Once upon a time, Sales and Marketing were in the same department in almost every company. The two were tied together so tightly that most didn’t realize there was a difference. Now, of course, we know better. Sales and marketing often have their own separate departments and, in the most successful of organizations, support each other.

Some brands now also have sales enablement departments, where the sole goal is to provide the sales department with information they need from the marketing team to make selling easier. Not all organizations are large enough to provide sales enablement teams, however. When you only have sales and marketing teams available to drive your revenue, it’s crucial that marketing works to clear the path for the sales team.

Updated Sales Cycle Goals

Let’s get candid here for a moment: If your sales cycle is still the same as it was five years ago, then you’re not learning from your successes and mistakes. The goal is always to shorten the sales cycle so that you become more efficient and, over time, sell more. That’s the only way to increase your revenue, unless you introduce more products or raise your prices.

Sales should work with the marketing department as information is learned, such as any changes in your target audience, any content that seems to resonate with your buyers, and any buyer behaviors that may prompt changes in your marketing strategies. Marketing can then, in turn, help to improve strategies for reaching your buyers, solving their pain points, and guiding them through the updated buyers’ journey.

Current Buyer Personas

If you’re not updating your buyer personas at least yearly, then you may not even be reaching the right audience anymore. Marketing can help set sales up for success by keeping the buyer personas as up to date as possible.

Some of the factors to consider in your buyer personas include economic factors, such as inflation or other external issues that can affect consumer behavior; technology improvements, such as the introduction of social media shopping; cultural shifts, such as support for green initiatives or small businesses; and new competitors entering your market space.

When one or more of these factors change, take some time to revisit your buyer personas to make sure they’re still as accurate as possible. The more often you tweak them, the more powerful they’ll be for your sales team.

Relevant Content

Constant changes to your sales cycle and buyer personas means regularly updating your content. The easiest way, of course, is to maintain a blog on your website so that prospects always have access to the latest information about your brand.

Marketers also provide crucial content sales needs to educate buyers and close the deals. These might include customer stories, slide decks, ebooks, and product demos. Marketing gives sales the greatest chances for success with content that evolves along with the sales cycle and buyer personas.

Buyer Behavior Data

Through the daily activities of the marketing department, various buyer behaviors will be uncovered. Did the introduction of a new line of products paralyze buyers with too many choices, or did your target audience embrace the new options? Are cultural factors changing the number of consumers that interact with your content? Do your buyers tend to open emails more at a certain time of day? Can you infer the income level of your buyers based on how quickly they move through the buyers’ journey?

As you learn more about your buyers through their interactions with your marketing content, relay this information to the sales department. Here, of course, is where we come full circle. Sales can use that information to inform the length of the sales cycle, while marketing updates information about their buyer personas. All of that new information is then used to create new and more effective content to help support the sales department as they serve current buyers and reach new ones.

The right marketing leadership understands that marketers work together with the sales team to develop sales enablement strategies. A CMO or Fractional CMO should ensure that sales enablement strategies are in place and always working to make the sales cycle more efficient. Because, again, an increasingly efficient sales cycle is the best way to increase revenue.