Your sales team is a key part of your lead-generation strategy. The sales reps are the first human touch that your leads will have with your company, so make sure that your reps understand your messaging and know what content is available to help their sales efforts. Here are some best practices to consider when enabling your sales teams:
Provide product and messaging training: As a marketer, you are constantly being tasked to create messaging around the company and any new product or service launches. Your sales teams need to be adequately trained to relay that messaging to leads. Make sure to set up training sessions for every message change, and provide a cheat sheet of sound bites for them to mention.
Give them a script to reference: Provide your sales teams a script to reference during their sales calls. Make sure that they know key talking points about your company and provide them with objections and rebuttals so that they know what to say if a lead says no right off the bat.
Make sure they know what content is available: Make sure your sales teams know what new content you have released. Whether it is a datasheet or an ebook, your sales teams can use these tools on sales calls. Just make sure that your sales reps know exactly what each asset is about and how it can help during the sales cycle.
Provide a database of content in one place: It’s great that you create new ebooks and content assets each month, but does your sales team know where to find them? Make sure you are putting everything in one place so that a sales rep can find everything she needs. This could be a cloud storage service such as Dropbox or Box, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool such as Salesforce, a company Wiki, or some other location your sales reps know to look for new content.
Create and maintain relationships with sales reps: Many marketers work in a silo and don’t interact much with the sales team, but this is the wrong way to go about sales and marketing alignment (which you need for successful lead generation). Have regular check-ins with sales, let them know that you are available to help, and consider scheduling joint team-building activities.