We’ve all heard the edict, “Ready, aim, fire.” Unfortunately, many marketers follow a different directive—“Fire, ready, aim.” They have it backwards. They jump into executing marketing tactics and campaigns before they understand their target, then they try to adjust and optimize after the fact.

A strong sales process helps the prospect along their journey but also acts as a roadmap to consistently close deals. Each action in the sales process should lead to greater connections and business growth. In order to gain revenue for your business, the key is to know how one element influences your entire sales process.

The primary purpose of marketing content is to drive traffic to your website and generating leads, but it’s not its only purpose. The content your marketing team creates as a part of the organization’s marketing strategy can and should be repurposed to support the entire sales process.

This includes resources like blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, Infographics, webinar recordings, and videos. Each of these resources can be used to reinforce your sales message, provide additional insight, and answer questions your prospects didn’t even know they had.

In short, they help remove friction as prospects move from the awareness stage, through the consideration stage, and into the decision stage. When marketing resources are appropriately mapped to the various stages of the buyer’s journey, the velocity of the sales process will increase, and sales cycles will shorten.

When marketers develop their inbound marketing strategy, they’re typically focused on two primary objectives. First, they want to extend their brand. Then they want to generate leads. So, they’re creating content, plans, campaigns, and tactics to build an audience that drives traffic to their website.

But you don’t want traffic to just show up and leave. You want to build functionality, tactics, and content that will grab the attention of those visitors and get them to convert leads —into sales opportunities that they can transition to their sales team.

Those are two great objectives to try to accomplish, but there’s a third objection that marketers often forget or ignore — your marketing strategy.

Are you using content in the sales process? How do you use content in the sales process?

Likely, your marketing team has created a large amount of great content that's not only beneficial for lead generation but is also helpful for lead nurturing. This content could range from informational blog posts to eBooks, checklists, or industry guides. 

In this video, I share one important way to utilize content in the sales process that many salespeople overlook. This one, simple tip can help improve a salesperson's sales performance.

A good theatrical performance can transport you to different places and times, and it can help you experience situations that you’ve never encountered before. It can change the way think and feel and provide a whole new way of looking at a situation. Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tony Award Winning Actor, says, “That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds, and the way they think.”

Competition for your prospects’ business is fierce. It’s likely that your competition’s sales team is just as hungry as yours. However, it’s not always the best salesperson that wins the business. According to HubSpot, only 19% of decision-makers want to connect with a salesperson when they are the Awareness stage of their buying journey. The Awareness stage is when the prospect is beginning to explore and first learning about their options and potential solutions. Since they’re not talking to your salespeople, it’s critical that your marketing provides your team with the winning edge. 

You can’t think of your marketing database as just a list of names and contact information. It’s so much more than that. This data represents what’s possible for your business. It’s your future customers and referral sources. It’s next month’s closed deals and next year’s revenue. A company’s marketing database can be the lifeblood of its revenue growth strategy. Consequently, it should be regarded as a key intellectual asset of the business. As with any corporate asset, there should be a plan to protect it, enhance, grow it and leverage it.

Uber has disrupted and transformed the transportation business because they focused on being easy to do business with. They’ve eliminated as much friction in the sales process as possible. No more standing in line to hail a cab. No more stumbling for a credit card or scrounging for cash. No more stuffing hard-to-read receipts in your wallet. And because Uber is easy to engage and easy to work with, they have experienced dramatic growth.

The objective of every inbound marketing program is to generate leads and build a consistent sales pipeline. It would be ideal if every lead that was generated was highly qualified and highly motivated. That’s what the sales team is craving, right? If that was the case, then it would make sense that every lead should be handed off to the sales team right away. Unfortunately, the real world is not that straightforward.

While inbound marketing will generate qualified/motivated leads, it will also produce “not-ready-to-buy-yet” leads (Not Ready) and “not-sure-if-this-is-an-opportunity-or-not” leads (Not Sure).  So how should these leads be handled?  Should they be passed to sales too?

In the work we do with media companies, staffing firms, and other professional service businesses, two topics consistently appearing on our clients’ radar screens are how to accelerate prospects’ movement through their sales pipeline and how to close more sales, faster.

There are basically two areas we focus on as causes for a slow sales process.

First, we look for key infrastructure that may be missing or misused or underused. This can range from lack of sales training programs to missing technology like a CRM or marketing automation platform.

Second, we look at micro-level factors focused mainly on how the firm engages with prospects on a one-to-one or customized level. We know to a high degree of certainty that if a firm is using a one-size-fits-all approach to closing a sale, then a more customizable approach may be just the ticket for reaching sales goals quicker.

In this post, we’ve summarized what's holding you back from making your sales process faster.