Marketing Vision 2009 expanded - Part 3: Sales Enablement

This expansion post is related to this excerpt of my marketing vision 2009 post:

“Next year is the year that marketing will take proactive steps to power sales enablement. They'll no longer use sales portals as landfills for marketing collateral that doesn't help their sales force sell. In fact, marketing will take on helping to lower that ridiculous amount of time salespeople spend recreating marketing content into something they can use.”

The sales and marketing disconnect is a subject that’s received a lot of press over the years. The gap is finally narrowing, but not quite enough. Marketing needs to take on sales as their customers and enable them to spend the majority of their time actually selling.

Consider that:

• 83.7% of companies say they see customers’ expectations increasing. [CSO Insights]


• 50% of companies say lost sales are directly related to lack of engagement. [Economist Intelligence Unit]


• Less than 25% of CMOs and Sales VPs are satisfied with their salespeople’s ability to articulate value. [CMO Council]


• 80% of customers say salespeople do not show them they understand their businesses. [IDC]


• According to executive buyers, 82% of them say sales reps are unprepared for meetings. [Sirius Decisions]


• Salespeople spend only 23% of their time on selling activities – “The selling category consists of activities designed to seek out new business. Mostly this consists of making sales calls on the phone, making sales presentations and writing letters. Occasionally some respondents have also included marketing and networking.”

In order to create sustainable growth and increase top-line revenues, salespeople need to increase the time they spend actually selling.

Marketing needs to embrace sales enablement as an extension of their marketing strategy. This means that as they map their marketing content to buying stages and develop target segment personas and profiles, they need to step beyond the creation of marketing content to creating useful sales content.

Marketing can facilitate how salespeople find the content and tools they need to prepare better for meetings, gain insight about their prospect’s businesses and industries and assemble slide decks that help prospects visualize how your company’s products will help them meet their strategic objectives.

Heck, marketing is doing all this research and content development to create better engagement and relationships with prospects, so it shouldn’t be that great an extension to apply that knowledge to the creation of sales tools and conversational email scripts and collateral that helps salespeople extend the buyers’ journey with your company after the handoff.

Otherwise, marketing is allowing their investment into prospect and sales opportunity development to go to waste if sales isn’t enabled to pick up the ball gracefully. By easing their salespeople’s ability to have better conversations because they can get up to speed on a prospect quickly and have the intelligence they need at their fingertips, marketing can have a huge impact on customer acquisition.

Start by improving your sales portal:

• Remove all the dead wood.


• Track which content is used by salespeople with prospects who become customers.


• Enable salespeople to rate and comment on sales portal content. Then use their feedback to improve the content that’s not performing and create more of the good stuff that’s working.


• Organize your sales portal content by problem-to-solution scenarios, industries and target segment personas. Give your salespeople a snapshot view of what they need on one page, in a variety of contexts that work for their mindsets.


• Include marketing campaign content summaries to provide salespeople insight to what the prospects they’re calling have viewed. And, provide follow-on conversational gambits that allow salespeople to step into the conversation with relevance.

If marketing puts sales enablement into their content strategy, they can do wonders for enabling salespeople as an extension of what they’re already doing. In order to be effective they’ll have to [GASP] work collaboratively with sales to hone and refine the process over time.

What difference would it make if your salespeople were spending at least 35—45% of their time selling? How about 50%?

Imagine how much the alignment between sales and marketing will improve if marketing is actually enabling sales to sell more. Not to mention the increase in customer acquisition for your company. That ought to give marketing something to measure to validate their efforts!

Other Marketing Vision Expansion Posts:

Part 1: Marketing Content

Part 2: Listening

Part 4: Storytelling

Comments

[Steven Woods]

Great post Ardath, much enjoyed. The one area where there seems to be a very difficult problem to crack is in sales awareness of what knowledge exists. If they don't know that a case study, whitepaper, or solution on problem X or Y exists, they won't know to look for it, and will stumble when interacting with prospects. Interested in your thoughts on that challenge.

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your comment!

That is a big problem, I agree. That's why I encourage companies to create contextual views for their sales reps.

For example, if you have a problem-to-solution scenario, you display content about that scenario, the products that solve it, customer success stories, marketing campaigns prospects have been exposed to, the differing impacts across the industries you serve, etc.

Content needs to be grouped how it's used by salespeople, not just out on a file server or in silos that require them to search for each piece separately.

I think about it as a sort of sales kit.

Does that help?
Ardath

[Paul]

Great post and I agree with Steven's comment.
This Sales Enablement application (amongst other things it is a sales portal) lets you browse for the different resource types available for an offering and also shows cross-selling opportunities etc:
http://tinyurl.com/9wyj3g

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your comment and the link. Cross-referenced content based on taxonomies is a good start to establishing context for salespeople. The sales portal has got to become a tool that helps sales excel at selling. And it needs to coordinate with marketing's efforts to keep the buyer's journey flowing smoothly from start to finish.