When Pam Didner, B2B Marketing Consultant, Speaker, Author and Podcaster, hit her forties, she realized something: She was over the corporate world.
“I hate saying this,” she laughs, “but I can’t take a lot of crap anymore. There was this awakening, and I decided I needed to do something totally different.”
For Pam, “different” meant leaving her longstanding corporate marketing job and developing her own consulting business. She currently works with B2B brands to align sales and marketing teams, evaluate AI processes and tools, set up strategies and much more.
Making Sales Enablement a Standard Part of Marketing
Organizational silos are widely bemoaned, with 77% of marketers in a recent study admitting that silos make it hard to align on important strategic goals. Pam’s passionate about working to change this by promoting sales enablement and bringing the marketing and sales functions together.
“A lot of people see sales enablement as onboarding and training — equipping sales with knowledge to do their jobs,” Pam points out. “I see it as an expansion of that; I think marketers need to analyze their roles for ways that they’re intertwined with or supporting salespeople.”
The rise of everything digital means marketing is usually in charge of the website, but the website also drives traffic and leads, which sales is interested in. Plus, many CTAs on a website typically point back to the sales team.
At this point, the teams and their goals often feel inseparable — and yet many teams struggle to find strong alignment.
Here are two tips Pam suggests if you’re looking to better sync with your sales team:
- Attend sales huddles. Even if you’re a quiet observer, you’re increasing visibility for your team and absorbing a ton of knowledge about the challenges the sales team is facing, the type of accounts they’re pursuing and other information.
- Spend time with the sales dashboard. Understand how a salesperson measures success. (Obviously, a lot of times, this will be revenue-related.) Once you know what those relevant metrics are, you can think about how you can directly and positively impact them.
In Pam’s experience, most sales teams welcome marketing support and understand they can’t do it all on their own. However, at times, a sales team might be reluctant or resistant because they feel they don’t need extra help.
If you’re getting a lot of pushback from your sales team when you try to help, look at your company’s sales goals. Are they being met? If they are, then your sales team might be right! Maybe nothing needs to be changed right now, and your time would be better spent optimizing what you already do to support sales.
However, if your org isn’t reaching its sales goals, then it’s time for a conversation. Dig into the resistance and find out why it’s there. Be open about your goals, and try to get information that will help both teams move forward together.
3 AI Prompt Examples for Marketing Strategy
Pam’s written a total of five books, with her last two just recently hitting the market, titled “The Modern AI Marketer: Guide to Gen AI Prompts” and “The Modern AI Marketer in GPT Era.”
Each one is full of amazing prompt examples you can use to better your work. (And we just might be giving one away if you read to the end of this blog.)
Pam shared some examples from the books that you can use when developing a strategy. According to Pam, strategy is one of the best places to start with your prompts. It helps you get a feel for the model’s creativity, accuracy and usefulness.
Here are a few prompt ideas for strategizing with the help of an LLM:
Target Audience
“I am a marketer for [business or organization name], an organization in the [industry type] that [describe your organization’s products or services]. Our competitors include [examples of top competitors]. Our current customer demographics consist of [describe details of your customer demographics]. What are some marketing strategies that could help us better reach our target customers? List [specific number] marketing strategies.”
Cold Emails
“Write a business email to existing customers introducing my organization’s new [product/service]. The target audience is [describe target audience demographics]. The new [product/service] will benefit our target audience in these ways: [list key selling points]. Include a subject line and a professional sign-off.”
Keywords
“I am researching SEO keywords for my organization, which specializes in [describe products/services] targeted toward [describe target audience demographics]. Our current target keywords include: [list keywords]. Provide a list of [specific number] additional high-volume keywords with low competition, relevant to our products/services and target audience.”
Be sure to experiment with these prompts. If the output isn’t what you expected, add more detail, or take some away. Whenever possible, provide examples the LLM can digest so it knows what you’re looking for.
As you make these prompts your own, you’ll learn more about prompting and achieve better results.
Our First Managing Editor Giveaway 🤞
One last thing: Pam is giving away free copies of her book to readers!
If you’ve been looking for a succinct, accessible explanation of how to use AI in your marketing, this just might be your lucky ticket. All you have to do is reach out to Pam on LinkedIn, and tell her that you heard about her book in this blog.
The first five U.S.-based readers to reach out will get a copy of their very own. Good luck!