Do you think of sales and marketing as being two completely different departments within your company? They might be currently working in a silo without collaboration, or it's possible you're operating with a marketing team and without a sales department to support your business.
Neither is a smart approach. And we're here to tell you why.
The best companies have a marketing department that is bringing in marketing qualified and sales qualified leads, analyzing these leads, and pushing the sales qualified leads to one or more salespeople to close. Your marketing department should be collaborating with the sales side of your business to understand what makes a good SQL and build an effective lead scoring model; communicate with sales about marketing automation, lead generation and content initiatives; and understand what content the sales team needs to be successful.
Not having a sales enablement role on your marketing team is kind of like navigating a ship at sea with a compass. You’ll probably get where you’re going, but it’s going to be frustrating and difficult, and you might crash and burn along the way. What happens when you add that sales enablement team member? Well, you’re still at sea, but this time you’re armed with GPS and all the data you’d ever want to help you navigate your route.
What the Heck is "Sales Enablement"?
If you don't currently have a Sales Enablement role on your marketing team, you're probably lost to what this role and job title even means, and why you would consider hiring one. The concept of sales enablement refers to the actions a marketing team takes to support the sale of their products or services. Seems simple right? Just wait.
Quality sales enablement requires a complex intersection of sales and marketing with a little bit of product knowledge thrown in. Each step of the way, the marketing team member responsible for sales enablement will gather marketing and sales data, evaluate leads and other metrics such as total volume of sales calls, time to close and more; and create a road map in order to supply your marketing and sales teams with the information they need to succeed from both perspectives.
A sales enablement role is the ultimate form of support that your business can leverage in order to provide a customized, authentic customer journey for your audience. This role ensures this journey does not break down, no matter what team is interacting with a new prospect. The team member you hire to hold the sales enablement role will be a next-level communicator, flexible, and have an in-depth understanding of how your business accomplishes both its marketing and sales goals. We consider this person to be a liaison or bridge between the marketing and sales teams.
Create Targeted Marketing
A major aspect of sales enablement is creating data-driven deliverables for your marketing and sales team that help move customers from website visit (marketing) to purchase (sales). The sales enablement team member will spend a large chunk of time creating these deliverables based on data collected on your target market.
The sales enablement team member will examine all aspects of your intended demographic, including their current interactions with your brand, to determine what direction the marketing and sales teams should take to target this customer.
Here are just some of the tools a sales enablement team member can use to support and amplify the efforts of your marketing team:
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Case studies
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Personas
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Customer interviews
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Regional/focused market analysis
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Competitive information
The marketing team can then turn around and use this information to create on-brand campaigns that will lead to a higher conversion rate for your audience. So much of inbound marketing relies on hitting the right tone with your audience, and the sales enablement team member helps make that happen.
Support Your Sales Team
Every action that the sales enablement team member takes on the marketing side of your business will be aimed at supporting the sales of your products and services. This role can create and provide customized content that gives your sales team the ability to hold valuable, customized conversations when engaging with leads and existing customers.
Here are a few of the deliverables that the sales enablement team member will give your sales team:
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Scripts for sales pitches
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Brand messaging that communicates value propositions, reasons to believe in the service, market differentiators and more
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Proposal or email templates
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Sales tools and content to send via email pitch or follow-up
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Prospect-facing informational material
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Continuous content that supports the sales interaction until close (and after)
In addition to these support tools, the sales enablement role will provide preliminary guidance to the sales team regarding what prospects and leads are most worth approaching. They’ll look at what’s worked in the past, what the market competition is doing, and what information leads respond to most readily. From this, they can create a lead scoring model that will help the marketing team understand when to step in and communicate and when to pass the most qualified leads off to sales.
Sales enablement can save your sales team an exorbitant amount of time in tracking down qualified leads and making successful pitches that close quickly.
Enhance Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
If saving your sales and marketing team time is a primary function of the sales enablement role, it makes sense that they’d use your existing technology to provide data and guidance. They can help you enhance and act on the information you already gather from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and practices.
Collecting and storing extensive data on your existing customers is all well and good, but being able to translate that data into actionable marketing is where the sales enablement role shines. By analyzing CRM data, the sales enablement team member can:
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Confirm what’s working
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Identify moments of churn
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Streamline the Customer Journey
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Establish future leads
Think of CRM as the ultimate internal support for your sales enablement team members. Not a replacement for the role itself. The data collected and organized by CRM helps the person in the sales enablement role fulfill their duties and better focus their efforts.
If CRM supports the sales enablement team member, the person in the sales enablement role is the cornerstone for the marketing and sales team. This role represents the perfect intersection of technology and human relationships required to succeed in any quality inbound marketing strategy. You need a sales enablement role to provide data-driven marketing campaigns that reach your target audience and raise conversion rates. You need the difference that customized, authentic marketing can bring to your company today.
Creating a successful team for inbound marketing today requires more specialization and attention to the finest details than ever before. As technology evolves and customers rely on it more heavily, you need a trained individual to evaluate your market and discover the best ways to reach them. If you're interested in outsourcing your sales enablement role, we offer this service through our Sales Enablement Expert.
