Sales and marketing teams – the importance of communication

It is imperative that sales and marketing teams communicate regularly to make sure that the material that is being sent out is valuable in terms of accessibility, is it current and adequate enough to support the product being offered.

Sales teams depend on marketing material to back up what they are selling, having the right material and offering it to prospects at the right time can make the difference between loosing or sealing a deal.

Not being able to find the correct or current data will result in a lack of confidence in your offering, resulting in lost opportunities.

Changing markets and client personas rely on sales and marketing teams having their fingers are on the pulse. Sales terms have their ears on the ground and know what their customers want and marketing teams are the creative minds behind the content and image of your product/company and are informed about the latest marketing trends.

Putting both teams together on a regular basis will ensure your content reaches its full potential and boosts your sales pipelines.

So what material is helpful to sales teams?

Data dashboards

Dashboards work really well for B2B and highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) by drawing in data from different areas on to one central dashboard.

Dashboards help analyse key data and allows decision makers to monitor the success of a product/business or department. Visually pleasing, dashboards display the data as line, bar or pie charts allowing immediate visual understanding of the data produced.

Having to hand valuable data in the form of a dashboard helps potential clients visualise how your product/offering can benefit them and increase their business at a single glance.

Type of dashboard

Analytical dashboards – These dashboards can be used in a variety of ways depending on your business needs. Decision makers within a company will use them to analyse performance within the company, establish targets, set goals and to highlight problem areas in order to tackle them. They are usually quite in-depth but provide useful data in order to improve company performance and reveal patterns in data.

Data dashboards – typically seen as tables, line charts, bar charts and consist of only the necessary data. Dashboards can be designed to be visually pleasing and as simple or as complicated as you need it to be. Using these tables or graphs in marketing material is the best form to send out to clients.

Displaying the data that is relevant to you and the product on offer and how it has increased sales, this will show the prospect the benefits of using your product and is a valuable way to communicate insight.

Videos

Videos are an effective and fun way of getting your message across to potential clients. They put a face to a company, show off your product and emphasise key elements of your offering.

Clients will have done their research into your product/company and may have seen your video on your website already, so this approach can be useful in the early stages. However, using a corporate video as your show stopper is also a good way of attracting potential leads. It shows that your company has put a lot of effort in drawing attention to the product and can often drawn in potential leads that were previously sitting on the fence.

Presentations

Presentations and dashboards can be shared at any stage of the sales process. Marketing teams must ensure that presentations are constantly reviewed and updated, so that data and information is kept current.

Presentations should allow the reader to pick up on key areas and to be able to reference areas quickly. The reader will not want to read through long paragraphs of text and it is important to have a balance of text and visual diagrams to keep the reader interested.

Coming together

If your sales and marketing teams don’t already share ideas and communicate on a regular basis, now is the time to bring them together. Make sure it happens regularly to that your content is current and on trend. You’ll soon see the benefits of working together.