Remember how we surveyed you with those nice colored scales during our presentation, at this year’s OESA Marcomms Summit?

This is unsurprising and common for most companies we speak with

Short-term sales focus seems to dominate marketing departments and this is easily understood. The short term only addresses the 5% of your available market that may be in the position to buy from you at any given point, marketing teams are missing a trick by not investing in longer-term brand-focused strategies. Investing in branding initiatives over an extended time frame has multiple benefits in comparison to purely short-term focused sales strategies and creates salience (making your brand come to mind when customers are in a buying situation).

Having a hard time getting your sales team to understand the importance of marketing?

Check out our B2B Sales Buying Cycle and bring it to your next sales meeting (Boom – Mic Drop!) 

Sales and marketing should work hand in hand, pulling in the same direction but with a slightly different focus and set of objectives. However, we often see some misalignment between these areas. We find that marketing direction is often set by the needs and priorities of the sales department, but with a poor strategy in place, a sales team can hold a hierarchy over marketing decisions which inevitably focuses efforts on more short-term results.

The benefits of aligning your teams:

Creative problem-solving: When sales and marketing are aligned on objectives, they’ll contribute perspectives that differ which will lead to more creative and effective solutions.

Employee retention: Building trust, and respect between these two departments makes it more likely that employees will want to continue working together. Make sure to communicate so that no one views this alignment as a burden to their workload.

To implement this, ask marketing team members to listen to a few sales calls per month and invite marketing to debrief meetings or other sales-related meetings and events.

Having marketing team members shadow sales calls can spark topic ideas for great sales enablement content.

Using marketing resources, the sales team may find gaps in the sales process, suggest more relevant sales collateral, or even discover customer pain points that hadn’t been considered by the sales team.

• A recurring brainstorming session is another way to bring sales and marketing together.
• To lead productive brainstorming sessions, ask questions like:
• What common questions do prospects ask during the sales process?   
• What sales-related questions are time-consuming to answer?   
• When emailing leads, what is the most common content used? 
• How are they wording the subject line?
• What kind of content are your salespeople most requesting?   
• Is your sales team using any particular type of verbiage about the company, product, or service 
• Does that verbiage resonate with a prospect?   
• In the sales process, what are the common barriers keeping a prospect from moving forward?  

By holding team brainstorming sessions you reveal content ideas and uncover insights along with aligning your teams to the process from start to finish.

• Provide knowledge about prospects
• Marketing can provide the sales team with additional information on prospective buyers.
• Implement a process that enables salespeople to access background information on people they’ve scheduled meetings with.

A salesperson would likely find valuable information on leads from the marketing team, such as:

How the lead learned about the company. The marketing automation software can extract this information from the website form submissions.

How the lead found the company’s website (e.g., organic search, direct traffic, or referral link). Sources can reveal a lead’s intent and readiness to buy.

Which content your leads engaged with on your website. The sales team can use this information to determine what solutions the prospect is most interested in and what topics they already have knowledge of before a meeting.

You can also find out bits of information the lead provided. Such as title, budget, or company size.

Get sales and marketing aligned and encourage mutual feedback. With that, you can avoid the sales-marketing misalignment that plagues so many organizations and forces them to leave so much money on the table by focusing only on short-term results.

And lastly, review and audit the content you have

Buyer behavior has changed as a result of industry disruption, with a third of buyers spending more time on pre-purchase research, while a quarter spends less time speaking with vendors. B2B buyers are increasingly relying on written content to make decisions about products and services, so sales and marketing teams need to be strategic about the content they send them.

When strategizing, it is essential to audit the available sales content and how it is being utilized.  Make a note of what collateral you have and what you might be lacking.

• Is your collateral outdated and requiring revisions?   
• What questions do leads frequently ask the sales team?   
• Should the sales team be more involved in lending their insights for content?   
• What content do you have now that does the heavy lifting?  

The goal here is to review your content against your objectives so you can see what’s not meeting expectations or what is being underused so you can determine whether your content marketing strategy needs to be realigned.

Now, let’s talk budgets…

We found that…

48% of companies are only investing 25% or less of their marketing budgets into brand building!

Our Recommendations…

These numbers can vary for all types of brands but where we generally see the best impact is when you follow the 60/40 marketing rule.

Depending on your specific objectives, we usually recommend about 60% of your marketing budget being spent on brand, with around 40% towards demand allocated towards sales focused or lead-gen, digital and traditional marketing.

If you are launching a new product or entering a new space, we recommend pushing this higher, to something around 80% branding.

If you are falling below 50% of your budget on brand, then you are placing too high importance on short-term sales impacts and this may have ramifications for brand effectiveness over time.    

Direct response efforts yield fast results and quick hits. However, they become gradually less effective over time and, with extended B2B sales cycles, any initial impact may ultimately be squandered if brand marketing isn’t maintained to ensure salience at the point of purchase.

Brand marketing works on a very different timeline. It takes longer to ramp up, but it delivers better returns in the long run. A year later, when the fruits of lead generation have long since fallen by the wayside, the results of successful branding are still going strong!