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Why Sales Enablement Requires Both Marketing And Sales Strategies

Forbes Business Development Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Jen Spencer

Marketing appeals to and attracts potential customers. Sales converts that potential into bottom-line results. As the vice president of sales and marketing at a company that provides sales enablement solutions, I've found that the two entities can join forces via sales enablement, with marketing delivering resources and strategies that help sales close the deal.

Moreover, a good sales enablement strategy can improve your return on investment. Research from HubSpot found that companies with service-level agreements (SLAs) between marketing and sales have better cooperation and performance.

So why does this approach become such a challenge? Sales enablement should be marketing-driven, yet too often, the way leads are treated during marketing can differ from their experience with sales. The careful research that drew prospects to your messaging doesn’t always transition to sales’ needs; thus, you could be cooling leads’ enthusiasm at the exact time you should be further impressing them.

Great sales enablement meets a potential customer’s needs from start to finish. You'll need to successfully apply marketing strategy and discovery to the sales process — and foster some collaboration along the way.

Use The Power Of The Persona

Personas — representations of ideal customers — are cornerstones of inbound marketing. Marketers spend a fair amount of time studying the demographics and psychographics of customers, but when you're applying personas to sales enablement, there’s always room for improvement and a deeper dive into the intelligence behind them. Marketing can deliver insight into the goals and pain points of personas, and sales can provide experiences and feedback from real customers. 

Negative personas also offer valuable insight into how sales should handle leads that will be difficult or impossible to convert into customers. Although securing as much business as possible is a natural goal, some prospects will drain resources from marketing and sales without ever converting. Create negative personas to identify these leads and help marketing ensure it isn’t inadvertently appealing to this segment — as well as inform sales when and how they should back off non-converting prospects.

Some tips for making the most out of personas include:

1. Do live customer interviews. You should talk to living, breathing people who use (and love) your product. This is a great way to understand the “types” of people who are most likely to buy in the future.

2. Create a persona description. Include obvious identifiers such as role, industry, geolocation, and size of the company, but take the next step by also highlighting challenges, goals, responsibilities, personality type, resources and news sources they consume, and so on.

3. Make a quick-reference card for sales reps. Every sales rep should have a one-page reference that includes the description and other key details about the persona.

4. Add personas to your sales engagement tool. Once your buyer persona research is complete, you should make it easy to use. One of the best ways to achieve this is by building personas into your salesperson’s existing workflow.

Improve Sales Enablement Content

Bottom-of-the-funnel marketing content such as case studies, checklists, toolkits and guides can be terrific sales enablement aids. Connect the dots between existing content (or even create new content) and what will resonate with leads deep in the funnel to give sales more ammo to show how much your product — and the people behind your product — can benefit the customer.

More importantly, the internal-facing content and intelligence you share between marketing and sales can significantly impact customer interactions and conversions. Identify the roadblocks sales reps encounter and the points at which deals go dark to set the stage for sales-enabling resources that overcome obstacles. 

For example, the more potential risk that's involved in a purchase, the more important social proof — such as customer testimonials — becomes. Your future customers look for proven success and expertise because there's revenue on the line. Sales enablement content might come in the form of written and video testimonials from customers, case studies and examples of actual work you've done for customers.

From there, organize your content into a format sales can easily reference, such as a half-sheet of notes and bullet points to memorize for each persona.

Consider A Sales Enablement Role

Collaboration between marketing and sales teams can drive better results, and a sales-enablement-specific role may inevitably emerge from this process. This specialist should bring passion about marketing and sales and be finely tuned to the goals of both teams — and how those teams can help each other. Some of the things this person can do include:

• Be part of sales calls and carefully listen to the questions customers are asking.

• Sit in on marketing meetings and understand the strategy that will attract prospects who will eventually end up in sales’ hands.

• Actually talk to customers outside of sales calls — as marketing might for persona interviews — to better know what makes them tick and even to update the personas.

• Analyze the data and look for opportunities to improve conversions.

• Undertake a gap analysis based on calls, strategy and data to determine which sales enablement tactics work better than others.

Even if they don't have a person who is solely dedicated to sales enablement, passionate leaders from both marketing and sales can take the reins and drive success. The two teams share plenty of priorities; identify what’s important to each and to both to strengthen the collaboration and empower your leaders with the knowledge that together, they can do great things.

Assess, Adjust And Achieve

Sales processes should be fluid. Obviously, you can’t have a Wild West where everyone is doing something completely different, but when sales reps recognize where customer relationships are going and adapt as needed, conversion rates may trend upward. This requires reps who are skilled in reading interactions and recognizing when to adjust course — and your sales enablement strategy can give them insight on how to adjust.  

Ultimately, effective sales enablement is all about vision and goals. Good leaders can help build the roadmap and inspire their teams to follow it. When you find that perfect alignment between marketing and sales and both sides buy into the vision, your bottom line — and your customers — can benefit.

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