What is the role of personalization in the entire buyer’s journey? It is crucial to offer personalized content to sustain a good rapport with your buyers. However, offering personalization throughout the entire buyer’s journey is not possible without strong interdepartmental alignment.
Research has revealed that the average B2B buyer, before deciding on a purchase, consumes about 13 pieces of content. Thus, companies cannot afford to deliver a bad content experience to a prospect just because their sales and marketing teams are not aligned.
This blog will highlight the importance of sales and marketing alignment while providing key guidelines to achieve that.
Prioritize sales-marketing alignment to facilitate personalized customer experience
When it comes to B2B, the content you offer to buyers begins with multiple marketing activities (like emails, ads, events, etc.) and extends to sales outreach. Thus, it becomes crucial to prioritize sales-marketing alignment alongside ensuring the delivery of a personalized content experience.
For example, you send out an email that describes how cost-effective your product is and directs the recipient to a landing page where they can download a comprehensive analysis. Then, after the download, it’s time for your sales rep to reach out. Instead of continuing with the cost-effectiveness message (which was the catch for your buyer), the sales rep shares video content that talks about product features.
The disconnect in the marketing and sales rep’s messaging is clearly visible here. A buyer leads with a specific aspect and ends up consuming a disparate piece of content (which may or may not suffice their intention and interest)
Thus, it is important to prioritize content coherence between sales and marketing. Both teams should agree on what is the relevant content at a specific time in a buyer’s journey. It will ensure the delivery of unified content.
Understand the buyer’s journey to acknowledge their unique needs
B2B involves large buying committees with their non-linear buying journeys. For example, a buyer may-
1. Consume your marketing content
2. Contact a sales rep.
3. Do some research on their own to get better insights.
4. Consider consuming more content.
5. Attend a webinar with their peers.
6. Might make a purchase.
Thus, it is critical that sales and marketing should both stay attuned to the buyer’s journey. They can then understand buyer’s needs at every stage of the process to provide them with the relevant content.
Marketers can consider using intent data and content platforms to give relevant content suggestions. When the sales team also offer the right content at the right stage of the buyer journey, the whole revenue engine then becomes more effective.
Get to know where your target account stands in his journey. For example, if a buyer is early in the journey, then their content topics and formats will be different from that of a buyer who is about to make a purchase. Accordingly, sales and marketing teams can develop a content strategy.
The person who just has discovered your company may have a different set of concerns in the beginning of their journey than they do as they gain much knowledge moving down the funnel. Thus, you must design a strategy to suffice buyer’s unique needs at every stage of their journey.
Concluding Thoughts
It is not enough to understand the buyer’s journey. Sales and marketing teams should commit to staying in constant communication. These teams should meet regularly to share what they are up to continually. Thereby, they can take the next right step to deliver the right content experience. Ultimately, it will improve customer’s experience with your company and help you drive more sales.
