Alright fellow marketers, it’s time to get real. I enjoy, much like the rest of the professionals with my job title, the sweet satisfaction that blaming my shortcomings on my sales team brings. Why not, right? They really are the perfect scapegoat. Gosh, do they make it easy to say, “Well, I created the content! You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make ‘em drink!” But in the spirit of the holidays, and for the good of the company and all, I’m going to quit the blame game. Do I smell a New Years’ resolution brewin’??
As marketers, let’s change tack. For the sake of our egos, let’s say our content is perfect. For the sake of changing tack, let’s say our sales team wants to use our content. So, where’s the problem? Ever heard that saying, “Out of sight, out of mind”? No matter how amazing our content may be, if we don’t make it readily accessible in a viable format sales will NOT use it. As much as we’d like to, we really can’t blame them for that; we’re not even leading the horse to the water. We’ve shipped our horse to the Sahara while we’re here bathing in the pool, sipping a strawberry daiquiri, getting annoyed that we’re drinking alone.
This problem isn’t going away. As Millennials begin to make up the majority of the workforce, they will require the utmost efficiency. Millennials, myself included, grew up with the latest and greatest. We’ve never known a world without technology, and we’re all too familiar with asking, “Is there an App for that?” We ask because we are certain there is a better, faster, cheaper way of doing whatever it is we’re doing. Millennial salespeople will not be marketing’s scapegoat. Instead, they’ll turn it right around and address the lack of transparency, digital savviness, efficiency, and effectiveness between marketing and sales. And you know what? They’ll be right. I understand that change is hard for some, but it’s also the only way we can progress. It’s imperative to our success. We have the capabilities to make the content transfer from marketing to sales seamless, so why aren’t we taking advantage of it?
It’s vital content all be in one place. It needs to be able to be accessed, filtered, and edited by marketing and sales teams. It’s critical that sales can easily access the cloud and create one-of-a-kind presentations for their prospective customers. Marketing must be able to embed relevant content such as, video, case studies, white papers, PPT decks, etc. A cloud-based tool for creating, communicating and capturing value with a content repository is the only way to quit the blame game in this new era.
Want to keep your horses hydrated? Check out LeveragePoint’s watering hole.
**author’s note: I do not believe salespeople are horses. Although, they too are quite majestic in their craft. I just get extremely carried away with idioms.**
