At Ignite London, we were treated to loads of sales enablement content throughout the event. Dominik Schaefer, marketing manager, EMEA at Highspot, shared insights on how you can use sales enablement to link up your marketing and sales teams. Kavita Singh reports.

Create shared objectives and goals

While the reality is that sales and marketing operate in silos, they should ultimately share the same business objective: growing revenue and retaining satisfied customers. If they have different objectives, they’ll have different journeys, and that’s where tension often emerges. As if that wasn’t enough, the pandemic has only served to amplify some of those challenges, as teams were now working in remote environments.

So, with that in mind, Highspot recently 

conducted a survey

 which aimed to uncover marketing challenges that resulted from the pandemic. Interestingly enough, most of the challenges weren’t new ones. They were existing issues, but were simply heightened. Dominik cited the three key challenges as:

1. Understanding how to effectively engage your customers.
2. Knowing what content is the most effective with customers.
3. Understanding what content is useful for sales teams.

Dominik says: “The problem is often that marketing and sales are too focused on their own operations, and start developing their own individual strategies, and quite often they don’t necessarily link up. So, the essential thing here is to understand what sales and marketing can do for each other.”

Research 

shows that 65% of content created by marketing is never used by sales. Ironically enough, 40% of sellers waste their time searching for or creating their own content. This is the impact and waste of resources that occurs when your teams aren’t aligned.

So how can you tackle that problem? You need to agree on where you’re going in the first place and share the same goals from the beginning.

Dominik says: “Effective alignment between your marketing and the sales team, as important as it was before, has now become paramount to turn your marketing strategy into sales success, and effective sales enablement is the key to do just that. Enablement teams have been instrumental over the last 18 months in tackling those challenges by quickly adapting to new market dynamics and shifts in strategy, and organisations have been recognising the strategic impact of sales enablement.”