The landscape in which we conduct business has changed. Virtual experiences and digital tools have become much more valuable. This led to the rise of a hybrid sales model that combines digital experiences with the personal touch only a rep can give. Harnessing the power of this digital initiative is how brands will grow their channels, support their retailers, and develop a Wholesale Forward strategy.
One of the key components of this strategy is building alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Collaboration between these two teams will produce more engaging experiences for retailers and increase sell-through during your season. Let’s take a look at what marketing and sales bring to the table respectively, and what tools Envoy B2B offer to enable them to work together effectively.
Marketing Builds The Big Picture
Your marketing team is going to be working on the macro-level to create the big picture for how your brand communicates to the world. This means that they’ll be defining the brand identity, product language, and messaging for the sales team to utilize. Marketing will also handle asset production, creating the images, videos, and language that sales will use when building assortments, catalogs, and experiences for their retailers.
Sales Provides Regional Focus
Your sales team knows what your retailers need on a more granular level. They can use this information to work with marketing and fine tune the messaging for their accounts regionally, creating custom experiences targeted to the individual needs of retailers.
Sales managers can harness rep knowledge to understand what retailers are looking for and what marketing initiatives are working on a regional level — much like they do with products. The feedback they provide to marketing allows for collaboration when trying to hit the target on messaging and assets.
And They’re Connected Through Your B2B
Now it’s time to connect the two teams together. Marketing is building the assets for sales to use in the field, and sales is showing marketing how to effectively utilize them. All this happens through a collaborative back-and-forth using the tools in Envoy B2B.
Building Showrooms Together
There has been an increase in brick-and-mortar sales, despite the rise of DTC as a reaction to the pandemic, and this has a big impact on your wholesale channel. That means your brand needs to be effectively supporting and educating your retailers. The best place to do this is in Showroom, the 24/7 content destination for retailers inside Envoy B2B.
Retailers land in your Showroom when they login, so it’s important to get it dialed in for high engagement. Insights into regional trends and needs from your sales team are going to be essential for the marketing team to build out effective Showrooms. Envoy B2B offers an Insights and Activities dashboard, as well as an integration with Locally, that allows them to track retailer activity and hot trends. Your sales team can use this data to collaborate with marketing and build highly effective, targeted Showrooms that increase retailer engagement.
Collaborating With Assortment Builder
The Assortment Builder is another tool that marketing and sales can use to work together and create better engagement.
Similar to Showrooms, this is where sales and marketing can collaborate to build Assortments that take advantage of regional trends and demands. Marketing builds the assets and templates, while the sales team uses their knowledge of what’s in demand across their accounts to guide marketing in how to best utilize those assets.
Harnessing Reporting And Campaign Analytics
Envoy B2B’s reporting and campaign analytics tools keep your teams on target. Your teams can track retailer activity in the platform and monitor the performance of your assortment campaigns. Marketing and sales teams can harness that data as they work together to adjust content and campaigns as needed.
Envoy B2B also offers an integration with Locally, so reps can see hot trends on a per store basis. Your sales team can feed this data to marketing for more effective, targeted Showrooms that increase retailer engagement.
Align Your Teams And Wholesale Forward
Digital tools and experiences are here to stay. And brands that want to Wholesale Forward will take advantage of the opportunities they present. This means using your wholesale B2B platform to keep your teams aligned and collaborating.
Want to learn more about how Envoy B2B can help you align your teams, excite your retailers, and power-up your brand? Get in touch.
