As the Marketing team you are generating lots of awesome content. You have your buyer personas sorted and your team is filled with Content Marketing superstars. You are engaging and nurturing your prospects. So far so good. But are you engaging your most important distribution channel though? Your amazing Sales team. Every marketer gives lip-service to alignment, then ignores sales at the most important time: when content is produced. Now is the time alignment can really work for both sides.

1. Amplify your content™.
Deepak Prabhakara, @deepakprab
The Role of
Content
in Sales and Marketing Alignment

2. As the Marketing team you are generating lots of awesome
content.
You have your buyer personas sorted.
Your team is flled with Content Marketing superstars.
You are engaging and nurturing your prospects.

3. So far so good.
But are you engaging your most important distribution
channel though?

4. Are you engaging your amazing Sales team?
Every marketer gives lip-service to alignment, then ignores sales
at the most important time: when content is produced.
Now is the time alignment can really work for both sides.

5. They would love to hear about your content too . Why aren’t you
engaging them?
Have they read your content before your prospects do
Are you pointing them to your latest Slideshare, blog article or
that awesome customer testimonial you just compiled?

6. There’s a lot of beneft in going through all this extra work of
engaging your salespeople.
How exactly do you go about getting your awesome content
across to them?
We’d like to share some simple but effective ideas with you.

7. Before that think about these three simple questions.
How can I centralise and organise my content regardless of where it’s
stored?
How can I make it easy for my Sales team (and Marketing team for that
matter) to discover my content easily?
How can I easily collect feedback and insights on how my content is
being used?

8. Centralise and Organise your Content
Content pools and puddles are popping up all over your company – and hiding in
your CMS and cloud storage services.
And then you have those Slideshares, guest blog posts, YouTube videos, Prezis,
product reviews, Quora questions, <next big B2B content social network>.
Bring it all together where everyone can fnd it and use it. Tag the heck out of it.

9. Accelerate sales fows
Make it easy for your sales team to discover your content.
Don’t make them search for content, serve it right up in their CRM systems so it
doesn’t interfere with their workfow.
Help your salespeople use content to power every opportunity - Re-engage with
stalled prospects, open up new conversations, share relevant content on social
media. All that good stuff only content can do.

10. See what works
Track what content your salespeople are picking up on. See what’s being shared
and where.
Figure out what’s working so you can do more of it.
Share best practice across the team. Celebrate success.
Get a glimpse of your content pipeline so you know which topics are being
neglected.

11. Going beyond Sales Enablement
Get started right away, while you are at it you should also look into building out
your Centre of Content Excellence (pioneered by the lovely folks at Velocity).
Once you have mastered sharing content with Sales you can extend this to your
Account Management and Customer Support teams as well.
And then maybe the rest of the organisation as well - Product Teams, Events, PR.
That will truly make you the God of Content.

12. Amplify your content™.
Deepak Prabhakara, @deepakprab http://contentsift.com