Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing Is the Key to Effective Sales Content

The messaging and content that marketing creates for sales presentations should be dynamic, centered on the needs, interests, and perceptions of buyers. But that’s often not the case, thanks to a disconnect between sales and marketing that leads to lost opportunities and a longer sales cycle.

When marketing and sales fail to work together, the sales content falls flat and salespeople have significantly harder times closing sales. But when the teams collaborate, the result is dynamic presentations that help buyers understand how your product or service will solve their problems, improve their businesses, or make their lives easier. Sales close and everyone wins.

More Dynamic Presentations = More Sales

Dynamic presentations start not with talking but with listening. Salespeople tend to be eager to jump in and pitch their product, but it’s important to take a step back and listen before diving into sales mode. This is one of the core tenets of a customer-centric approach — one that will help you build a more meaningful relationship with buyers and collect valuable information to improve sales presentations and land more sales.

That listening is so important because a pitch by itself isn’t enough. Effective sales presentations demonstrate a thorough understanding of the prospect’s pain points — a general rundown of what the product or service does will leave your prospect cold. Ideally, B2B sales presentations should include different personas that drill down into different use cases.

Getting specific with personas isn’t enough, however. Personalization is also necessary, and it must go far beyond adding the prospect’s logo to the presentation. Curated content is the norm now — think Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon — and this extends to the business world. In addition to knowing which buyer persona you’re addressing, tailor the presentation to fit the individual buyer’s unique needs and industry. This includes providing relevant proof that your product or service can solve for those problems.

Content is King

Nearly 90% of B2B sellers and nearly half of B2B marketers rely on content to captivate prospects and motive them to move down the sales funnel. Content can tell the brand’s story, demonstrate credibility, and highlight the offering’s value, making sales presentations among the most meaningful content asset for buyers across all phases of the purchase decision process.

Not just any content will do, however. Keep in mind that customers today are already 60% of the way to making a decision before they ever talk to a salesperson. Odds are, they have done their online research and sought insights from industry contacts. If sales materials review information prospects already know, they’ll become frustrated at the waste of time. This will make the sales process lag or, worse, shut down entirely. To combat this, sales presentations need to respond to all different points of the buyer’s journey.

The following tactics can help you leverage rich content that will pitch, persuade, and engage potential buyers:

1. Create a presentation architecture.
   This should align to stages in both the buying cycle and sales process. By understanding the flow of both processes, sales reps can learn the optimal time to introduce each presentation component. If you’re relying on rich-media content (and you should!), each piece of the presentation should be designed to be easily customizable for the sales team.
2. Focus on buyer needs.
   Presentation content should address buyer needs and instill buyer value for each sales process stage. Ways to demonstrate value include zeroing in on the prospect’s primary need, sharing relevant industry trends and facts that back up your claims, sharing fresh business insights that help potential values improve before they buy in, and sharing reasons why your product or service can solve their problem.
3. Use engagement analytics to improve content.
   Engagement analytics can reveal what content is being read and what is being skipped over, how prospects are responding, whether they’re interacting with the content or sharing it to their networks, and whether it’s successful at moving them down the sales funnel. By collecting this data over time, you’ll discover exactly what content inspires prospects to take action — and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

The quality of your sales-related content can lead to speedier sales and closer relationships with customers. Sales and marketing teams must work together to achieve this, however, and must understand the nuances of how the product or service is helping each individual customer and solving their industry-specific problems.

ClearSlide can help make your presentations more dynamic by supporting rich content like videos and animations and by enabling sellers to easily assemble presentations with marketing-approved content. Ready to make the most of every prospect interaction? Start your free trial today!