Aligning Sales and Marketing to reach their goals is based on knowledge sharing of effective and usable information about customers and potential leads. To prevent your employees from struggling during their tasks, measure the quality of your sales materials and find out how to improve them!
Access Pigro Knowledge Insights now or keep reading the use case to learn more.
Smarketing: meaning and benefits for companies
The phenomenon known as "Smarketing" refers to creating a strong relationship between Sales and Marketing, in order to align those departments and pursue common strategies and goals. The importance of alignment between Sales and Marketing within companies lies in the fact that when these departments work in harmony, it is easier to reach customers, create conversions and drive sales.
Ensuring collaboration to achieve shared goals leads to growth and increased revenue for the entire company.
This requires shared access to documentation and availability of information for the Sales and Marketing departments.
In this way, it will be possible to always have up-to-date information to design activities that turn leads into customers and improve the Customer Experience.
In Hubspot’s 2023 Sales Strategy & Trends report, data collected from 1,000 global sales professionals showed that 41% exceeded their sales targets last year. Among the various virtuous behaviours that have contributed to the achievement of the goal, there is the use of CRM tools, but also alignment with Marketing.
According to the report of LXA London "Sales and Marketing Alignment: Stats and Trends for 2022", in fact, businesses that have implemented an alignment of departments and functions of Sales and Marketing increase efficiency in closing deals by 67%.
We, therefore, understand the benefits of knowledge sharing and the importance of working in close contact, which is often not realized, both for the organizational structure of the company and for the difficulty of managing knowledge effectively.
Knowledge-sharing issues in Sales and Marketing
Many tasks performed by sales and marketing employees involve using data and information to produce new material. Let’s see some in detail:
Marketing tasks
- Develop the product communication strategy in the target market, to acquire new leads to be converted into customers. In this case, you need to access market analysis and forecast documents. Still, not all the knowledge is easily accessible due to file sharing permissions and, moreover, communication with other divisions is not always simple and immediate.
- Implement promotional tools to support sales activities and align all colleagues on the development of a marketing plan. In these activities, you need to access data on contacts and the status of ongoing negotiations with potential customers, contained in the CRM; but it takes time and resources to train employees to use the tools and the necessary information is not always available or shared.
Sales tasks
- Design and develop the targeting of potential customers with the information collected by marketing, to increase market shares and have up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. In this task, you need to access marketing materials and reports based on campaigns and other lead-collection activities; but these data are not always shared and documented effectively.
It is therefore clear that in each example exchanging information and sharing knowledge are essential elements to carrying out targeted actions and supporting sales activities. But how is the alignment between Marketing and Sales departments achieved?
How to foster marketing and sales collaboration with easily available information
To create a synergy in the Sales and Marketing department it is necessary to ensure easy access to the knowledge built by these divisions (such as marketing and sales strategy, sales and marketing plan and sales and marketing KPIs), based on the dissemination of the knowledge sharing culture.
The sales and marketing knowledge must be updated and easily available to those who need it to perform their work.
To ensure better performance of sales and marketing teams, however, you must first know the deficiencies present in both departments: those regarding the alignment strategy of the work, but above all those in the sharing of information within the company and in the management of the documentation in the knowledge base.
Since this phase of preliminary analysis could require a lot of resources if carried out internally, Pigro has developed a new feature, called Knowledge Insights, that deals precisely with measuring the quality of the company’s knowledge base, and identifying the most problematic areas.
For example, in the case of the sales and marketing area, it is important to understand how the knowledge-sharing process is carried out among employees; or if there are materials difficult to access or not updated, which are therefore misleading for those who have to consult them.
The two insights referred in particular to the "sales and marketing performance" are:
-Knowledge sharing - Pigro provides a list of documents that are not shared with the right people within the company, depending on the topic. Wrong access rights and permissions may cause usability issues and barriers to knowledge sharing. Pigro suggests how to change the sharing permission to access folders for figures that might find them relevant, so as to increase the team knowledge sharing.
-Broken link checker - Pigro can automatically identify similar documents with different access permissions, and find broken links in documents or links to content and media that are no longer available. In this way, it is possible to update the links in order to increase the usability and effectiveness of those documents.
Content findability is the number one problem for 41% of managers. And it’s going to increase, due to the large number of data and information produced today in organisations. Discover the other actionable insights provided by Pigro, and how can be useful for all company divisions. Stay tuned to find out the next use case!
Read also: How to improve Help Desk support content and Customer Service help articles' usability
Measure the quality of your knowledge base and access the Knowledge Insights from Pigro: start now!
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