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:
- Understanding how to effectively engage your customers.
- Knowing what content is the most effective with customers.
- 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.”
Equipping sales and sales equipping marketing
In simple terms, sales enablement is about serving the right content and messaging for the right conversations to happen at the right time. According to Highspot’s research, 74% of buyers choose sellers that add value to their conversation and 54% of customer loyalty is driven by sellers who offer valuable perspectives consistently. This is why your sales team needs to provide valuable information at each stage of the buyer journey.
Sales enablement for marketing is about making a piece of content easily and readily available to provide guidance on how to use it. Your marketing team has the insight (if it doesn’t, it should) into what content is working and what’s not working. Marketing also needs to educate buyers to make sure that they are educated, interested and engaged.
Dominik says: “So, this is where sales enablement as a concept of empowering your sales teams and sales enablement tool to give you the foundation to do that as effectively and efficiently as possible. The result is that both teams are equipped to do their jobs as best they can, and do it consistently. That is what sales enablement is all about. It’s ensuring consistent execution and performance for both sales and marketing that produce game-changing benefits for your business.”
In addition to marketing helping sales, sales also can help marketing. Because of their close relationship with customers and prospects, sales can offer insights into their buyers needs and become even more tightly integrated. This type of feedback between the teams can create more alignment.
Become less complacent with processes
Once you have goals and objectives aligned, and you start assisting one another, you need to create visibility and accountability around processes. Have a clear idea of roles, responsibilities and stakeholders. That means embracing the uncomfortable conversations between the two teams.
Dominik says: “Complacency with current processes, strategies or systems is a fast way to lose a competitive edge because you don’t want to stick with processes that are not effective or efficient. So, encouraging constructive criticism can bring sales and marketing teams closer together and allow both parties to understand why certain decisions were made. Embracing these difficult conversations will ensure that teams don’t just make the easy choice but make the right one.”
Discussing possible tension points or friction is extremely important. While it may feel uncomfortable, if a piece of content or process isn’t working, it’s necessary for growth. In addition, these types of meetings can establish any missing parts.
Dominik explains: “I’m sure many of you can relate to that feeling of needing that one PDF, or that one slide deck when you can’t find it. And so, you end up maybe creating something yourself or equally as bad, or even worse, you find an outdated older version somewhere else, you just go with that one. Centralise your communications and make sure to let your team know where they can find updated content.”
With sales enablement, you can make all of your content available to provide context on its usage and training and coaching around objectives and initiatives. You can make sure everyone is engaged and you’ll also have the ability to track your success, no matter how large your sales and marketing teams are.
