Align Marketing and Sales Materials with Creative Presentation Tools

One of the biggest obstacles to success many companies face is a disconnect between their marketing and sales teams. Usually, this arises from a misunderstanding between the two departments in terms of goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). You can fix this by organizing a process that aligns itself with your customer’s journey—creating a simple lead processing flow that originates from marketing and carries straight into sales. And with the help of next-level presentation software like Ingage, you can additionally mitigate interdepartmental miscommunications by aligning the two departments’ creative tools.

Aligning a Single Sales and Marketing Journey

The best way to align your sales and marketing team’s processes is to identify the unique journey your customers travel along. Then pattern your team’s internal flows so they overlap with specific parts of this journey.

For the sake of simplification, let’s say your average lead travels along the following steps:

  1. Awareness: They become aware that they may need to purchase a product or service similar to what your business provides.
  2. Consideration: At this point, your lead is scoping out the market and shopping around (both you and your competition).
  3. Decision: Now that they’ve assessed the resource landscape, your potential lead assesses which product will be best for their needs.
  4. Purchase: Bam! The lead has made a selection and is now a customer—hopefully yours.

Of course, the exact journey will vary from market to market and lead to lead. But consider these four steps the broad strokes of the process.

The Goals of Sales and Marketing

Building to match this four-act structure sounds simple enough, right? That is, until your two teams create two completely different workflows to track the same demographic.

This happens because, as mentioned earlier, marketing and sales often have completely different goals. Marketing campaigns are long-term, meaning they track the number of leads over time. Since they are responsible for creating a positive name for your business, marketing also tracks brand awareness via a variety of channels.

Your sales department, on the other hand, tracks quotas within a given period. This isn’t surprising, since they take on a more active role—chasing down new leads and closing sales. Ideally, the sales department picks up right where marketing stops. But sometimes there are overlaps—and this is where the problem of misalignment starts. So how do you harmonize the two?

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Aligning Processes

The first and perhaps easiest way to harmonize the two teams is to set unified goals that each can strive for. This isn’t always easy, and if not articulated clearly, can become future points of contention. However, identifying KPIs that both teams can hit is a good way to get them on the same page.

But while you’re harmonizing their objectives, you much also sync the toolboxes they use to achieve those objectives. For example, a standardized set of creative presentation tools for both teams to use can cement brand recall and recognition. If both teams use collaborative software, they are quite literally working off the same playbook.

Create Brand Consistency in Sales and Marketing Assets with Creative Presentation Tools

Brand recall and recognition resurface again and again when discussing harmonizing teams, and for good reason. Brand recall makes it easier to sync the entire marketing-through-sales process by ensuring that leads are already familiar with your brand when sales come in.

A huge component of this is ensuring your branding is consistent in all of your collateral. Utilizing creative presentation tools like Ingage to create cohesive marketing materials and sales presentations, you can create overall awareness that people will begin to associate with your business.

A Cohesive Marketing Edge

Brand awareness is a big component of marketing, and brand consistency is a big component of creating that awareness. Famed art director and designer Paul Rand said that “design is the silent ambassador of your brand,” and it’s true. Look at globally ubiquitous brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Apple: the connection they all have is instant recognizability, thanks to an unwavering commitment to a particular design aesthetic. By ensuring your presentation tools and materials follow a set of brand guidelines—no matter how creative you choose to get with individual collateral—you’re well on your way to cementing your image in leads’ minds.

Recall For Closing The Sale

Everything above applying to marketing is equally applicable to sales—especially sales units that interact directly with their leads. Advanced sales presentation materials with themes that follow branding guidelines utilize this recall potential to help customers warm up to your products based on their perception of your brand. If your marketing department did the legwork to position your overall brand positively, this should translate to a warmer reception of what you are selling when sales teams come knocking.

Communication For Brand Consistency

The key to making sure that your brand is represented consistently throughout the process is communication between your teams. Start by holding regular meetings that can further impress your branding guidelines. Also, integrate tools that make collaboration and the creation of creative presentation tools and templates easier.

Creating Aligned Marketing Assets

An integral part of solidifying brand recognition is ensuring that your brand is represented the same throughout all of your marketing materials and sales presentations. This generates brand awareness, and—if the brand recognition is positive—can increase chances of lead conversion.

A great way to unify your marketing and sales materials is to implement a sales presentation tool like Ingage. Ingage’s creative suite empowers you to create powerful and dynamic marketing and sales materials. You can use these tools to ensure alignment throughout your materials, including your sales forms, presentations and interactive media, which helps leads recognize and remember your brand. The inclusion of a robust analytics feature in the Ingage suite then gathers data that can help you better understand what makes your customers tick!

To learn more about Ingage and how new, creative presentation tools can synchronize and level up your marketing and sales teams, try a demo today!

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