Create Marketing Materials With Your Salespeople in Mind What do your salespeople need to succeed? Give them a toolkit that helps them out during every step of the sale.

Whether you have one salesperson or 10, outfitting your front line with the right tools is critical to your company's success. Production of collateral materials often falls to marketing staffs that design in a vacuum, without true insight into the day-to-day operational requirements--and just plain hands-on, grab-and-run nature--of salespeople. The result? Some recent studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of materials created by marketing staffs for the use of salespeople go unused, while salespeople often create their own less-than-stellar tools on the fly. Meanwhile, important branding and selling messages can fall by the wayside, and sales may decline or stagnate.

So how can you create tools your salespeople will love--and actually want to use? It all comes down to these three essential steps.

1. Get frontline input. Eliminate the disconnect between your marketing and sales teams by getting them talking. Salespeople can offer tremendous insight into customers' needs and objections as well as your company's competitive challenges. Ask your salespeople to brief the marketing staff on the product or service elements that are most critical to the customers or clients they meet. Listen to them recount the objections they face most often during the selling process so you can create marketing tools and materials that support their efforts to overcome them. Salespeople should also tell your marketing team about any changes in customer demographics or hot buttons so that old tools can be revised to coincide with the current needs of your customer base.