LinkedIn has an article titled, “The Art of Winning: Orchestrating Sales and Marketing to Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience.” There it talks about the current state of sales enablement and how businesses are using it to grow their brands.
They define sales enablement as “equipping your sales team with strategic resources it needs to excel, from tools to technology to content and beyond…B2B sales enablement solutions are often buyer-focused, with an underlying goal of helping sellers target the right buyers and engage them effectively throughout the customer journey. It’s about removing any barriers that might inhibit smooth interactions and a seamless buying process. And, it’s also about helping sales reps show expertise and credibility thanks to content and training.”
As much as the digital age has to offer us by way of connection, it can often prevent salespeople from being able to connect in a meaningful way with their customers and sales enablement helps to provide the value customers need in order to gain trust and credibility and foster positive relationships.
Sales enablement stands to make a big impact on B2B companies. Developing and following a well-researched B2B sales enablement process can help you make the most of your marketing efforts.
How to execute the best B2B sales enablement process
The businesses who are currently using sales enablement is estimated to have risen to nearly 60% of B2B businesses, up from 20% in 2013.
If you’re looking to begin or improve your sales enablement program, start here.
- Get stakeholder buy-in: No matter how much sense you feel it makes for your business to embrace sales enablement and reduce the disconnect between your sales and marketing teams to create a more effective, consistent customer outreach and communication approach, the whole business needs to get behind it, particularly sales and marketing leaders and business leadership teams. Collaboration needs to become part of the culture – there will be no more silos and goals, while they still may vary per department, will be connected.
- Find your tools: Having the right tools in place to support your sales enablement journey is key. Software tools can help you manage leads, organize content, and create reporting that analyzes what marketing pieces are being utilized with what degree of success. There are dozens of excellent sales enablement platforms to help your B2B business, so finding the right one for you is a matter of budget and overall organizational goals.
- Assemble a team: Because sales enablement requires the teamwork of sales and marketing teams, it makes sense to assign sales enablement specific roles within each group. Naming team members to certain roles – such as analytics officer, sales enablement manager, marketing manager, and others – can create the foundation for sales enablement and scale easier in the future. This team will be responsible for the creation of strategy and communication between both departments, as well as project management.
- Align sales and marketing teams on content: This is the crux of sales enablement: what do buyers need? What to salespeople need to provide? Marketers need to ask about and weigh in on the content development that sales requests, as well as make recommendations for content gaps. This is not a one and done conversation, but a whole series of content creation that covers every stage of the buyer’s journey, as well as personalizes various content pieces specific to stakeholders at various B2B accounts – for instance, creating content specific to facility managers in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, possibly accomplished by segmented digital banner ads. Deciding on and developing content for each piece of the journey and every possible decision maker in the B2B buying process is integral to the B2B sales enablement process.
- Decide on metrics: How do you know if your sales enablement efforts are successful? There are several metrics of success to consider, such as cost per customer acquisition and the number of qualified sales leads. Decide as a team – sales, marketing, leadership, and whomever else – what metrics define success and ensure that those are being tracked the strategy can be updated as needed.
- Continue communication: Communication is key to successful sales enablement; without dynamic conversations happening between sales and marketing, there is no such thing as sales enablement. But it’s important that these conversations keep happening – they aren’t just an annual event or part of a semi-regular strategy session. Sales enablement is a constantly growing effort that requires the knowledge of effort of two teams working towards the same goals. It is the job of both teams to ask questions to further the ability to reach sales goals and other company initiatives.
In 2019, it’s important to consider what changes need to be embraced to create the most effective and holistic sales approach. Customers are more educated than ever and sales cycles take longer due to more data being analyzed at every level of business so organizations can make the best decisions. Sales enablement helps you more effectively be part of the solution – by offering education and resources for your customers along the way.
