I'm curious... how does your marketing team support sales?

[Anonymous]

We have been working to improve our marketing and sales alignment but have continually run into road blocks for how we (marketing) can/will support sales through the late stage finalist presentations (and other custom campaigns). Our busines model deals with very large B2B sales that take months/years to close and we also have a small  4 person team. 

I am curious how your organization supports sales with finalist presentations and pitch decks. Do you build custom decks for them? Who owns the talk track/story? Do you have an agency involved for design, etc.? What expectations do you have of sales before marketing gets involved?

We have a lot of programs built to support top of the funnel and midddle of the funnel activities but we have a gap when it comes to closing the deal. 

Would love any of your advice/feedback!

Thanks,
 

Erin

[Josh_Hill13]

It depends greatly on the kind of B2B situation: selling ads vs. product/service. Whenever possible, I setup the following

• deck templates with the key messaging we need to repeat. There are slides for each industry that could be pitched. and plenty of places for Sales to fill in the blanks.
• Then I support Sales at the proposal stage by helping them prepare the decks. Ideally, I don't, but some salespeople do like the help and a once over at a minimum. If there aren't too many deals you can do this well.
• Software - there are plenty of proposal generators out there for SFDC.
• Agencies - I'd only do this for a template rebuild or to support a high volume of advertising pitches. The firms I've worked at had Integrated Marketing teams which just built the pitch deck from research to messaging. They worked closely with the AE who had the relationship. I suppose you could hire an agency to help with product pitch volume.

My preference is that Sales must own the story, but cannot make up product features, so there must be an approval process. Sales should also put together as much of the information as they can before they ask Marketing to make the deck look good. Again, much of that work can be copy-paste into a template deck and messaging can be compiled in a document for various situations. I would trust Sales to tweak things to close the deal.