By Danny Clarke, Director, Services & Sales Engineering EMEA at Highspot

Sales has always been a people business, but technology such as artificial intelligence has forced businesses to reconsider the human-machine balance.

Finding the right balance between human and machine is critical since they each have distinct skill sets that, when joined, can revolutionise the way we work. When human expertise and oversight are combined there are endless capabilities that AI can help to deliver.

This is the first step to embracing innovation and eradicating the lack of collaboration between marketing and sales teams in order to provide an improved and consistent customer journey.

Businesses that effectively facilitate this collaboration will be able to reinvent their organisations from the ground up and produce tailored content that is catered to human needs.

Aligning teams to produce content that adds value

When your marketing and sales teams are misaligned it’s difficult to drive a consistent and personalised customer experience.

This can result in time and money being squandered on teams developing vast amounts of content that has no clear objective, mismatched messaging and is frequently not even used.

The sales team are unable to locate the most recent sales content, while marketing teams continue to develop further content with no idea if it’s useful. This lack of communication and collaboration means valuable content gets wasted or lost. 

As a result, keeping track of which assets are working with prospects and which aren’t becomes exceedingly challenging. This leaves marketers disconnected from what customers truly want and unable to present them with relevant content, while missing key insights and metrics such as which assets are performing well and where time and money could be better spent. It’s a vicious cycle.

When both teams work together on a single revenue cycle, marketing ROI, sales productivity, and most importantly, top-line growth all increase. This, in turn, will instil a habit of collaboration between both sales and marketing and eliminate teams working in silos. 

So, how can AI help to solve this problem?

How to leverage technology to align sales and marketing

New innovations are drastically improving operations in sales and marketing. Leaders looking for efficient methods to improve their sales and marketing alignment should look to new AI solutions for help.

Sales enablement technology has emerged in part as a solution to common misalignment issues between sales and marketing, but also as a result of the advancement of AI innovation which has made it truly advantageous for businesses to adopt.

Sales enablement platforms help to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. In short, they provide a single source of truth for all content across the business.
Through the integration of business analytics, content statistics, customer experience, CRM, marketing automation, sales data, and numerous other advantages, they provide valuable insights that can support with strategy and training.

If your business is experiencing common pain points such as content chaos and a lack of usable data or insights, the problem isn’t as difficult to solve as you might think. Simply implementing the right tool or platform to bridge the gap between your sales and marketing team can make all the difference and reap numerous benefits.

Benefits to sales, marketing and the wider business 

Employing AI-powered sales enablement tools will minimise low-value, repetitive processes by up to 23%, automate admin tasks, optimise workflows, and facilitate effective internal and external communications. 

These benefits pass on to your customers as well. Your marketing team can leverage these machine learning algorithms and the power of big data to create detailed profiles of each customer, and automatically tailor offerings to specific customer needs.

Creating a more tailored experience for your customers will drive success and improve customer attraction and retention. When your customers feel heard and understood, a much greater relationship is built with your business. 

Whatsmore, the benefits of sales enablement doesn’t just impact your sales and marketing function. In fact, with these detailed insights, you can make data-driven decisions that support other areas of the business too. This could include strategy, revenue, hiring and even HR processes like training – all of which will help you gain and maintain a competitive edge.

In Summary

Consumers today increasingly expect better and more from the businesses they interact with. Personalisation is the new customer battleground across many industries and, if you are to be successful in this, your business needs the right tools for the job.

Nothing makes personalisation through data analysis easier or more efficient than artificial intelligence. But the key is to have these AI-powered insights integrated right into the heart of your sales funnel. 

To put it simply, sales and marketing must operate in tandem for this work, and a robust sales enablement plan is certainly proving to be one of the best ways to get there.