It’s well-known that marketing and sales have a love-hate relationship. They’re kind of like the real housewives on BravoTV. One day, there’s mutual love and respect, and the next day, there’s finger-pointing and hair-pulling.
(Well, maybe not hair-pulling, but you get the point.)
Tensions tend to flare when an important deal is on the line.
Does this scenario sound familiar? Sales need a custom one-pager right now after a high-stakes meeting to close the deal with an important prospect, but marketing is tapped with other projects and deadlines (not to mention they’ll need time to route the one-pager for approvals before releasing the perfectly polished product to sales).
This can be extremely frustrating to both sales and marketing. The truth of the matter is that both marketing and sales have valid reasons to be frustrated in this scenario.
It’s marketing’s job to get the word out, build brand awareness and convince potential customers that we are the perfect fit for their needs. Once potential customers say, “Yes, I’d like more information,” sales enters the game to build rapport and dive into how the product or service addresses the specific needs of their business. And because it so closely supports the decision to buy, personalized and quickly delivered sales collateral is key during this part of the closing process.
It’s also key to have a consistent, cohesive and polished brand. In fact, it’s critical for building trust. If the logo or messaging on the website is different from that of the printed materials and sales collateral, it can make your business look sloppy or sketchy.
At the end of the day, marketing and sales teams ultimately share a common goal–bringing new customers on board.
Thankfully, there is a simpler solution to satisfy the sales department’s need for speed while ensuring that marketing’s carefully crafted brand guidelines are adhered to, saving everyone time, energy, frustration and hair-pulling.
But first, let’s talk about branding.
Why Consistent Branding is Important Across Marketing and Sales Collateral
It’s supported by psychology. Ever hear of context-dependent memory? It allows you to remember information when contextual cues are the same. It’s the reason you recognize a brand’s logo or tagline in a print or digital ad.
Your messaging, logo, brand colors and collateral design must be consistent–and it’s worth the effort.
In fact, presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%.
Despite the benefits, maintaining consistent branding can be hard. Marketing teams simply don’t have the bandwidth to halt operations to constantly respond to one-off and ad-hoc requests.
That’s why we created the Jet Mail Marketing Portal. Through the use of pre-approved, pre-designed templates uploaded to the portal, sales reps have the ability to browse, customize and order collateral on-demand–with minimal oversight from marketing. Marketing teams have complete control over who can access the portal, how much they can order, and what they can and can’t customize to ensure proper branding.
This “controlled customization” can have a huge impact on bandwidth for marketing departments and revenue for sales teams. Let’s talk more about how the portal arms sales with the deal-sealing weapons that turn prospects into customers.
How Personalized Messaging Can Seal the Deal
As mentioned above, consistent branding is critical for building trust in your business during the awareness stage. And personalized, relevant messaging amplifies that trust during the sales process. It can be the difference between marking a prospect as closed-lost or closed-won, especially in competitive business environments.
For example, the decision-makers at a hospital who are involved in the purchase of a new diagnostic imaging system could be from the C-suite, ER department, radiology department or all of the above. Sales can add deal-closing details to the pre-approved templates in the portal to show how specific product features and specs address the challenges they solve for the hospital as a whole and the decision-makers in particular.
Using a brand-compliant product flyer template in the portal, a sales rep can select pre-approved messaging from a drop-down menu to fill the template with hyper-relevant content that addresses specific pain points, such as:
- How the system expedites workflow and throughput, resulting in cost savings and other efficiencies that resonate with the C-suite.
- Specs on the system’s scanning speed and how it improves patient outcomes in the ER when time is critical.
- Details and images of the system's high-resolution and crystal-clear images make it easier for a radiologist to detect a disease.
- Ergonomic features that make scanning easier for HCP, as well as a more patient-friendly experience.
Additionally, images can be customized to represent the local health population. Sales reps can select from bariatric to geriatric patient images that reflect the demographics of the community.
The names and titles of decision-makers can be added to collateral, as well as company logos to personalize content even further.
Still nervous about sales reps personalizing branded assets and want to sign off on any customization prior to submitting the order to production? No problem. The portal is built for your business and all settings are completely customizable. Simply set up automated approval routing so that some or all orders require sign-off prior to production and shipment.
The controlled customization is truly a win-win. It frees up marketing’s time and ensures sales can get the collateral when they need it, even with short turnaround times.
Speed to Market is Essential in Competitive Business Environments
Speaking of short turnaround times, the COVID-19 pandemic proved, business environments are extremely dynamic and change isn’t a matter of if, but when. Quickly reacting to changing market conditions, consumer behavior and other unforeseen events can set your business apart and propel sales numbers skyward.
Customized sales collateral can be printed and packaged with pre-assembled, ready-to-ship marketing collateral stored in our on-site 80,000 square foot warehouse and shipped straight to prospects or customers.
Jet Mail’s in-house end-to-end marketing fulfillment capabilities mean that we can process orders from the portal for same-day fulfillment. This is because behind the Jet Mail Marketing Portal is a state-of-the-art print shop, commercial mail house, fulfillment center and a team of experts that specialize in speed-to-market.
Streamline B2B Sales Collateral Management With Jet Mail
With the Jet Mail Marketing Portal on your side, managing B2B sales collateral can now be drama-free at your company. Our team of marketing fulfillment experts help you maintain complete control over your brand and bandwidth while giving sales teams self-service access to personalize, order and distribute the materials they need. Contact our experts today and let us create a customized solution for all your sales collateral needs.
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