For many years, we've dedicated ourselves to helping our clients breathe life into their brands. Through our journey, we've discovered the key drivers of momentum in both brand development and tactical growth initiatives. Alignment with sales teams is high on the list.
The most successful marketing strategies make room for sales enablement and involve sales teams early in the process. Why? Because salespeople are experts at selling. They can provide marketing with crucial insights into what drives their conversations. Marketing can then use this intelligence to craft integrated content that not only supports these conversations but also helps achieve corporate goals.
Marketing and sales naturally overlap, often with mixed results. Imagine the potential when this collaboration is done with intention.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is essentially any process, content or function that may contribute to a salesperson or team reaching their targets.
Common sales enablement tactics include:
- Onboarding, training and coaching programs
- Sales tracking software and/or customer relationship management (CRM) platform
- Pitch decks, email templates, brochures and other collateral
- Product demos and sandbox environments
Some companies only implement sales enablement tactics when they identify a gap or problem. Backfilling solutions to problems is not a proactive strategy. What’s needed is a proactive, holistically integrated sales enablement strategy.
A sales enablement strategy is the intentional and systematic use of enablement tools that, when implemented, will significantly boost success.
A robust strategy should:
- Deeply understand the customer and their business landscape
- Provide a thoughtfully designed framework for segmenting and nurturing prospects
- Include tools that deliver actionable insights to optimize and prioritize sales efforts
- Ensure a seamless transition of brand voice and experience from marketing to sales
- Utilize managerial oversight to ensure tools and processes are well-understood and effectively used
- Continuously evolve to optimize against KPIs and uncover opportunities for improvement
Sales enablement strategy isn’t just a “nice to have” — organizations leveraging sales enablement report an increase in sales between 6% to 20% as a result.
So, whose job is sales enablement?
How a company is organized will determine which department takes the lead on sales enablement. However, without a clear structure for the sales enablement process and support, it often falls to the sales team to manage on their own.
Having salespeople own sales enablement can be problematic because:
- Inconsistency: Each salesperson may create something different based on their personal preferences
- Limiting potential: Sales operates in a silo, isolated from the assistance and expertise outside their team
- Myopia: Team members may be too close to the challenges to see them clearly
- Capacity: Developing the strategy diverts focus from actual relationship-building and selling
Salespeople already have the heavy burden of driving company revenue. And when 65% of sales managers say they don’t have the time and resources necessary to perform their job, how can we then ask them to address sales enablement too?
Marketing’s role
The old days of sales vs. marketing are over. And for a very good reason: when sales and marketing teams are aligned, sales teams achieve 41% greater growth in reaching their quotas. The cost of misalignment — estimated at over $1 trillion each year — includes lost revenue, lower productivity, fewer pipeline opportunities and higher employee turnover.
Aligning your sales and marketing teams isn't always easy. Download our guide, "The 5 Biggest Alignment Challenges Facing Sales and Marketing Teams" for tips!
Reflecting on the sales enablement tactics mentioned earlier, it's clear there's a significant overlap with marketing functions. Whether through marketing or sales, our goal is to create touchpoints that feel personalized and relevant to each individual's needs. Essentially, we're building meaningful relationships.
Content at its core
Content marketing is crafted to equip prospects with the essential information they need as they navigate the buyer’s journey. While many marketing teams focus on content for lead generation, they often overlook the content requirements in the later stages. This oversight forces sales to bridge these gaps themselves, which disrupts consistent brand messaging and hinders a seamless prospect experience.
When creating content for sales enablement, marketing and sales should work together to discover:
- What questions aren’t being answered by our existing materials?
- What are prospects consistently asking for that we can provide?
- What are the objections sales is regularly addressing?
- Where are prospects entering and exiting the pipeline?
- What existing materials are sales teams using that work, and how can we standardize them across the team? Or make them even better?
- What content is driving MQLs? Is a contact an MQL just because we have a name and email? Are they converting to SALs/SQLs? Why or why not?
- How can we best distribute our existing content to the right people at the right time?
For instance, if prospects frequently question a product’s pricing, marketing can develop case studies or a calculator tool to clearly illustrate the ROI. If a particular salesperson’s email style consistently achieves higher open rates, marketing can create templates for the entire team to use and even conduct A/B testing to further enhance those open rates!
When marketing collaborates with sales to create a strategy — and its accompanying content — sales teams are 86% more likely to exceed expectations and 67% more likely to close deals.
As an added bonus, all the content that marketing creates will actually be used, and much of the sales enablement content can be repurposed for other objectives in the main content marketing strategy.
Leverage tech that creates impact and clarity
Sales and marketing teams already rely heavily on data to build strategies, track performance, and close deals. However, it's all too common for these teams to use data to highlight their own contributions or, worse, to point fingers at the other team. How often have we heard, “The leads marketing sends are no good” or “Sales isn’t following up”?
Using technology and data for sales enablement is a collaborative learning process to make both teams more successful. Marketing teams — especially ones using a CRM like HubSpot or Marketo — can use data to demonstrate best practices that help refine sales processes. Sales teams can, in turn, use data to demonstrate where they need more resources.
Beyond simply aggregating data, marketing technology can also help sales teams operate more efficiently and effectively. Marketing teams can collaborate with sales to automate and improve their processes, including:
- Tracking what content a prospect has engaged with and offering other relevant content automatically through an email nurture sequence
- Notifying a salesperson when a prospect has high purchase intent
- Filtering contacts into lists by their ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Automating follow-up for lists of any size, based on specific actions like attending a webinar or trade show
The sales team may not have the expertise with (or access to) the technology to set up these functions. Thank goodness they have a great relationship with the marketing team, and can collaborate to create something that works to meet everyone’s goals! Right?
Titan ONE worked with this client to build an interactive playbook that helped its salespeople have more meaningful conversations with prospects. Find out how.
New tools like HubSpot's Breeze AI Agent can help your sales teams do more with their time, make better choices, and help provide more visibility into how everything is connecting together.
What are you waiting for?
By empowering your marketing team to take an active role in sales enablement, you can:
- Help the sales team not just meet but surpass their KPIs
- Build a more reliable and steady pipeline
- Close more deals with confidence
- Reduce employee turnover and alleviate burnout
- Create impactful content that sales teams will actually use
- Boost efficiency and morale across both departments
- Minimize friction and foster genuine connections with your prospects and customers
If your marketing team doesn’t have the capacity or skill set to support sales enablement, you’re not alone. It’s difficult to add yet another function — especially a strategic one that will take time to develop — when 83% of marketing professionals are reporting some level of burnout. It may be time to leverage a strategic brand and GTM agency.
At Titan ONE, we find true purpose in partnering with our clients to develop integrated strategies and support the tactics that bring them to life. We prioritize sales enablement to help our clients forge meaningful connections with their customers and prospects. Intrigued?
Learn how to supercharge your integrated brand and GTM motions. Book a discovery call.
