4 must-have assets that marketers should create to support sales activities

Peter Drucker, ‘the founder of modern management’ said:

‘Marketing is so basic [meaning, foundational] that it is not just enough to have a strong sales department and to entrust marketing to it. Marketing is not only much broader than selling; it is not a specialised activity at all. It encompasses the entire business.

It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is from the customer’s point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise.’

Marketing and sales don’t just need to work together to hand over leads. They also need to ensure the handover process is smooth from an external perspective — the lead’s perspective — too. As far as that person is concerned, every interaction is marketing.

That prospective customer is forming an impression of you regarding your expertise, trustworthiness and likability. That impression has to be consistent, throughout. Salespeople have a role to play in delivering that marketing to the customer to persuade them and build a relationship to the point that they’re willing to buy.

Sales collateral, then, is the marketing content that supports this effort.

Here are four key pieces of sales collateral your salespeople need to succeed:

1. Win library

Sales collateral includes things like product literature and customer evidence. Case studies are extremely persuasive pieces of sales collateral. However, time is precious, both for your sales team, for the marketers creating such case studies and for the prospects reading them.

It helps to be pithy.

Here’s an idea we use ourselves: a database of micro-case studies for salespeople to refer to during the sales process, which are not publicly available. That way, they’re quick to create and easy to reference. We call this the ‘win library’. Sales can extract data points from this library and insert them into emails or as natural part of a conversation.

2. On-hand resources

Another thing you can create is indexed lists of relevant content resources, collated by marketers who know where all that stuff lives, and again, to be delivered to leads by a salesperson.

Infographics, diagrams, images, videos — marketing can support sales with all of this material, which is on-brand and curated for their needs and the needs of prospects. These resources must be easy to find and reference in the moment during a conversation or when putting together an email. So, ideally, you want a dynamic database tagged by service lines, sectors and topic areas that acts as the sales team’s knowledgebase. We suggest using Notion or something similar, like Excel, to make your database.

3. Sales messaging

Beyond marketing emails, sales collateral is also sales email copy or LinkedIn message templates ideally crafted by experienced copywriters and deployed by salespeople. Often, this is a collaborative effort. If marketing and sales emails are all created separately, then it’s easy for the tone to shift wildly from one to the other. That is a jarring experience for recipients.

Not that every email must be written in this way, but if you’re building out an automated sequence of sales emails, then this is the time to involve your best wordsmiths. They can craft emails directly, make guidance for best practices or run regular writing training for the sales team. That way, the basics of tone and style (and spelling!) are well-understood by your key communicators, even if they aren’t full-time copywriters.

4. Proposal deck

Finally, marketers (copywriters and graphic designers) can help put together the all-important proposal deck.

When a salesperson is pitching to a prospect, a slide deck is the visual anchor for that presentation. It helps prospects to understand what they’re buying, so of course, it’s one of the most important pieces of sales collateral there is. The telling is in the showing.

When a proposal deck is high quality, while the prospect is viewing a slide, they’re also subconsciously ‘reading’ your company — and making gut decisions about how you do business.

A bit of give-and-take

Marketing has a part to play in the sales cycle and salespeople have a part to play in marketing, too. It’s their insight into the customer that will help marketers tailor their campaigns to the right audience, about the right things.

And if the sales team is targeting a particular area for the next quarter, then you want that targeting to be reflected in the marketing campaigns for that quarter, as well.

While these departments have different ways of working, metrics for success and priorities, they must nevertheless be tightly aligned and communicate consistently.