Talking to potential buyers on a daily basis, your salespeople know your target customers best; they can help direct your content marketing strategy by sharing what they know about your customers. Let Your Content and Sales Teams Collaborate on Brand Uniformity Guide Creation There is nothing worse for a brand than a sales team that doesn’t understand the status quo for a brand’s messaging and goals, yet it happens all the time. Brand uniformity increases lead generation and conversions. Encourage your content team to create a brand identity guide for the whole company to use. Use your business plan to develop your brand identity guide and then share them both with your entire team. Get input from your sales and customer service teams Make your sales and customer service teams part of the guide by allowing salespeople to contribute their ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. Use these tips for effective webinar demonstrations as a guide to developing presentations for the teams so they start out on the same page. Give Your Sales Team Something to Look At: Using Content Marketing Materials in Sales Your content marketing team likely has plenty of materials that can help your sales team close more deals. Since your sales team is involved in customer interaction and knows your audience best, encourage them to share content ideas and feedback. All you need to do is to encourage knowledge and content sharing within your company and provide solutions to make it faster and easier.
In most businesses, there’s a huge disconnect between sales and marketing. Because sales teams usually exist as an island, content marketing teams have no way to influence sales. And then apart from sending leads to the conversion funnel, marketing never knows what happens to those leads once they’re sent.
It’s a sad trend because the two teams—content marketing and sales—are actually more powerful together. Sharing marketing perspective with sales can unlock breakthrough profits for your company.
Content is, by its very nature, the foundation of your company. It provides information, breaks down difficult concepts, and helps better prepare your sales team for the task of selling to your audience.
Your sales team, on the other hand, can provide the most powerful insights into your audience. Talking to potential buyers on a daily basis, your salespeople know your target customers best; they can help direct your content marketing strategy by sharing what they know about your customers.
Here are three ways your content marketing and sales teams can boost each other’s growth.
1. Let Your Content and Sales Teams Collaborate on Brand Uniformity Guide Creation
There is nothing worse for a brand than a sales team that doesn’t understand the status quo for a brand’s messaging and goals, yet it happens all the time. A salesperson can become very single-minded, only thinking of his or her numbers and commissions, and seeing sales as a personal mission.
That is not how it should be. Each individual’s actions affect the entire business. Brand uniformity increases lead generation and conversions. It ensures that once a potential customer is in the conversion funnel, they will feel safe and confident to move forward.
In more practical situations, brand uniformity means that your leads will feel less inclined to hang up on you when they hear your company name. We also want leads to be less likely to delete an email with your company name in the “From” field.
Encourage your content team to create a brand identity guide for the whole company to use. Use your business plan to develop your brand identity guide and then share them both with your entire team.
What is a brand identity guide?
The brand identity guide should include your logo, brand colors, tagline, company mission, and values. Don’t forget any keywords (including words that should be banned when discussing your company with potential or current clients). Some essential keywords to include in the identity guide are:
- Exact words that describe your products and services, both internally and in public. (Too often internal product and service names go public, creating confusion.)
- Industry terms to use and to ban. (If you were to sell marketing services, for example, terms to ban would be “directory submission,” “search engine submission,” and other outdated terms that could signal to a client that your company might not be quite up-to-date with the industry.)
- Best terms to describe your company’s value proposition. (What makes your company better than your competitors? What makes your offering unique?)
Examples of brand identity/brand uniformity guides
For a good example of a comprehensive brand uniformity guide, review this document [pdf]. It is primarily about visual branding, but it also tackles writing and positioning as well as communication guidelines.
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New York University has a more advanced guide. It includes document templates, wording samples—everything needed to represent the NYU brand. Even small businesses should develop this type of guide and adhere to it in all marketing materials and communications.
Remember to include social media and visual brand guidelines. The SlideShare “Visual Brand Guidelines to Manage Social Media Accounts” from Origzo provides tips.
Get input from your sales and customer service teams
Make your sales and customer service teams part of the guide by allowing salespeople to contribute their ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. This makes perfect sense since both teams are on the front line of customer interaction.
Sales actually talks to real people every day, discussing their needs, struggles,…
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