Sales-ready assets have the power to ramp up your revenue, improve win rates, convey a value message and provide a visual snapshot for your buyer when they need it most. These assets have the power to stick with buyers — literally staying behind with them long after the salesperson leaves. They reinforce messages and drive home the value of a solution or a company with powerful and memorable language and imagery.
Sales-ready assets can be invaluable tools for any salesperson. Yet 90% of sales-ready assets marketing creates for sales go unused in the field, according to an American Marketing Association study . That means marketing is wasting their resources creating content sales never uses, while sales continues to want for supportive content they can implement in the field to land their deals.
How can we get sales to use the sales-ready assets marketing creates? First, marketing needs to create sales-ready assets that sales finds valuable.
Arm Marketing With the Right Tools — to Provide Sales With the Right Tools.
Per a CMO Council study, sales professionals waste two days a week creating their own tools and messaging. Fifty-one percent of sales reps in a different study say they devote time to modifying existing content (Brainshark).
If marketing already is creating sales assets, why do so many salespeople spend their time creating and modifying content for themselves?
The disconnect often occurs when marketing and sales disagree on personas and the buying process. The majority of salespeople (42%) state that their marketing department rarely or never includes them in content development process (Brainshark). Likewise, marketing rarely receives an invite to sales meetings.
The easy fix is to get sales and marketing teams to collaborate. Encourage your marketing department to invite salespeople to project kickoffs and input sessions. Agree on personas, and help marketing understand the buying cycle and where their sales-ready assets become vital within it.
Also, invite key marketing team members to support some sales cycles where tools are being used, for example:
- Preparing for the conversations
- Developing the proposal
- Identifying the differentiators
Even after sales and marketing are on the same page, and marketing creates sales-ready assets better aligned to sales’ needs, validate your tools with actual customers and prospects. Engage third-tier prospects and test the sales-ready assets.
After you do that, you’re ready to enable your sales channels with these tools.
Make Sales-Ready Assets Easily Accessible and Implementable.
Marketing may have created dozens of valuable sales-ready assets, but salespeople won’t be able to use them if they are not stored in an easy to access and easy to navigate system.
Put a system in place that affords handy access to these tools for sales, and ensure sales knows when new and updated sales-ready assets are rolled out.
Beyond that, help sales understand when to use each sales-ready asset in the buying journey and how to present the information before, during or after a customer meeting for example by:
- Implementing the sales-ready assets in role-play exercises
- Tagging each sales-ready asset with a persona and buyer stage
- Standing 100% behind the sales-ready assets to exemplify their value to your sales team
Do you want to further discuss how to implement sales-ready assets into your sales teams’ toolbox? Let’s connect.