Andrew Davies, CMO and co-founder of idio, discusses sales enablement and how to bring your marketing and sales departments together
The life of a salesperson should be getting easier, not harder. CRM tools have structured and codified sales engagements and conversations. Marketing automation (MA) presents each prospect’s activity history. In fact in some sectors, next-best-action technology delivers customised scripts that take the legwork out of deciding which proposition to give to each prospect. And yet, sales continues to be an uphill endeavour. Let’s look at how you can solve this in terms of data, content, technology, targets and culture.
According to the Telenet/Ovation Sales group: “In 2007, it took an average of 3.68 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. Today it takes 8 attempts.” These woes are further compounded when you realise that: “95 per cent of all customer interactions happen over the phone and 85 per cent of customers report being dissatisfied with their phone experience” (according to Salesforce).
Despite having access to some of the best technology in the world, sales reps still lack the necessary information to successfully engage and convert, upsell and/or cross-sell their prospects and customers. In fact, a recent CSO Insights study showed that 42 per cent of sales reps say they don’t have the information they need when they make a call. Underlying this challenge is the semi-mythical gap or misalignment that exists between marketing and sales. According to one Aberdeen Group study, highly aligned organisations achieve an average of 32 per cent year-over-year revenue growth – while their less aligned competitors see a 7 per cent decrease in revenue.
Sales enablement refers to a systematic approach to increasing sales productivity by supporting reps with the content, training and analytics they need to have more successful sales conversations. Put more colloquially by Forrester’s Peter O’Neill, it is the: “Supply chain for successful sales conversations.” For the gap between MA and CRM to be closed, sales enablement needs to focus on the following interlinked areas.
Data
The latest research from Ascend2 reveals that lead quality is the most important lead generation objective for marketers in 2015. Sales reps don’t suffer for lack of data – they lack the right data.
Depending on how sophisticated your demand generation process is, most lead records passed through to sales will contain a contact name, firmographic details, purchase history and a lead score. These are certainly instructive, but don’t tell the full story or even represent the full spectrum of lead data that can be made available to a sales rep.
Marketers should understand each lead’s emerging interests and needs based on the content they’ve consumed. This enables sales reps to have relevant, informed conversations with prospective buyers based on actual pain-points, rather than assumptions made on job titles and purchase history information. And because this dataset changes every time they interact online, it is highly dynamic and predictive.
Content
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 86 per cent of B2B marketers are now using content marketing to generate, nurture and convert leads. This makes content the commonality that spans the gap between marketing and sales. However, although content spans the gap it doesn’t necessarily close it. In fact, sales and marketing talk very different languages when it comes to content.
Closing the gap requires a common understanding and usage of content. Salespeople often don’t know what content is at their disposal, and can’t quickly find and access the content they do know about. The content they do use regularly is likely out-of-date. It is incumbent upon marketers to make it easier for sales teams to find and recommend the right piece of content to each lead. This could be through weekly update meetings to alert them to new content to be released that week; or as more people are doing, placing content recommendations into Salesforce right where and when the salesperson needs it.
Technology
Divided dashboards often lead to divided departments.This fragmentation is upheld by marketing teams that keep their eyes on their MA software, rather than also taking a look at what sales see from their CRM-centric view.
It’s crucial for marketing to have an understanding of how sales sees the leads that are passed through. In our recent webinar with Laura Ramos of Forrester, she explained that: “Marketing’s new imperative is sales support…moving from nurturing leads to creating a shared customer context.” Since sales will not learn about the buyer and the specifics of his/her situation until late in the game, marketers need to think about how they can provide sales with as much useful and actionable information as possible so that less resources are wasted on prospect research. We enable this by making sure that the interest data garnered from each lead’s content consumption is available to our sales team in their Salesforce dashboard; that way both sales and marketing have a single-view of every lead’s emerging interests and context.
Targets
Often marketing and sales are working to different deadlines and different worldviews. Closing the gap means making both teams realise you share a common goal: revenue. As I learnt at Content2Conversion in February, 50 per cent of mature B2B marketers now carry a revenue quota. Marketing and sales find it much easier to align when their targets and bonuses are aligned to generating revenue.
Culture
The feedback loop between sales and marketing is crucial to optimising and shortening sales cycles. Sales have the best information on what problems and recurrent questions appear in the conversations with prospects. A strong marketing function listens to sales, and ensures that recurrent and/or significant questions are addressed earlier in the purchase journey through quality content. One of the ways you can accelerate the feedback loop is to have a live dashboard that shows the reasons for lead disqualification by sales. This is a constant challenge to marketers to improve lead targeting to lower the main drivers of disqualification later in the funnel. Communication between your marketing and sales departments is key, since this is what allows them to adjust their strategies for the better and helps improve your chances of success. Fundamentally, it’s about building trust.
This is the key to successful sales enablement: for your marketing team to understand their most important client is the sales team. Marketing should even build a success plan for how they are going to surprise and delight their sales team. A tangible plan to increase trust closes the gap like nothing else can.
