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Content Management Sales Enablement Marketing

The Journey to Sales Enablement: A Marketer’s Guide

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August 13, 2020 | 5 min read

Marketing is not a lone wolf in an organisation

As marketers, we rely on multiple business partners across our companies to design winning go-to-market strategies that connect our business’ solutions with the right buyers at the right time. Yet, even the best-thought-out marketing strategies fall flat if sales teams do not receive the right guidance on what to know, say and show at key inflection points during the sales cycle.

This is where sales enablement comes in. Whilst our organisations may have been brandishing the term “sales enablement” for a while now, there seems to be a lack of common understanding of what it really is and the opportunities it provides for both marketing and sales professionals.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training they need to effectively engage buyers.

As a business function, it is fairly novel for European businesses, but one that is quickly gaining traction. When SalesEnablement.pro ran its inaugural State of Sales Enablement survey five years ago, only 14% of organisations had a defined sales enablement team in place. Now, across companies in Europe, 58% have a sales enablement person, programme or function in place and an additional 22% plan to dedicate a person, programme or function to sales enablement in the coming fiscal year.

In short, sales enablement helps sellers do their job and tells marketing what they need to do it well.

What’s in it for marketers?

Marketing teams know that many of their strategic initiatives are not currently landing with sales. All of the content diligently produced (usually at a high cost, both in terms of time and budget) never gets used. Typically, around 65% of the content produced by marketers is never used by the sales team. Ultimately, this means that two thirds of the investment in this marketing content is wasted. The ROI on content that never gets used is zero.

One of the issues is content findability. As sales moved from analogue to digital channels, so did the myriad of content created by marketing to support this function. Without proper management and analytics systems in place, all of this content got scattered across multiple sites, platforms, and devices.

To solve the issue of content findability, sales teams now gather a small subset of the content they like on their devices. They use the files at hand as much as possible, unaware they might be out of date or not engaging to their buyers. What is more, sellers waste time hastily recreating content that already exists, because it is too much trouble to find the “official” version of the files they need at that moment in time.

Meanwhile, marketing has virtually no visibility into what is really happening, which pieces of content are being used and which ones aren’t. To solve these problems, vendors began developing solutions to give salespeople access to the content they need, from centralised content management platforms all the way up to closed-loop sales enablement systems with performance analytics, semantic search, guidance and training.

What does sales enablement achieve?

The main goal of sales enablement is to make salespeople more effective at closing deals and driving revenue. The opportunity is large - companies that consistently nail the selling experience have 50% higher quota attainment than average companies. And those best-in-class companies are twice as likely to be using a sales enablement solution that addresses the main obstacles to driving sales.

Sales enablement helps salespeople find the right piece of content at every step of the buyer’s journey, shows if and how buyers engage with it and provides guidance on how to use each piece of content effectively.

The result is that sellers engage more effectively with customers, and engagement is the lifeblood of a successful sales process.

What can marketers do to start a sales enablement journey?

Sales enablement is not a one-time quick fix, but requires continuous work and diligence to be truly successful. Here are a few tips and examples on how to get you started on your sales enablement journey:

Work closely with your sales team
When creating content, it should be based on what’s best for sales. Try to show seller empathy and understand sales methodology, sales processes and sales stages, so you can provide the content that is truly needed.

Provide guidance
Implement a guidance framework for your content. That means, telling your sales reps how to best use the content you are providing.

Map Your Content
Build a catalog that captures the key types of content your sellers need to close deals. You will often uncover content that lurks in unexpected places or detect content gaps for you to consider when creating new content.

Finally: Analyse, improve, rinse & repeat
As mentioned above, sales enablement requires continuous work to have a true impact on your business. This includes frequently measuring the usage and effectiveness of your content at each stage of the sales cycle, building on initial success and tweaking as necessary.

If you’d like to learn more, read our Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement.

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