Is your sales team constantly pestering your marketing team with different wants and needs? The process of marketing asking sales what they want and then using what they say to create content is past its time.

It is the job of the marketing team to create content that aligns to the sales process. The biggest problem marketing and sales teams have isn’t that the right content doesn’t exist, but that it’s hard to find. More specifically, the biggest problem for sales is not having easy access to the content that marketing creates.

To resolve this sales enablement problem, companies must systematically deliver sales teams with content they actually need—the materials that help move a buyer closer toward a sale.

What Can Marketers Do?

1) Map the Sales Process/Buyer Journey

There are a number of stages in making a buying decision, but each requires its own distinctive information to help the buyer move through the process. Marketers need to have content that is available along the entire buyer journey, so creating a sales process map is the key first step.

2) Align Content to Sales Process/Buyer Journey

Based on where the buyer is in the sales journey, the marketing team should have materials that support each stage. The team must therefore organize which materials go with which piece of the journey.

As a basic example, a prospect at the earliest portion of their journey would probably be looking for introductory presentations, case studies and market research information. As they move further down the cycle, they might require guides and ROI analyses, followed by contracts at the very end of the process.

3) Figure Out What Content is Available

A lot of the time, sales teams and others in the field ask marketing to create something because they don’t know that it already exists. Marketing might create a brand new piece of content that they’ve already made but didn’t know it because it’s buried away in an enterprise CMS, like SharePoint. Taking the time to catalogue which content already exists and is still relevant today is the key—because stale, outdated content can quickly create an unmanageable CMS system.

4) Fill in the Holes

Now that marketing has figured out what sort of content exists, they can fill in existing holes and create new content. This approach is much more efficient than simply responding to one-off emails by members of the sales team, as the right pieces of content will be delivered to everyone, rather than to only the individuals who requested it.

5) Make it Available/Easier

The ultimate goal is to make it easier for sales team to find what they need without having to ask marketing. For many sales teams, it is impossible to access shared drives from mobile devices. When they are traveling to meet prospects they need to be able to locate the right pieces of content in that precise moment.

While this step often requires the right technology, it is also important to keep in mind that improving the sales enablement process begins with streamlining the marketing process. To improve sales enablement process companies need to make the sales process easier than what was currently in place while also making marketing more efficient and supportive for sales.

To achieve sales enablement success marketing teams must go through this five-step process to continuously deliver the right information and content to sales team.