The objectives of both sales and marketing are the same.
Both are attempting to attract new clients.
Despite this, many businesses struggle to integrate sales and marketing.
There is hardly any collaboration, and communication is broken.
Does this ring a bell?
Your marketing department is churning out great content.
However, your sales team is unaware of its existence, where to get it, or even how it can assist in closing agreements.
Maybe you’ve even squandered time by writing multiple versions of the same document because your teams can’t seem to discover what they need.
Here’s where sales enablement comes in.
Integrating your sales and marketing teams may seem impossible. Still, with a great sales enablement strategy and just a little perseverance, you can increase the ROI on your marketing material while also assisting your sales team.
The best part is that you don’t have to do it alone.
This blog contains everything a Marketing Director needs to remember about sales enablement.
What Is The Definition Of Sales Enablement? Is Sales Enablement A Concern For Marketers?
The concept of sales enablement isn’t new.
It has, nonetheless, gained popularity in recent years.
Here’s an example of a statistic:
Fifty-nine percent of businesses said they had a specialized enabling employee, program, or function in 2017. In 2016, that percentage was 19%.
In just one year, that’s a 210 percent gain.
Here’s the “official” definition if you’re unfamiliar with the term:
“Sales enablement is a collaborative effort between sales, marketing, and other departments inside a firm to develop more effective content, expertise, and tools for usage throughout the sales cycle.”
To put it differently, sales enablement is concerned with the following elements:
- The proper material is available to sellers at the right moment.
- Cooperation between marketing and sales has improved.
- Ongoing training to assist salespeople in delivering results.
- Iterating on content to understand how it resonates with potential buyers, then using analytics to improve it.
Although sales teams benefit the most from a sales enablement strategy, marketers are critical to its execution and long-term success.
Marketers, on the other hand, aren’t entirely useless.
We, marketers, are constantly attempting to demonstrate the importance of what we do.
When your marketing team’s content helps close a new transaction, that’s a beautiful method to assign value and demonstrate ROI.
In Sales Enablement, What Is The Function Of The Marketer?
Although the marketing department does not own sales enablement, they play a significant role in the function.
The following factors can make up a marketer’s role in sales enablement:
Proposing a sales enablement strategy – From the beginning, marketing managers should be included in the sales enablement proposal. Being active from the start demonstrates initiative and demonstrates that you tend to develop the firm forward.
Sharing consumer insights – You are the expert on the client or buyer journey. Distribute this information to your sales staff (or sales enablement team if your company has a dedicated team for this). It would help if you took the lead in developing a unified customer profile, pain areas, and brand value that everyone in the company understands. That’s your area of expertise, marketer.
Content mapping and audit – Your team will undertake a mapping exercise to identify content gaps and create a material production strategy to fill those gaps with more customer-facing content.
In the customer journey, ensuring a smooth flow from marketing to sales – Consider it a relay race. The baton will be transferred from marketing to sales as an individual progresses down the marketing funnel.
As the baton is delivered, the marketing team must equip the sales staff with the right equipment to win the race.
Consider the marketing funnel. The upper half is controlled by marketing departments, which try to raise recognition and interest. The button is frequently given to sales during the consideration/evaluation process.
The sales department deals with the lower half.
Marketing aids sales in turning customers by offering the appropriate marketing elements to engage and teach buyers.
What Is the Importance of Sales Enablement?
“Sales” have evolved dramatically during the last 15 years.
Today’s buyers are well-informed.
Because it’s easier to be than ever before.
An abundance of information is available, and buying decisions can be taken without ever interacting with the sales team.
As a result, sales staff have been forced to adjust their focus from strongarm “always be closing” techniques reminiscent of something out of Glengarry Glen Ross to giving value and insights to the purchasing process.
Because of this new reality, your sales force must have access to all the relevant content just at the right moment.
However, storage systems are disconnected, making it practically hard for sales members of the team to locate the papers they require.
As a result, people collect their “go-to” files on their hard disks, even if such documents remain out-of-date and ineffective.
OR they request the marketing team for fresh materials that meet their requirements without understanding if the contents already exist.
Marketing does not know what sales are doing, and deals do not see the marketing roadmap.
These deficiencies are filled by sales enablement.
Read more about How To Sketch Your Business Plan Better In Less Time?
CoSchedule Can Help You Solve Your Visibility Problems
What if you could communicate your marketing roadmap, timeframes, and work plans with people of your sales team without the need for lengthy emails, regular check-ins, and complaints about how long things are taking?
That reality is conceivable.
You can quickly share your marketing strategy with other departments (such as sales) using CoSchedule’s read-only capability.
Generate a read-only hyperlink in CoSchedule and share this with your sales team.
Once you’ve added the link to your calendar, when you make adjustments, it adjusts in real-time.
That is, you only need to share the URL ONCE.
