Marketing’s goal is to ensure that every seller has the required knowledge, skills, processes, and behaviors to optimize every interaction with buyers. And equipping reps to make the most out of their time with potential buyers is as much marketing’s responsibility as it is the sales team’s.

While sales numbers may get directly attributed to the sales team, there are a variety of ways marketing contributes to conversions. Marketing teams can enhance their contribution by optimizing the ways they support their sales team in the field.

Six Ways Marketers Can Help Drive Sales

1. Listen, Communicate, and Collaborate with Sales
For marketers, effective sales enablement starts with strong alignment with sales. Marketers and salespeople should be active collaborators during the initial stages of content development, tactical brainstorming, and technical implementation. Reps have valuable in-the-trenches insights from the sales field that can empower marketing teams to ensure their processes, tools, and tactics align with measurable sales goals at the outset of any campaign.

2. Give Sales Teams What They Need
Aligning marketing processes with sales goals is only the start – next, marketers have to execute and equip salespeople to go out and sell. This takes upfront collaboration on what works and what doesn’t work during the sales presentation. Elements like which content formats drive prospect engagement, what barriers prevent reps from accessing content, and how content can help streamline the conversion process are all topics that should be part of the dialogue when marketers and salespeople talk about what they need in the field to make sells.

3. Make Sales Reps More Effective and Productive
The challenges of a time-sensitive, increasingly wireless sales field require that reps have the tools to be as impactful and efficient as possible during the sales presentation. It’s up to marketers to equip them with content tools for doing so.

Using rich media content, surveys, forms, and calculators for examples, enables salespeople to go beyond articulating a solution and deliver a streamlined, interactive presentation experience where a prospect can learn about a product, get their questions answered, and sign a contract all in one sitting.

Stay tuned for 4, 5, and 6 in our next blog, Marketing Can Help Drive Sales? Say What! Part Two!