It’s no secret that companies with good sales enablement close 15% more deals than companies without.
Not to mention that nurtured leads spend more money (by almost 50%).
Which is why if you’re not already paying attention to sales enablement, it’s time to start.
Of course, once you recognize that, the question becomes: where exactly do we start?
We’ve got three answers for you:
-
Involve sales in your strategy.
Identifying your target audiences? Doing brand research? Figuring out customers’ core problems and how you can communicate your company’s solution?
Involve your sales team.
They’ve got knowledge that can help you figure out the right questions to ask, surprise you with common customer problems or objections you didn’t know about, and help you segment customers into smaller groups you can personalize your marketing for.
Not to mention that sales has questions of their own and if you’re doing something like market research, you can probably kill two birds with one stone—getting the marketing and sales info you need.
-
Use sales knowledge to develop your funnel.
What does your customer journey look like? If you’re like most companies (68%, according to this research), you don’t know.
And that’s a problem. Because if you don’t know what the journey looks like, how will you usher your customers along the path toward a purchase?
This means it’s time to get to know your funnel. How do customers make buying decisions? How do they get to you? What pushes them over the edge into the sale?
And because your funnel extends from first impression to closing the sale (and hopefully beyond to upsells and customer loyalty), it’s not just marketing that should be weighing in as you figure it out. Sales needs a seat at the table—from the beginning.
-
Create content sales teams actually want to use.
Here’s an awkward truth: 60 – 70% of B2B content created by marketing is never used.
That’s right, all that work you put into that whitepaper? It’s been flushed down the toilet.
The reasons for this are myriad—lack of trust between marketing and sales, mismatch in what sales needs and what marketing develops, a lack of clear strategy about where in the funnel that content belongs.
This means there are quite a few things marketing needs to address when it comes to content creation.
The first is the simplest: ask the sales team what they need. Is there a common challenge prospects want addressed? Is there an opportunity to educate customers on a certain topic? What are prospects excited about when sales first reaches out? What scares them? What frustrates the hell out of them—and how can we show them that our products or services alleviate that frustration like their own private fairy godmother?
The more you involve sales in strategizing content, the more likely they are to use it. Both because it’ll be useful to their funnel and because involving them early builds trust, communicates respect for what they’re doing, and bridges that age-old gap between marketing and sales.
Need more guidance?
Bridging the gap between marketing and sales is kind of our thing. If you’d like an agency to help you figure it out, we’d love to talk.
