After the marketing-to-sales process is complete, the two should get together and conduct a debrief about the experience. Whether you won or lost the deal, there is a wealth of information to evaluate for competitive insights that can improve future emarketing efforts.Often, this process is done by sales on their own or with their sales manager. However, this is a key moment for marketing to gain intelligence that can help them tweak and tune their content marketing strategy.If you can involve the customer you gained or the opportunity you lost, even better.Because sales has face-to-face insight, they can tell marketing things they'd not know otherwise. Body language, facial responses and enthusiasm levels are something marketing often only sees in virtual form. In fact, if it's at all possible, meeting with salespeople during their engagement with the opportunity can help marketing capture critical response data at different points in the process when it's still fresh in the salesperson's mind.Sure, you can't do this for every sales activity, but consider trying it on a few choice ones and see what you learn. An example would be to try this with a salesperson actively engaged with a prospect in a target segment where you'd like to expand your market.Consider using these 12 questions for marketing intelligence gathering:How many attempts did it take for you to get in contact with the prospect? And, what worked - email, phone - combination of the two?What made them agree to meet with you? (what were they most interested in, excited about)When you got there, were other people in the meeting, too? Who were they? (then try to learn why each person was in the room - what was most important. This will vary based on role and stake in the project outcomes)What's the problem the prospect needed to solve? Peripheral problems?What trigger is propelling action? (deadlines, compliance, competitive advances, mandate from above, etc.)What questions did they ask?Were there any points of confusion they needed to clear up?What risk factors were they concerned about?What expertise do they need that they don't have in house for this project?Which competitors did they mention? What had their attention?Was there any point in your presentation where their body language told you they were losing interest? Was there a point during the meeting when their enthusiasm became prominent?As you read the questions above, did you see all the opportunities for insights that can help you create high-value marketing content that will increase your probability for higher engagement with that target segment?Armed with the answers, go back to your prospect's activity profile and assess what content and communications they'd been exposed to during your emarketing and nurturing campaigns. How can that content be improved to add relevance for future campaigns to that target segment?In today's marketplace you cannot afford for marketing to be guessing about what's effective. Especially when sales can easily provide these insights. In order to flesh out customer profiles and personas and get to a level of personalization that builds consistently higher engagement, you've got to get down to the nitty gritty in your intelligence gathering.Sales can help. Ask them. After all, if they help you and your marketing efforts shorten sales cycles, everyone wins!
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