Because Splashmetrics fundamentally sits at the intersection of marketing and sales efforts, we are continually talking with senior leaders from both of these teams (CROs, CMOs, CSOs, etc.). And these are always fascinating conversations because everyone is laser focused on effectively bridging the long-standing operational divide shown in the image below. But they typically have very few clear and actionable means for getting it done.

So I wanted to take a moment to specifically look at HOW you can bridge this operational divide. There are TWO BIG QUESTIONS that point you to the actionable answer:

1. What do your buyers want?
2. What will it take operationally to deliver on that demand?

Let’s start with Big Question 1: According to TrustRadius (and many other sources), virtually 100% of today’s B2B Buyers want to self-educate and manage the end-to-end buying experience on their own. They simply do not want to speak to sales reps until they’ve made their purchase decision.

So, if your Buyers don’t want to speak to your sales reps – how do you sell them? As the stats clearly show, it is all about INTELLIGENT SALES CONTENT that can answer their pre-purchase questions just like a sales rep would.

And this leads us to Big Question 2: Delivering this new kind of intelligent content to this new era of self-serve buyers clearly requires FAR more strategic alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales. For example, it’s abundantly clear that to deliver on this demand, you need your SALES content to be hyper-personalized to every buyer that comes into it. Unlike more general marketing conent, it needs to be intelligent enough to speak directly to their needs and interests – be that their role within their company, the specific vertical in which their company does business, different languages, etc.

Operationally, this means knowing exactly how to target the right buyers through your marketing efforts (e.g. – ABM, etc.) but also having in place the strategic means to seamlessly move them into the right sales content journey (the bridge). And once they are in that journey it also means INTERACTIVELY ANSWERING THEIR SPECIFIC PRE-PURCHASE QUESTIONS IN THE CONTENT.

A clear barometer of how your company is doing in this regard is this: Do you have a “Resource Library” on your website full of traditional PDFs, etc. that you expect THE BUYER to wade through and find answers to their questions? If so, you’re failing your Buyers while losing both revenue and ROI. Buyers demand bespoke answers to their questions – now.

Self-serve buying means that sales teams MUST now collaborate directly with marketing teams to define the kind of STRATEGIC INTERACTIONS in the content necessary to assess painpoints and value areas – AND immediately provide the right answers to convince the Buyer to purchase.

This is the new sales conversation. And you need to be leading it.