Sales enablement can help you avoid department silos. Carrie Morgan, managing director of The Sales Way, reveals how to integrate it into the wider marketing function
Take a moment to think about all of your marketing and sales campaign efforts – they have probably all started with a focus on the customer’s needs and how your product or service can help solve those challenges.
Yet, the buyers that your sales teams are visiting just aren’t seeing that in the meetings with your sales people.
So could sales enablement be the solution to this mismatch in expectations between the vendor and buyer in a B2B engagement?
Put simply, sales enablement is the holistic go-to-market sales and marketing strategy for your company – ensuring that a joined up approach is taken throughout your organisation’s different teams when launching a new product to the market.
Connect departments
Create a super group between your departments. The key to integrating sales enablement into your marketing processes and department is getting back to basics. This is about starting from scratch on a new product launch – with sales, marketing and product development all working together from the start.
This is, in essence, your business’ super group. This super group will have responsibility for not only building the product in the first place, but marketing it and eventually selling it to customers.
Sales teams need to share input at the product development stage, based on the valuable, first-hand feedback they receive from clients on a daily basis. Marketing can also draw on these insights to provide relevant and targeted content and collateral when the product is launched. And sales get the benefit of first-hand experience of the product being developed, which will enrich later conversations with clients.
Non-traditional roles
There is no longer room in the B2B world for a traditional sales person. Their job has become extinct. What has emerged in its place is a multi-faceted role that encompasses sales, marketing, customer service, social media and thought leadership.
As buyers become more sophisticated, they increasingly control the sale – having so much information readily available at their fingertips about your company, your product and your services, they tend to only engage with sales people at the very last minute – once a decision has been made.
In order to survive in this new world of B2B sales, salespeople have to become marketers: they must help to produce the marketing content and social media updates. This elevates sales people to become thought leaders within their industry and build their personal credibility alongside that of the company. By using tips and insights picked up from their client engagements, sales teams have the information necessary to create relevant and regular content to encourage a healthy funnel of future prospects.
Likewise, your marketing executives require real life customer engagements on a regular basis and need to be visiting clients wherever possible. Try encouraging sales and marketing to team up on joint customer calls and meetings once in a while and to then agree follow up marketing initiatives based on those client interactions.
Take a cyclical approach to sales
Start to view your marketing and sales efforts as a never-ending cycle. That can sound daunting, but it’s the only way to deliver consistent results that continually improve.
In this cyclical approach, marketing begins early on during product development, and supplements the sales cycle at regular milestones. And once a sale is made, or a prospect is lost, that information is fed back into the marketing engine of the company, changes are made based on the outcome, and the cycle starts once again.
This method of constantly reworking and supplementing the entire sales process, means that marketing, sales and product development engage with the customer at many points, rather than each department having their designated timeframe (e.g. product development brings a product to market, marketing creates collateral which is sent out, and then sales contact customers based on leads generated by marketing.)
In a cyclical model, feedback from the customer on why they decided against your product would be fed back into marketing immediately, so that new campaigns could be tweaked and repositioned on the fly. This ongoing process of continuous improvement means your sales and marketing collateral is always up-to-date and relevant to your clients.
These ideas may seem obvious, but in practice they are rarely implemented in full. This is because it’s often easier to continue with the status quo. The other factor is that this approach requires a team working together cohesively. And in a climate where many businesses are firefighting just to stay on top of current operations, it can be hard to launch a new initiative.
However, think about how just putting together a small team between the product development, marketing and sales departments could deliver immediate results for your marketing plans. Using immediate client feedback gained from the sales teams would save you time and money in conducting market research, and gaining insight from marketing about what clients are really interested in could save product development precious resources when introducing new features.
More importantly, the consistency in messaging that will emerge as a result of your teams working together means that any new marketing and sales campaigns have a bigger impact and better results from the start, which surely must be worth it for any business looking to expand.
