Raising Content Quality

In an ideal world, marketing departments serve as the link between engineering and sales teams. The idea is that marketers work hand-in-glove with their sales counterparts and can then recommend to engineering how to shape future product development. They also use their market insights to create collateral that promotes the company’s products and services using key competitive differentiators and highlighting those capabilities that solve real problems for customers and prospects.

But how can that collaboration actually happen? Most often, sales reps are on the road, in airports, preparing customer presentations and crunching numbers – often their own. They work on quotas, are paid on commission, are not typically tech-savvy and have little interest in “timewasters” that don’t immediately help them do their jobs. And yet they have critical knowledge and insight into the needs, attitudes, concerns and business health of your customers. That information can’t come from anywhere else.

Finding the Upside

Typically, marketing can engage with sales most effectively around a specific set of shared goals. These may be revenue targets or addressing a specific competitive challenge. Start the conversation with sales reps by asking them what materials would help them close deals. Often sales reps create their own talking points based on industry trends and data, and they may be willing to share that information for reuse in marketing materials.

Better yet is if you can identify a handful of sales people who are willing to help you improve marketing collateral during the review and approval stages. It can be helpful to get a reality check from field marketing, sales and sales engineers before releasing new campaigns, especially if they contain any competitive claims.  Likewise, you can get the input of the executive team in the late stage, when they're most likely to be interested.

A MAM platform gives you a way to loop in other team members by allowing them to access and comment on content that’s in a production environment. It’s often easier to get feedback on campaign messages within a day or two of when they're slated to enter the market. This approach appeals to both sales reps and executives, who often don’t want to see or comment on campaign collateral before it’s completed and final. Knowing that they can have an impact on real content that will appear in the market shortly after viewing is a terrific incentive to people who don’t want to get bogged down in the details.

Using a MAM system lets you incorporate valuable feedback without disrupting design and production work cycles. It’s simple to make changes to the text, including updating the messages so they're as strong as possible, and easily swap out photos and images. So your team can remain open to input until the final hour, and still be successful in incorporating multiple viewpoints into the final product without losing sleep.

Better yet, once marketing becomes a more integrated part of the sales cycle, your team can also offer customer knowledge and insights to other parts of the organization, including engineering.