It’s no secret that your sales and marketing teams each play a critical role in the success of your organization. While the performance of each individual team is certainly important, what’s even more impactful on your organization’s maturity is the way these two teams collaborate to better meet the changing expectations of buyers.
In order to scale your business, it’s key to focus on what you can do to improve alignment between these two teams. This can seem like an overwhelming endeavor, especially if you’re at an organization where sales and marketing are often at odds and you don’t know where to best focus your attention to make improvements.
After assessing the maturity of your organization’s current sales and marketing alignment, it’s time to focus your attention on actions that’ll have the biggest impact on improving sales and marketing alignment. There’s one important strategy your organization can adopt now to improve sales and marketing collaboration: unite to focus on delivering a better buyer experience.
Focus on a Better Buying Experience
Today’s consumers have higher expectations than ever before. And, not surprisingly, our experiences as consumers are shaping our expectations as B2B buyers. Today the ideal B2B buyer experience includes engaging, personalized, and seamless experiences while buyers do their own research and while working with a salesperson. In fact, a study from SiriusDecisions found that 81% of B2B buyers make purchase decisions based on buying experiences, rather than product or price.
Despite changing buyer expectations, most sellers haven’t adapted their approach to selling. They’re using generic, static, and irrelevant presentations and leading ineffective meetings that are boring their buyers.
Partner to Deliver Relevant, Impactful Content
In order to scale success, marketing and sales must unite to focus on delivering a better buyer experience. For starters, marketing must collaborate with sales — and rely on content analytics — to provide content that is valuable and relevant. That way, with the support of sales enablement, salespeople can become guided sellers when they’re talking with prospects.
Collaborate to Make it Easy for Prospects to Share Information
After a buyer has engaged with sales, marketing and sales must provide branded microsites that allow buyers to access relevant content anytime and anywhere, and share that content to other internal stakeholders. This is key, as nearly 30% of B2B buyers cite difficulty sharing information internally as a factor that slows down purchase decisions.
Partner with Sales Enablement
When focusing on buyer experiences, remember that sales enablement is your partner. Your sales enablement team will help map different buyer experiences to sales stages according to your sales methodology. In addition, sales enablement will help ensure sales has the right training, coaching, content, and tools to deliver experiences buyers love.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams to Deliver Better Buying Experiences
Uniting to focus on a better buyer experience is a step to improving collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. But what else can you do to improve this key partnership?
Download our new eBook, Your Roadmap to Sales and Marketing Alignment, to learn five more practical, impactful actions you can take to improve your organization’s sales and marketing alignment — and start delivering winning buyer experiences.
