How can marketing teams better support their sales colleagues?

Marketing teams can help to support their sales colleagues by providing insights on prospect activity that occurs outside of sales interactions. This insight can come from first-party interactions, where the prospect engages with your website or content, and third-party interactions, to understand what actions the prospect takes outside of your domains — what we refer to as intent signals. Because prospects choose to stay anonymous for longer throughout the buyer journey now, avoiding filling out forms where possible, marketers need to be smarter with how they track buyer intent. External intent providers can help marketers to understand the keywords and topics that a prospect is researching outside of their own websites, helping to fill in the blanks from anonymous visits by prospects. Even more importantly, trending intent can help sellers identify the right moments to reach out to a prospect to build that sought-after trust and avoid bombarding prospects with irrelevant messages at the wrong time.

Gathering insight is just one half of the job though. Marketers should also package and present the insight in a way that allows sales teams to quickly digest it, and then utilize it to have meaningful conversations with their prospects. Typically this means bringing the insight into the CRM platform that sales teams manage their workloads through, helping the sales team to digest the right information at the right time.