3 Ways The Modern B2B Salesperson Aligns with Marketing

Marketing and Sales Alignment Fosters Better Outcomes

Once upon a time it was rare to witness the B2B sales team aligned with the B2B marketing team. And, once upon a time gasoline cost 50 cents per gallon. Times have changed a ton!

The Best Sales Pros are Aligned with Marketing

The modern B2B sales professional understands the concept of building audience. To capture the attention of your audience in the three-second window that you have on a first visit, you need to grab their attention with compelling content that meets their need in the moment. In a nutshell, I’m suggesting that you collaborate with your marketing team to leverage all the content assets they provide to help you succeed in your sales efforts. If you need a guide, I’ve written one here: “How to Get More Traffic and Leads Through Content Marketing.”

Here are three ways the modern B2B sales professional can align with marketing to win more.

Branding

When marketers publish any content whether it’s a website, an e-book, a webinar, a video, handouts for an event…It doesn’t matter what content the marketing team creates, it ALWAY has to align with the brand.

But, what is a brand anyway? Here is my favorite definition of a brand – any brand. “A brand is the promise you make to your customers.”

What is the promise of your personal brand?

If (for example) you sell medical supplies, perhaps the promise of your personal brand is quality supplies in a specific niche of medical supplies such as orthopedics. In this example, your professional brand should support this promise with every digital interaction you take.

So, I urge you to assess your personal brand promise. If you haven’t previously defined it, write it down. Then, do a “gap analysis.” Do you have a gap between how you currently engage in social selling activities and your personal brand promise? Are you active in social media groups that align with your personal brand? Do you curate content that aligns with your personal brand and share it through LinkedIn and Twitter or other channels where your buyer is engaged? Do you create original content that aligns with your personal brand? This article from Viveka von Rosen offers 15 ways to rock your personal brand.

Visually Centric Digital Engagement

I’m sure you’ve noticed….Social media engagement has become very visual (duh)…The ability to share images on social media is pervasive across all social channels, including LinkedIn!

Marketers understand this and as such create visually compelling content and amplify it on social media. And, you can and should do the same.

Take pictures that you can share. Some common examples of pictures that B2B sales professionals can share on social media include customer events, annual conferences, local events, etc., provided that you’re permitted to take and post pictures.

If you’re restricted from taking and sharing your own pictures, re-purpose pictures published by your marketing department. Anything published by your marketing team in the public domain should be okay for you to share. In fact, your marketing department will love you if you become an employee advocate by sharing images they publish online. Be sure to select images that align with your personal brand.

Conversions that Lead to Sales

Marketers care a lot about conversions. This isn’t the same kind of conversion you care about as a sales professional. When you’re aligned with marketing, you want to leverage content assets to convert a contact into sales conversations that can eventually lead to a customer.

In this blog post, I covered how to get engaged in the B2B buyer’s journey during their research phase. When the buyer is conducting research, she is often not ready to have a conversation with a sales professional.

Your goal should be to convert that buyer from an invisible researcher, to a willing conversationalist. In order to do that, you have to be useful to the buyer. You have to earn a reputation as a trusted resource to the buyer. And, you have to convert contacts with her network into conversations. A natural outcome of being aligned with marketing should be to help position you as a trusted resource to the buyer through content assets provided by marketing that you can share in digital channels.

The modern B2B sales professionals is aligned with marketing. Hopefully, such alignment is not by accident. Organizations who are intentional about marketing and sales alignment generate better sales outcomes.

If you want to learn more about content that converts, I urge you to download our white paper here: