Bridging the Communications Gap
How often is sales (direct, field, or channels) unaware of your organization’s marketing efforts. You have an annual marketing plan, but as you, and I know, opportunities arise, campaigns are adjusted or cancelled and budgets are cut or expanded. A marketing plan is a living breathing animal that needs constant care, feeding and grooming. But how is sales kept in the look, mostly by emails prior to the events taking place, limiting their time and effort to coordinate sales efforts with customers or prospects. This is the “communication gap” between both organizations.
But what if sales could have access to marketing’s playbook, calendar and content, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What if they could be notified in real-time as changes or additions occur?
But even more importantly, what if they participate in providing feedback, customer quotes, success stories, tips on what’s working and what’s not. This is your front-line connection with prospects to customers. Creating a collaboration between sales and marketing should improve both organization’s productivity and ROI.
Shared Calendar – Sales would know of events weeks or months prior to taking place and can provide inputs or who’s coming both prospects and customers. Allowing marketing to prepare for them. Sales can post critical sales meetings and request marketing support.
Single Repository - Organized to provide sales the latest tools; sales presentations, templates, demos, videos, brochure and other marketing materials, one click away. This allows marketing to manage the set of marketing materials in the field controlling versions and updates.
Sales Tips – marketing can capture tips and ideas across the sales force and channels to create best practices, lessons learned and a, tip of the day blog, for reps to be kept updated.
New Communications – Reps can be provided updates anytime and even real-time information with VOiP, Instant Messaging as well as its own messaging system eliminating spam and providing only relevant information, while linked to his/her current email box.
This could sit on top of your lead generation software allowing your to continue tracking, posting and recording the success of your leads generated from various sources. But you are adding a social layer of communications and collaboration that didn’t exist or if it did was not with the entire sales force, but those reps closer to home.
This may be an innovative opportunity to leverage team collaboration tools or an enterprise social network to support this social layer.
Food for thought…
