Sales professionals waste 2 days per week doing this

According to research conducted by the CMO Council salespeople invest upwards of 40% of their time creating presentations and other sales cycle content — that’s two days per week wasted away! Sales leaders have to be flabbergasted by this undesired reality, as sales enablement should be the #1 responsibility of a B2B marketing team.

How should sales leaders engage their marketing counterparts for help?

1. Get marketing engaged in sales cycles. If the sales teams don’t see value in marketing directly or indirectly supporting them behind the scenes (at a minimum), then you probably don’t have the right marketing folks rowing with you. Marketing can add value in the sales cycles by helping create presentation decks, crafting the messages for demonstrations and identifying and securing customer references. These are all great ways to support the revenue generation efforts, saving your sales team valuable time.
2.  Ask marketing for help with profiling the ideal buying audiences, and creating a messaging framework for delivering differentiated messages that resonate with buyers’ pains. Engaging marketing in sales cycles will help expose them to the needs, pains and desires of the buyers. A good marketing team will then build on that by engaging the market directly, both existing and prospective customers, through roundtables, where marketing can directly explore the business, financial and personal pains the buyers are battling in use cases they regularly experience. Together, these experiences will help them create compelling messages that resonate with the buyers as the buyers seek to distinguish all the solution alternatives.

With the experience of supporting sales cycles, and insight from buyer roundtables in hand, marketing will be equipped to refine existing sales kit assets and create new ones. This way sales teams won’t be wasting 40% of their time creating their own tools!