Every successful business knows the importance of marketing and branding, but sometimes those principals get pushed to the wayside when it comes to internal, and sometimes external, documents. The importance of brand unity in sales materials, proposals, and anything a potential customer sees can drastically impact your brand image. This encompasses the entire process – the first display ad, website interaction, sales calls, becoming a customer, customer communication, and user experience.
It’s not just smaller businesses who aren’t as marketing-savvy that are struggling with this, it’s medium-sized and even enterprise companies too.
Focus on Marketing and Sales Alignment to Enhance the Customer’s Journey
A marketer’s job is to create a memorable experience for the customer that sells the value of your product. To do that, every element of a customer’s journey should be top-notch and customized. The buying experience – from the very first piece of marketing collateral a prospect receives, to walking into your office doors, to the appearance and function of your mobile apps – it should all be consistent.
And, this shouldn’t end once you’ve landed them as a customer. The consistent customer experience should be visible through every touchpoint they have with you and should last throughout the lifetime of your relationship together.
Also Read: Five Things That Will Redefine Customer Experience in 2018
What Are the Consequences of Inconsistencies in Marketing and Sales Alignment?
If you fail at keeping your internal and external marketing consistent, does this really affect your company and the marketing and sales alignment? A recent study by McKinsey & Company says that B2B companies with strong and consistent branding are 20 percent more successful than those that are weak or inconsistent.
One important touchpoint that is often overlooked, yet easy to remedy, is the sales document. Every customer interacts with a sales contract or proposal, so it makes sense to create an attractive, branded yet functional document. This gets your company’s branding in front of every customer in a meaningful way and creates another memorable brand experience.
Of course, this makes sense to marketers, but getting salespeople to execute on this can be difficult. Salespeople can be resistant to change. They may not want to change their sales proposals with new logos and branding because they’re comfortable with older versions that have worked for them in the past.
While giving in may seem quicker on the forefront, this will definitely hurt your brand in the long run. This marketing collateral will go unused, resulting in a waste of both time and money.
Also Read: Why Every Marketer Needs to Focus on Conversations in 2018
Make Technology Work for You for Better Marketing and Sales Alignment
While aligning your internal and external collateral may seem like a daunting task, there are several martech tools that work with CRMs to make integrations between marketing and sales teams seamless. These types of tools also often allow feedback loops, which help ensure that your company is producing the best possible internal and external documents and, in turn, the best customer experience.
In addition to creating a positive customer experience, using technology makes your sales team more efficient. When salespeople have to search around for the right logo, tagline, etc., this causes them to spend more time than they should be executing tasks, building sales proposals and creating marketing collateral. As you know, time lost is money lost.
A consistent brand experience builds confidence with your customers and is the basis for a lasting relationship. An arsenal of consistently-branded marketing materials isn’t a “nice to have” but a “must have.”
From small to medium-sized to enterprise businesses, this isn’t something that can fall to the bottom of the priority list. Strong brands create more memorable companies and leave better impressions on customers, and that has a direct impact on your bottom line.
Recommended Read: Want to Boost Revenue? Start by Aligning Marketing and Sales
