The Challenges
It is commonly accepted, even among marketing teams, that sales organizations take advantage of relatively few of the assets marketing creates. Studies done by the American Marketing Association and CMO Council show that sales teams ignore 80 to 90 percent of the sales tools that marketing gives them.

The reasons behind this disconnect vary from example to example, but at a certain level, the root cause can be boiled down to a difference in priorities.

Where marketing is generally creating tools and messages that describe a solution and its value proposition as a whole, Sales is often in need of messaging that speaks more directly and personally to a specific audience.

Think of this as the difference between answering a customer question by handing them a brochure and answering that question by having a conversation. The content and messages may be fine unto themselves, but they are often in the wrong form, at the wrong level, or are packaged up in such a way that they can’t be easily repurposed to a given situation.

Marketing team performance is often under nearly as much pressure and scrutiny as sales team performance. Today, marketing executives need to be able to show a direct relationship between marketing investments and sales results, and not just more abstract concepts such as market awareness or even website traffic.

Without being able to demonstrate impact to the bottom line, marketing spend is no more immune to cuts than any other form of spending.

From the perspective of the marketing team, then, it is very important to align more closely with Sales, not just from the traditional perspective of ensuring that the right messages are reaching the market unaltered, but also to ensure that marketing investments intended to directly support and benefit the sales team are being used to good effect by the sales team.

In an era of increased marketing accountability, any wasted investments should be redirected into things that will actually add value and get used by the sales force.

The Solution
Kadient sales knowledge solutions help achieve alignment between your marketing and sales teams.

With Kadient, your marketing team can easily capture the messaging, content and tools they’ve created and put them into the hands of the sales team, via a web application that helps sales people make the most of those assets.

And as your sales people begin to use these messages, marketing benefits from an understanding of what resources are being used, which are being ignored, and can even take advantage of feedback from the sales team as to what should be changed to better suit their needs.

As tools, content and messages are updated for any reason, all users benefit from those updates, as well as from the investments in accuracy, quality and branding standardization that marketing normally builds into its deliverables.

Through this ongoing cycle of releasing assets to the field, gauging their use and impact and responding to feedback about things that are missing or not quite right, your marketing team will be able to align much more closely with sales, delivering the field enablement tools that have the greatest impact, while avoiding spending time on things that ultimately never get used.

This alignment is critical to helping improve the performance of the sales team, keep the performance of the sales team strong in an evolving selling climate, and optimize marketing investments.

The Benefits
Kadient helps marketing more effectively meet the needs of the sales organization, while at the same time improving sales compliance with marketing-driven initiatives such as positioning and branding.

Kadient can help you address a major source of the friction that often exists between marketing and sales in a feedback-rich and constructive manner, improving the performance of marketing and sales, and in turn driving overall company success.