Marketing Peeps - Open question about sales/marketing alignment

[Anonymous]

Our small sales team (territory based field reps) consistenty lean on marketing for all requests related to their finalist/pitch presentations (PPT deck clean-up, graphics, font clean-up, etc.) (we see some prettttty ugly decks). Marketing is extremely resource limited as well and we are finding these requests to be extremely disruptive to our process (we don't have internal designer, etc.). I was curious what kind of support you provide to your sales team when it comes to things like creating PPT presentations, cleaning up pitch decks.

Does sales work directly with external or internal resources to do their decks or do they go through marketing? What kind of process do you have in place? I am curious where marketing draws the line. 

Any thoughts are welcome! 

[Anonymous]

We try to make the sales team self sufficient by providing a template to use that contains the main pitch and also another deck that provides imagery to easily add to a presentation. If it's something big, then marketing will get involved but not for everyday presentations. 

It's always a balance 🙂

[Anonymous]

I usually refer to marketing as "air cover" and sales as the "infantry." Since they deal with leads directly, they have to make it look like they customize pieces specifically for the client. What we do is create generic pieces, infographics, case studies, etc that they insert inside a customized piece/email they create.Since most of their communication is done through email, it makes it really easy.

For presentations, we build templates in a way so that all they have to do is switch out logos and/or delete pages in powerpoint. No other customizations needed since they are not graphic designers.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! This is helpful. We have some PPT templates created but still get lots of requests for things like formatting, (even asking how to take screenshots). Most of our pitch presentations are highly customized so it's hard to manage and not have it disrupt our higher objectives.

Erin