Most organizations aren’t entirely aligned. You may have your product and marketing teams do their thing while sales run their own race and buyers are managing their buying process miles away. There may be gaps between your teams and these gaps can be costing you revenue.
Bridging these gaps is not always easy, though. Teams have traditionally been working in more or less rigid silos and the buyer’s journey has always been distinct from the sales process. There has, quite simply, always been a distance between teams and the buyers they serve, and it tends to look something like the image here below – where teams try to collaborate across a chasm but oftentimes fail to get the right material to the right people, reach the right stakeholders and keep knowledge from falling into the chasm that separate them.
In practice, these gaps might mean that:
- Product managers fail to adequately train their organization, share important product documentation and key features, get buy in from other teams and effectively launch their product internally. This can cause belated product launches, wrongful information being shared by Marketing and Sales and a lack of market impact.
- Marketing teams struggle to get their marketing material to Sales and get them to use the right versions, and have a hard time keeping the product message consistent. As a result, Sales may use outdated material and can have trouble finding the right content to send to their prospect. This can lead to all kinds of complications such as a lower win rate, compliancy issues, brand dilution and a waste of marketing resources.
- Sales teams have a blindspot for most of their sales process. They share material without knowing if their buyer has read it – or if it’s lost in an inbox. They struggle with keeping track of buyer stakeholders and risk not addressing key questions that pop up between meetings. The consequence is oftentimes a prolonged sales cycle, a lack of oversight, missed opportunities and a lack of relevancy.
This means that there are unique challenges that come with specific gaps. In other words, your product, sales and marketing teams will experience different hardships due to the distance between them. The results of these gaps do have something in common, though: they can all affect your revenue negatively.
The good news is that you can revert this negative spiral by closing the gaps between the departments in your organization – and aligning both revenue teams and buyers. With that, you can not just avoid losing revenue – but achieve a serious revenue growth.
Close the gap between your teams – and buyers
This also happens to be the exact thing you can do with SP_CE. It is, in fact, the reason we exist. SP_CE gives you shared, digital spaces that allow your teams to align around your product, connect across distances and reach your buyers. Once in place, these spaces will act like a drawbridge between your teams and the buyers they serve, ensuring that no knowledge is lost and that stakeholders can meet, share material and collaborate in the smoothest way possible. With that, you can effectively bridge the gaps in your organization and make it look something like the image below:
That way, your product manager can get through to internal stakeholders, Marketing can reach Sales with the right material and Sales can work with their Buyer in a shared, collaborative space where material can be shared and all interactions are kept in one place.
Choosing where to start
At this point, you may be wondering what gap is the most important to close. Is it the gap between Product and Marketing, Marketing and Sales or Sales and Buyers?
This is a difficult question, and it comes down to what has the highest priority and where you’re facing the biggest challenges. In other words, the most important gap to close depends on what roles and departments have the hardest time reaching one another. By choosing the right gap to close, you can get the quickest path to value possible and see measurable effects on your revenue growth.
To make it a little bit easier to pick your starting point, we’ve summarized some key challenges for specific roles. Check them out and see what challenges your organization struggles the most with:
1. Product manager
When there is a gap between Product and the rest of the organization, product managers may struggle to:
- Get their products launched in time
- Make sure the organization has received product material and that sales and marketing teams understand the product
- Keep the product message consistent
2. Marketing team
For marketing teams, a gap between them and Sales can prevent them from:
- Getting sales teams to use the right marketing material and sales presentations
- Finding out what material is interesting for the buyers that sales teams meet
- Making sure the product message remains consistent
3. Sales team
Sales teams, in turn, can have trouble:
- Knowing what prospects are interested and focusing on the wrong deals
- Keeping track of multiple stakeholders and addressing their concerns
- Sharing relevant material and keeping prospects engaged throughout the process
- Knowing who has seen what material and what stakeholders are interested in
Close the gap and get results
By looking at the challenges above you can get an idea of where to start. If the most important priority right now is ensuring a smooth product launch, training your organization and getting buy in, you may want to close the gap between your product managers and the rest of your organization. If the key objective is to keep your message consistent and get the right marketing material into the hands of your sales reps, you might want to close the gap between Marketing and Sales. If you, on the other hand, find that the biggest challenge right now is enabling your sales reps to drive large deals with multiple stakeholders, get to know their prospects and closing the deal faster, the gap between Sales and Buyers can be good to address first.
At SP_CE, we have solutions for closing each of these gaps. Contact us today to discuss what solution is right for you or check out our Digital Sales Room and Interactive Showroom to learn more.