How Percolate's marketing orchestration hub enables sales success

Enterprise content marketing platform Percolate, in collaboration with ClickZ, presented a webinar focused on explaining how B2B marketers can drive sales enablement by using content as the catalyst to streamline the relationship between sales and marketing teams.

“Driving Sales Enablement Success Through B2B Content Marketing Orchestration” reviews how sales and marketing alignment is critical for a successful content marketing strategy. Content marketing platforms like Percolate use marketing orchestration technology to achieve this alignment.

Content produced in collaboration with Percolate.

What is marketing orchestration?

Greg Roth, VP of Marketing at Percolate, provided an overview of Percolate’s functionality as a marketing orchestration hub.

In a nutshell, marketing orchestration technology helps companies improve coordination of the marketing workflow so businesses can build effective marketing campaigns and content. Percolate works with some of the largest brands in the world, including Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Electronic Arts.

“These companies use our platform to reduce their production costs and understand the impact of their marketing initiatives,” says Roth.

Marketing and sales alignment

A 2018 Content Marketing Institute survey revealed that only 46% of B2B marketers felt their marketing and sales teams were highly aligned.

This number may be a high estimate, according to Roth, who presented research that listed the various methods that companies use to share content with their sales team. Only 6% of companies that responded to the survey had a sales enablement platform while another 5% had a sales enablement platform plugged into their CRM.

Says Roth, 

“Anyone who has tried to use a CRM for strictly sales enablement in the past knows that these 12% of survey respondents are likely really struggling, but not as much as those who don’t use these tools.”

Opportunity is not consistent with reality when it comes to marketing and sales alignment. Roth emphasized this point by presenting some key statistics from top research firms including the CMO Council, Forrester and Gartner.

For example, while 87% of buyers choose a technology provider because they found content to help navigate each stage of the buying process, fully 95% of content platforms indicated that companies use content infrequently as a selling tool. Additionally, nearly 40% of companies do not have a formalized sales enablement process.

Streamlining the process of content production

Streamlining content production starts with facilitating communication between sales and marketing teams. However, achieving this is a pain point for many companies.

A recent Forrester survey revealed that only eight percent of sales and marketing executives believe their teams are strongly aligned. This disconnect leads to a problem where sales and marketing teams are not able to operate with peak efficiency, creativity, and clarity. That’s why there must be transparency involved in knowing what both teams are doing.

Addressing this problem is worth the investment since organizations with tight alignment between sales and marketing have 38% higher win rates than those who don’t.

The solution to this problem of alignment is in the content itself which connects all stages of the buying funnel, from generating awareness to educating prospects, to closing a deal.

Give content clarity

According to Forrester, sellers spend 35 hours every month creating their own content with $2.3 million lost on enterprises annually to poor findability.

“That’s really where a digital asset manager acts as the backbone of a sales enablement and content marketing platform,” says Roth. “It’s what ties them together.”

Content marketing platforms can have a significantly positive financial impact on the companies that implement them. Forrester interviewed four Percolate customers and reviewed their data to determine the total economic impact of the platform after three years of use.

They concluded that the summary of benefits of using this content orchestration platform for three years was $2.8 million in administrative time savings, close to one million dollars in eliminating duplicate content, nearly $700K in reduced agency spend and nearly $600K in retired legacy system savings.

CMP use cases

Roth reviewed five use cases across five different industries:

• Manufacturing
• Energy
• Telecom
• Financial Services
• B2B Tech

Each use case presents a different content scenario. For example, in use case #1, the company is a fortune 500 manufacturer with heavily regulated content. Roth calls this case the “content traffic cop.”

“This is the simplest of all possible integrations,” Roth explains.  “It requires an API which is necessary for passing data seamlessly between systems. It’s a one-way sync with marketers working within Percolate to plan their product marketing content for sales enablement. Sales can then track the schedule of upcoming collateral and once this is done, the content goes into a damn—the digital asset manager.”

Roth goes onto explain that once the collateral moves into the damn, it’s automatically pushed into an aggregate folder to key sales stakeholders (e.g., the “traffic cop” referenced above.)

When the content assets come out of Percolate into the sales enablement system, the documents are tagged within the platform and the traffic cops can distribute the assets to each seller.

To hear about all five use cases and learn more about how marketing orchestration technology drives successful sales initiative, register for the on-demand webinar, “Driving Sales Enablement Success Through B2B Content Marketing Orchestration.”