How to increase B2B sales with the right marketing materials.

What’s the most important job for your marketing materials? Helping your sales reps to make stronger, more effective pitches. If there’s a disconnect between the marketing message and the salesperson’s pitch, customers end up confused, unsatisfied, and unwilling to buy.

The big question is: how do you make sales and marketing work together instead of against each other?

I'll cover four key factors for creating effective B2B marketing materials that will help increase sales. But first, let’s do a little quiz to analyze the current state of your marketing materials.

First things first: Are you using the wrong marketing materials?

To find out if you’re using the wrong marketing materials, check your success indicators:

• Is your sales process based on targeted personas or do you take a one-size-fits-all approach?
• Are you getting client feedback on marketing materials? Is it aligned with their interests, meeting their needs, and bringing them value?
• At a high level, are you closing deals? Are you getting far enough in the sales cycle to persuade your audience to implement your solution?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no” or “not enough”, it’s time to reevaluate and improve your marketing materials.

What makes B2B marketing materials effective?

Effective B2B marketing materials essentially have three jobs:

1. Differentiate your product or service in the client’s mind
2. Demonstrate the value or ROI you could bring to your client’s business
3. Show clients that your offer is a solution that can work in conjunction with and improve their current business operations

To communicate the benefits of your offer effectively, a collaborative approach between sales and marketing is necessary. When a sales strategy is created, marketing needs to be in the same room, developing the content and helping sales reach objectives and goals.

To start this collaboration, you need to spark a conversation between sales and marketing. Set up a meeting where sales can ask marketing directly which materials work best, and marketing can learn client pain points and other insights firsthand.

A key factor to productive meetings with both teams is open and honest conversation. This article from Business.com provides 9 tips on running productive meetings.

Remember that the conversation between sales and marketing should be ongoing, not a one-time thing. The sales path is never straight, and having a steady flow of feedback from sales and the marketplace allows marketing to adjust accordingly.

How to increase B2B sales with marketing materials.

The ultimate goal of marketing materials is to boost revenue. Here are the four factors that will help your marketing materials effectively increase B2B sales:

1. Align sales and marketing

Aligning both departments can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing. That’s a tough number to ignore. To produce the right materials for sales, marketing must be strategic in their choice of messaging, which is best done with feedback provided from sales. This is your first step toward creating alignment, but obviously, there’s more that you can do. Download our white paper The true cost of the status quo to learn more.

2. Gather client data

Few companies  have analytical data for what reps are using in the field and how successful those materials are. By compiling usage statistics for each piece of content marketing produces, you’ll get a clearer picture of what’s working and what isn’t. You can take this a step further by gathering feedback from clients, which will allow marketing to continually improve content based on real client opinions.

3. Focus on the buyer’s journey

If marketing materials aren’t in clients’ hands when they’re ready for them, they’re useless. For marketing materials to be effective, they need to fit the prospect's stage in the buyer's journey. Sales reps can't just use one pitch; they need to deliver at the right time, in the right medium, and with the right message.

A lack of lead nurturing and attention to the buyer’s cycle can be fatal for your marketing investment. With 79% of marketing leads never converting into sales, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to your buyer’s journey* and take control of your content.

*New to the concept of the buyer’s journey? Check out HubSpot’s quick definition.

4. Make your content customizable

The right sales material must be quick and easy to customize for your particular prospect. This allows reps to respond quickly and use custom pitches—two practices that improve the likelihood of making a sale.

One great way you can customize your content is by using Triptych. Triptych is a sales content management and channel marketing enablement platform that allows sales reps to customize, order, and provide feedback on all sales materials while giving marketing the data they need to strategically manage and produce better content.

Learn more about what Triptych can do to empower your business on our features page.

Make sales and marketing work for your business.

The best marketing materials move the sales process forward with the right customers, incorporate helpful customer feedback, and close deals.

In this article, we talked about how you can improve your marketing materials and increase B2B sales by:

1. Aligning sales and marketing
2. Gathering insightful client data
3. Focusing on the buyer’s journey
4. Making your content easy to customize

By following these four steps, you’ll help sales and marketing work together and create marketing materials that exceed business goals. That’s something everyone in the business can get behind.