In this episode, Bill discusses the importance of marketing and sales alignment in the B2B space. He emphasizes that 86% of the buyer's journey occurs online, making it crucial for the marketing team to provide the right content to guide prospects. Bill provides practical advice on how to address the sales and marketing alignment challenge, including mapping out the buyer's journey, identifying content gaps, and optimizing touchpoints. Gain insights on enhancing your marketing efforts and driving more effective sales engagement.
Are you looking for a simple way to get very tactical on aligning your sales and marketing departments and developing some content rapidly that will activate your buyers? Tune into our next episode for a quick roadmap on how you can execute a strategy to align sales and marketing today.
Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. I'm your host, Bill Woods. Today we're going to talk about marketing and sales alignment and the importance of making sure your marketing and sales team get together and make sure they're communicating with the prospect to get them where they need to go and get them the information they need.
If 86% of the buyer's journey occurs online, it is so very important that the marketing team provides those touch points, that content, that will allow that buyer to self-service and move themselves along that journey to the point where they want to contact the sales team. It's also so very important that your sales team understands that just because they've identified with the company, they've contacted your sales team, they don't immediately want to transition from the way they've been ingesting content, from the way they've been self-servicing and having that rep-less experience to continue to gather information, to continue to educate themselves and prepare that presentation for their buyer's committee at their organization.
So one of the things we want to do today is maybe demystify this process a little bit, simplify it, and give you some tactical advice and a roadmap to quickly execute a marketing and sales alignment content plan that you can deliver to your prospective buyers.
So when we look at the entire buyer's journey, it's very important for us to recognize that 86% of the buyer's journey today happens online. And this is in the B2B space. So we need to really recognize that, let's say, for instance, if we use an example of 10 touch points, let's say that prospect is going to have 10 touch points with your company. Well, 8 and a half of those are going to happen online. So we need to make sure, as a marketing team, we're providing our brand messaging, our unique value proposition, a recognition of the client's problems, and that we can solve them with our offering. And when we look at that 86% of the buyer's journey, it's so very important that we tie all these things together and that we have a great cohesive content journey for those prospects.
At the same time, when we look at the Gartner study that talks about 72% of buyers want to have a rep-less experience. We have to recognize that as soon as they hit that contact button, they're not immediately going to want to abandon their current self-service approach to learning about the product or service or solution that we offer. They're going to want to continue to read case studies, have a lot of sales enablement data, watch videos, and we really need to make sure that sales and marketing gets aligned on one, recognizing this shift in the buyer's journey. And then also, really works together to make sure that from the inception, from that first contact point, we're having that seamless experience the entire way through the purchase process, that everything flows and is very, very consistent.
So what hasn't been working for companies that we've talked to? Whenever they want to address the sales and marketing alignment issue, here's what hasn't been working. A lot more internal meetings, more Zoom calls, more conversations, just general, you know, being bogged down in the traditional approach to getting these things done. So when we look at the marketing and sales alignment problem or challenge in our organization, what can we do and what can we avoid? So what can we avoid is one, more meetings, more Zoom calls, launching subcommittees, and launching into these deep studies to try and find alignment between marketing and sales.
One of the things we see that is working really, really well and where we're seeing a lot of success is where companies do the following. One, they get really tactical and agile. They get together very quickly, they map out a complete buyer's journey, and then they do a content map. They look at the buyer's journey and make sure they understand where they start and where they finish, not only from a marketing standpoint, but the buyer's journey the entire way through the sales process. If we map that out, that buyer's journey out completely, and then we overlay our content offering and identify the gaps, we can very quickly see where we're missing information or where a client on their journey might feel abandoned or not able to self-service and not able to take that next step in their journey.
If we go through that process very rapidly and map it out in a way that everybody can agree quickly, we can decide, okay, what are the things we need to do to fill those gaps to make sure potential clients or prospects can move the entire way through that journey through the marketing information and market presentation into the sales presentation. Once we have this buyer's journey established and we have this content map with our gaps identified, what are the very tactical steps that we can take to solve this problem quickly? And this is solving the problem without a six-month window, without these long drawn out processes and expensive endeavors. Here's a practical guide on how to address these problems.
Number one, get really gritty and turn a camera on and have candid conversations with your prospective audience, just like I'm doing today. Just get on the camera, get leadership from your teams, both marketing and sales, have conversations and just talk to the client like they're a real person. Don't make a presentation in a stadium. Don't think you're talking to the masses. You're talking one-on-one to that prospect. And you are filling in those gaps in the journey by having that conversation with them. Once you record these videos and and sometimes that might seem like an oversimplification, but honestly just turn the camera on and talk. Once you record these videos the next thing is to get them edited, which can be done relatively inexpensively, and then publish them on YouTube publish them on your social media channels mostly, and then also lean into that content on your website. Make sure you're integrating all of that video content that addresses the gaps that are in your content map that will fulfill that buyer's journey and just get them out there. Once you have this content, you can then look to repurpose it and reimagine it and reuse it time and time again.
We often get tired of our own marketing. We get tired of the content we produce because one, we were there when we had the idea. We were there when we wrote it, created it, shot it, edited it, distributed it. And by the time it goes to market, it may have been in the hopper or in our processes for weeks or months. By the time it hits the market, we're sick and tired of it. But recognize that your client is seeing that for the first time. And for years to come, your client will see that for the first time. So just continue to reuse that content.
So when we look at how does that impact the marketing and sales alignment problem, when we have a content map that overlays our buyer's journey and we make sure we address the gaps that exist and we have a full-funnel buyer's journey with content that will address each point in that journey, we then just need to make sure that we don't stop just at the marketing qualification process. That we carry that through the sales process.
Now some pushback you may receive from your sales team is, well, it depends. Every client's different. I never say the same things. Every solution we offer is custom. While that may be true, there are common questions and common opportunities that exist in every sales process that sales team members lean into the same exact presentation time and time again. This is what we need to record, this is what we need to present and consistently saturate our market with this information and make it available for that self-service process.
So when we look at the marketing and sales alignment problem and we look at that 86% of the buyer's journey that occurs online, if we're really disciplined and map out that buyer's journey, if we then overlay the buyer's journey with the content map and identify the gaps that may exist, if we then fill those gaps with the right content that will help the prospect self-service and go through the process of attention, interest, desire and action. And then we take it a step further and we move into that sales process and we make sure there's content available to move them through each step of the sales process in a self-service way, but then also in a way that our sales team can help guide them through that content, we will have much better sales and marketing alignment and have quicker paths to purchase for our prospective buyers.
So when you think about what you're doing in your sales and marketing alignment process and trying to address these, maybe take a short time period and try a more tactical approach where you just get really gritty, jump in, turn a camera on, address those gaps, and really try to answer those questions. Make some tests and go out there and use this information, publish it, and see what happens.
There's a saying I've been watching on some of the socials and it says, no one knows what they're doing. Some people just go ahead and do it anyway. In this case in content, we have to get over imposter syndrome and we just have to put the information out there and let our buyers self-serve and bring them along that buyer's journey to the point where they're willing to contact us.