This provides your sales staff with complete visibility into its collateral’s timeframes and delivery dates and the opportunity to view what materials have been requested.
Perhaps you want your sales staff to view marketing campaigns relevant to sales. Not *everything* on which your team is working.
Not an issue.
Save a picture by filtering out anything but marketing efforts connected to sales.
You’ve cleared a few more sales enablement roadblocks with only a few clicks.
Advantages of Sales Enablement
It is not easy to launch a good sales enablement plan.
However, the advantages exceed the drawbacks.
If you (or your boss) are still not convinced, consider the following main benefit of applying a sales enablement approach.
Increased Return on Investment on Content
According to a SiriusDecisions survey, 60 to 70% of content created by B2B marketing businesses goes underutilized.
A consolidated gateway for all the content items is one of the results of just a sales enablement plan that can be used.
Analytics and reporting have been improved.
What team doesn’t want to know what kind of material resonates with prospects?
Sales enablement analytics can help you evaluate content performance and understand what performs and doesn’t.
More deals would be closed by your sales team.
To begin, salespeople spend only 35.9 percent of their time on sales, with the remainder of their time on administrative work and other non-selling-related problems.
“Salespeople only spend 35.9% of the time selling. This sales enablement plan can help.
And sales teams need information quickly. No time to scavenge for scrap.
One-hour response times were seven times more likely to qualify a lead than two-hour responses. Those who stayed 24 hours were 60 times more likely.
Using a sales enablement approach saves time searching for documentation, allowing your sales staff to spend more time selling.
Six Best Sales Enablement Strategy
Step 1: Find Strengths and Weaknesses
Finding Operational Weaknesses and Strengths.
This stage will help you determine how and where a sales management strategy might help your firm.
Do sales representatives have access to the information they require?
If not, this means you either have information gaps that have to be filled or a problem getting the information into the arms of your sales team.
Is the content you have now outdated?
Your sales professionals aren’t interacting with potential consumers as effectively as they may be using outdated sales materials. Sending out a five-year-old case study, for example, does not make a good first impression. This suggests that there are inefficiencies in marketing and sales collaboration.
Is the material being used?
If your marketing team’s materials aren’t being utilized, it’s either because they’re not relevant or because they’re being stored in the wrong place.
Our sales representatives altering materials?
This shows that sales teams have difficulty obtaining the resources they require from marketing. If a sales rep finds it quicker to change and generate their documents, something is wrong with the request procedure or production time.
These questions point to the fact that your business could benefit from such a sales enablement plan.
Step 2: Create a Business Plan
A sales enablement plan cannot be reduced to a simplified strategic plan, but it is a brilliant place to begin seeking senior buy-in.
It demonstrates that you have correctly analyzed the issue and how the answer will contribute to the overall strategy and objectives of the firm.
You’re raising awareness of the issue and handing out the remedy on such a silver platter.
Make confident that your business answer is clear, simple, and linked to measurements and targets.
Step 3: Establish your Personas
Before you begin a sales management process, you should understand who your clients are.
Work with the sales team to create your ideal customer. This will help your marketing team create content that will resonate as people travel down the funnel.
The sales department has a direct channel into how potential consumers express their problem concerns, the solutions they seek, and the terminology they employ. This is excellent information for marketers to consider when creating sales enablement content.
Engaging the sales force also increases the likelihood of producing content suited for the purpose.
It is more likely to be used in the first place.
Step 4: Conduct a Content Audit.
The following phase, and perhaps one of the most crucial from the stato endpoint of a marketer, is the content audit.
You will map out existing material and identify content gaps during this step. During this process, you can also find materials that require updating.
It’s typically helpful to map content against the marketing funnel and the specific sectors you want to target.
Step 5: Content Arrangement
Next, plan a central area for storing sales content.
It should be a place where a sales representative can discover, use, and share information.
One helpful feature is the option to categorize information by opportunity level, industry, buyer stage, etc. This makes things simpler for salespeople to access the right content at the right moment, resulting in greater efficiency and production.
Content libraries can be stored on Google Drive, Dropbox, an intranet, or a CRM such as Salesforce. Please work with your sales team to determine the most efficient for them.
Marketing Managers may find it challenging to keep track of what content has been produced and when.
When your contents audit is complete, and your file structure is in order, it’s critical to ensure that it *stays* this way.
You don’t want your content strategy to backfire after your hard work.
Step 6: Analytics
As if you don’t hear enough about analytics.
However, it is an essential component of any sales enablement approach.
Analytics allows sales and marketing to iterate and continuously improve their operations.
The reporting you create addresses critical questions about content efficacy, consumption rate, which material made the most interaction if it prompted a purchasing decision, and how much value creation you are gaining from it.
Here are a few things to keep an eye on regarding sales enablement reporting.
