Marketing and sales have always had a close relationship. Marketing helps power the engine that drives interest to increase sales activity. A functional sales team and organized business will communicate with marketing leadership regularly to facilitate the creation and tracking of marketing assets that will help communicate the brand’s message to potential customers.
One tool that helps support a business’s sales goals is sales enablement, a process that helps align the goals of sales and marketing teams to help them complement each other effectively. Sales enablement is defined by HubSpot as, “the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.” These pieces help to better streamline an organization’s efforts to reach more people more successfully.
How HubSpot sales enablement helps your business
The HubSpot sales enablement service helps companies get their sales enablement processes together. As a leader in marketing automation services and training, they offer a free sales enablement certification through their HubSpot Academy program that helps marketers develop a marketing-driven sales enablement strategy. Here are some of the ways that their sales enablement education can support the important aspects of a company’s marketing and sales plans.
1. Better timing
Sales enablement helps to better define what a qualified lead looks like as opposed to a business aggressively contacting every customer who’s interacted. A buyers sales journey is an important thing to consider in both marketing retargeting and sales outreach. The HubSpot sales enablement training helps a business to better understand this and shape timing around certain factors to help better facilitate positive interactions and create more conversions based on better business relationships.
2. Creating and utilizing sales level agreements (SLAs)
SLAs help companies create specific, measurable, and attainable goals that drive marketing actions. This could be something like “Every month, marketing is responsible for delivery 2,000 leads to sales and sales will contact each lead within 24 hours.” This helps set expectations and gives more meaning to the efforts and actions of both sales and marketing teams, particularly as they relate to overall business goals.
3. Better seeing the solutions
Marketing isn’t all about getting your messages in front of a customer via advertising. Good marketing can include two-way communication that provides both sales and marketing groups a better sense of what’s effective and resonating with your targeted customers. Sending follow-up surveys after purchase or interaction or creating forms to gate content that help qualify and understand the needs of customer leads is an effective sales enablement tool. Asking customer questions like, “What was your purpose for buying this product or service? What will you use it for? What was your process in finding the right fit for you?” can help you understand the specific ways that your product is creating value and the way that they came to find your company as a solution, ultimately shaping how you talk about your brand.
4. Creating the most effective content
Relatedly, figuring out how to talk to leads once you’ve found them is driven by figuring out how to talk to your target market. This is accomplished through an effective content strategy that brings the right message to the right audience at the right time. Marketing teams need to create enough content to fill the funnel and develop a pipeline of leads – from social media ads to gated whitepapers and email nurture streams – to sales specific collateral, like testimonials, one-sheeters, spec sheets and more. Content has the potential to grow the understanding of the value of your product to your audience and gives sales teams an arsenal of relevant content to share with customers at every stage of their journey.
HubSpot sales enablement can help your business understand the best ways to align your sales and marketing teams to create a more dynamic and powerful sales force.
