Creating a marketing campaign is like cooking a meal. There’s a standard process that you should follow to achieve your desired results. You can deviate from the recipe by adding or swapping out ingredients to make it more spicy or sweet, but you can’t mess with it too much or your meal won’t turn out the way you want it to.
Marketing campaigns should follow an established framework and include key elements such as personas, a CTA strategy, and monitoring and reporting tools. Then, you’ll need to activate your campaign using air cover tactics, like digital advertising, SEO, and content marketing. And finally, you should have a way to convert leads like your website, a demo call, or trial experience.
Simple, right?
Unfortunately, many marketing teams fall short on the results they want. The problem isn’t the team’s ability to generate leads and interest. It’s the step after that: taking the leads through the “last 10 feet” and ensuring their successful journey through the sales funnel.
Why do marketing campaigns fail?
Campaign objectives can be insurmountable without a proper sales enablement process. And much of what sales enablement entails is providing sales teams with the information they need, when they need it.
Here are a few reasons why marketing campaigns fall flat:
Sales nurturing isn’t happening
Sales team don’t know the pitch based on your campaign
Objection handling scenarios have not been thorough enough
The sales team doesn’t know where to find collateral
The sales team doesn’t understand how to use the assets you’ve developed
The sales team doesn’t understand the structure of your campaigns
The sales team doesn’t understand how a lead was captured
The sales team doesn’t understand the investment you made to deliver a lead to them
The sales team doesn’t have the nurture guides to keep conversations moving
As you can see, the majority of the reasons tie back to poor information-sharing between the marketing and sales teams. You can have the most compelling message, steady web traffic, and a funnel overflowing with leads, but if your campaign stalls there, all your efforts can be wasted.
Let’s consider steps in a typical marketing campaign:
The marketing team puts together a strategy and plan.
All campaign assets are created.
The campaign launches.
The marketing team emails the sales team announcing the campaign and provides supporting promotional assets (like an email signature) and instructions.
The leads start to come in.
With the leads come questions, and suddenly the marketing team is bogged down with emails and the sales team feels like they don’t have all the information they need to be successful.
The siloes start to rise which causes inefficiencies and unnecessary confusion and conflict between the two teams.
The campaign runs its course (for better or for worse).
And the process starts all over again.
Not surprisingly, marketing teams that operate this way continue to fall short on campaign effectiveness, because they’re not addressing the needs of their sales team.
So, why not use it? You may be rolling your eyes – because your intranet is stale, out of date, hard to use – or all of the above. In fact, 43% of respondents said that they have avoided sharing a document with a colleague because they couldn’t find it or believed it would take too long to find.
But imagine this: a place where your sales team can go to access to all the information they need to close deals using a tool that doesn’t require additional investment or strain your IT resources.
Turn your intranet into a sales enablement tool using these five strategies:
1. Create a Sales Zone
A Sales Zone in your intranet is a one-stop-shop for your sales reps to find all the company’s sales-related information. Include a link to the sales playbook, customer references, RFP answers and templates, and a newsfeed for quick questions and chatter within the team.
2. Create a Marketing Zone
Directly linked to your Sales Zone should be a Marketing Zone where you can house all relevant campaign updates, collateral, and enablement materials in one place. Not only does this simplify access to information, it can create tremendous efficiencies in an already fast-paced sales process.
3. Display your campaign calendar
Inside your Marketing Zone, your sales reps should be able to access a campaign calendar which can include key dates and events (like campaign launches or upcoming webinars). With this tool, everyone knows what’s happening and when, cutting down the amount of back-and-forth questions and emails.
4. Upload marketing assets
Create a marketing knowledge base for all your final campaign assets. This is the best way to help the sales team understand what assets are available and how to use them, with which audience, and at what stage. The key is making sure it’s up to date so reps can trust that it’s a reliable source. To make it extra user-friendly, you can tag your assets by persona, stage, industry, and company size.
5. Onboard new sales reps
Start your sales reps on the right foot by getting involved in their onboarding process. The marketing team can create an onboarding center that provides insight into how marketing and sales work together. Include information like your lead handoff process, where to find campaign-related content, and a 1-minute video introducing the marketing team and available resources.
The key to sales enablement: access to information
If we think about the key issues impacting sales and campaign performance, the core of it is access to information. Sales reps won’t pay attention just because you tell them to. Instead, they have to: 1) see value in what you provide and 2) be able to find what they need, when they need it.
Your company has already invested in tools that allow you to do this. To all the marketing teams out there, I challenge you to transform your company intranet into a sales enablement tool that leverages powerful communication and collaboration features and makes access to information quick and painless.
In a recent webinar, we explored these strategies in depth and discussed the next evolution of sales enablement in the digital workplace, specifically how marketing and sales can work together to achieve optimal campaign results.
Watch the webinar for more information and to hear my answers to these audience questions:
Our intranet is owned by IT. Is it possible for them to section off a portion of it that I can manage?
Can I track who’s accessing content?
Is it possible to create a Sales Zone without replacing our entire intranet?
What’s the best way to govern sales enablement on your intranet?
