Your sales team have their own impressive skill set, but marketing writing is not necessarily part of it. In order to gather their input, don’t ask them to think like a marketer. Make it easy for them to share what they hear in their role as a salesperson.
Consider putting together a worksheet that asks them some basic questions. What are the top three questions they hear from prospects? Do they hear similar reactions across the board to pricing and specific products? What kind of content do they wish they had available to them as part of their sales arsenal?
Gathering responses to these questions will help your marketing team understand and meet the sales team’s needs.
Do: Provide Them with Content Extras
Salespeople are dealing with prospects and existing customers who are at all different stages of the marketing hourglass. Whether they’re…
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