From a customer’s perspective, there are few things worse than being engaged by a company that clearly has no idea who you are and what you need. In our data filled world, businesses no can longer plead ignorance – sending marketing collateral that is highly irrelevant must end.
Unfortunately, this long-standing issue among marketing and sales departments isn’t easily fixed. Creating relevant marketing materials takes time and energy, and in the meantime, prospects may have lost interest. At the same time, companies want to maintain control of their brand image, which is why they don’t want resellers and field agents creating their own materials. It’s a marketing Catch-22.
A report from the Content Marketing Institute highlights the problem, finding that salespeople spend a whopping 30 hours per month searching for and creating relevant collateral. This is because 90 percent of marketing deliverables have been deemed unusable and useless by sales teams. From the perspective of the sales agent, the options are either losing time to create materials or losing relevancy to be timely.
Alleviating Relevancy and Resources Issues with Distributed Marketing Automation
This is precisely where distributed marketing automation comes into play. With the right solution, businesses can develop libraries of brand-compliant, pre-approved assets and content. With this collateral in hand, salespeople will be better able to respond to inquiries and leads in a relevant yet timely fashion.
Typically your local sales team knows the customer the best, and a marketing collateral builder arms them with the brand compliant messaging and content they need. This saves both marketing and sales departments time, while eliminating some of the tension and chaos that arises from prospect engagement.
In fact, companies that deploy distributed marketing automation solutions have been able to expedite the sales cycle by 70 percent, while also achieving a 54 percent improvement in hitting set quotas. Marketing automation takes care of most of the heavy lifting in terms of execution, enabling salespeople to focus on their core jobs – selling products and services to people and converting them into paying customers.
Distributed marketing automation empowers everyone involved with the sales and marketing department. It allows marketers to maintain control of their brand while helping salespeople engage customers in meaningful and relevant ways. This is why many companies are making distributed marketing automation a core part of their promotional strategies.
