More About This Episode The Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast helps industry professionals find better ways to grow leads, sales and outperform the competition. It’s designed to give insights on how to create a results-driven digital marketing strategy for companies of any size. This week, Steve Coffey, Venveo’s Director of Growth, is co-hosting with Zach. Together, they talk about the recent AIA Show and key takeaways for manufacturers they have seen over the first six months of 2023. AIA 2023 Fresh back from AIA 2023, Steve had two immediate, very important, insights to share. First, he says how there was less attendance than organizers may have wanted. But despite that, there was a lot of high-quality interaction. Second, and more importantly, there was one particular booth that Steve raved about. “There was a puppy booth. An actual booth where you could go in and hold a puppy.” Utilize the Convergence of Marketing and Sales If Zach had to pick a word to describe 2023 so far that word would be convergence. “We're starting to see more and more of this convergence of marketing and sales happening in the industry.” Zach and Steve break down three ways manufacturers need to take advantage of this convergence. #1: Create Shared Goals and KPIs “The number one way that marketing and sales can converge is shared goals and KPIs,” explains Steve. Usually, sales has their own set of goals, objectives and KPIs while marketing has a separate set of goals, objectives and KPIs. Sales wants marketing to give them more leads, but when they get those leads, they say they aren’t the best quality or the right type of lead. Marketing gets upset because they were just told to provide leads. Avoid the tension and conflict between both teams by creating shared goals. This not only helps them but the customer as well. “When you align the two with a shared set of goals and KPIs, you can collectively pursue the experience that the individual needs to have with your company. It creates a cohesive environment. When you have a set of shared goals and KPIs, you can construct a better user journey,” says Steve. You can’t just say you are going to increase your lead rates by X amount. Ask yourself: What does that look like from the user experience? What kind of nurturing do you need to create? What kind of marketing campaign does the sales team need to nurture that conversation for the six months until their project begins? Alignment on goals and KPIs helps your company craft a cohesive customer journey that, in turn, increases conversions into sales. The Problem With Leads When marketing drives leads that sales say aren’t good enough, there are a number of contributing factors to the issue — the biggest factor being misalignment on messaging. “The messaging has to be very precise, and it has to tell me why I want your product or your brand and how I buy it. If I don't know those two things, then I'm going to struggle with the follow-up or the nurture campaign after I have a conversation with the sales rep,” explains Steve. “If I don't know why I would want your product or how I buy it, that puts more work on the sales rep, and then that facilitates a harder conversation.” With the right marketing messaging, the prospect already knows what the company does, why they would want to buy and how to buy. That frees the sales rep up to focus on whether the product meets their specific qualifications and needs, moving the prospect down the funnel faster. #2: Co-Creation of Content and Resources Often, the sales team will create their own materials — and it’s almost always out of alignment with branding, meaning the message is off. And on the other side, the marketing team isn’t fully utilizing the sales data and information. “The conversation needs to be between the marketing department and the sales team to co-create the content. Because if you can meet the pain points that the sales team has with all of their conversations and then you align that with what they're interacting with at the front end of the conversation, you're going to have a lot more work done before they ever get on the call with a rep,” says Steve. #3: Sharing Data Consistently The sales team collects a lot of data. However, how they collect that data and how it’s shared (if it’s even shared) can widely vary. “There's very few companies that I have interacted with that collect data from their sales department in a really effective way that marketing can go and build campaigns off of,” says Steve. You need to have a technology plan within your company that every single sales rep is trained on, no matter how small or large their territory, where they can input their data. Everyone should be collecting the same data and uploading it the same way. “If you're spending a lot of money on Salesforce, you're spending a lot of money on HubSpot and you're not leveraging the data that you're collecting effectively, then the cost of that software goes up significantly, and you’re not getting the ROI that you could,” explains Steve. When your marketing team can access data from the sales team in a reliable and consistent way and then use that data to build campaigns, they’re able to bring in high-quality leads that the sales team can actually use. Want Even More Insight? “There's this vast quantity of insightful data that marketing teams can use to create campaigns from existing in the brains of the sales reps. So a company has to be very intentional about collaborating together and getting those teams together in a way that the marketing team can then mine that information and actually pay that forward,” says Steve. As big platforms like Google restrict access to customer data, manufacturers are going to have to rely more on their own proprietary data to be successful. Companies that integrate their marketing team with their sales team effectively will be more successful. “For companies to win in 2023, having a good user experience is not a choice anymore. Having a great user experience and digital presence is totally a choice. You can totally choose to have a great digital presence, but having a good one is absolutely necessary. And I think the success that a manufacturer can experience, [along with] organizational impact [and] revenue impact, is substantial when they can successfully bring their marketing and sales teams together,” says Steve. To learn more about how manufacturers can converge marketing and sales, listen to the entire episode. You can reach out to Steve on LinkedIn. Remember to like and subscribe to Smarter Building Materials Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.