The road to a handshake deal is not as smooth as it once was. Now, clients often require more than basic product information from your business’ website and sales teams.
The shift has come because they expect you, their sales reps, to help solve their business’ problems. In response to these changes, we’re seeing an increased focus on integrated sales enablement solutions. For example, in 2013, fewer than 20% of businesses brought on a dedicated sales enablement employee or solution; but by 2017, 59% of companies had made the change to bring in a dedicated solution for sales enablement.
Despite more businesses embracing sales enablement platforms and technology, they’re still not getting it right. So, here’s why your sales enablement isn’t working and how to fix it.
Your Sales and Marketing is Siloed
What do we mean by that? There is an outdated view that sales and marketing are two separate competing disciplines with separate sets of interests. “Silo mentality” has become a stubborn issue in organisations across the world.
Sales and marketing teams should, but don’t always, work together to generate and nurture leads throughout the entire buying cycle – it’s easy to end up just managing their respective workloads. Marketing need to care more about the end result of lead generation as well as channel engagement. Sales need to take a step back from the numbers to better understand their customer, including their needs and motivations. And this is why communication and collaboration between both departments is key.
Technology can now also put up obstacles and cause silos between sales and marketing teams. For example, using a CRM platform to manage customer relationships alongside a separate marketing automation platform to manage leads means these two systems often aren’t sharing information. Having this disconnect between what the sales and marketing teams are doing can lead to lost opportunities and lost revenue.
The best way to stop this is to collaborate the two departments by introducing a sales enablement platform that can not only deal with automation but also create a dedicated and integrated CRM. Data Dwell is one such option that is built on the Salesforce CRM infrastructure.
You’re not Analysing Content Success to Optimise Further Sales Processes
Another key issue with sales and marketing is the lack of ongoing analytics on the success rate of collateral: how well are your blogs, whitepapers, e-books, etc. performing in the sales process? Have you looked at their analytics? What about the printed material? Are you utilising vanity URLs and tracking phone calls?
If your sales teams aren’t able or prioritising feedback, and marketing teams aren’t utilising metrics, opportunities will be missed due to a lack of information or not promoting the right features of your products with your core demographic.
Sales enablement technology employs one of two approaches dependent on the number of data points available. Actionable insights are generated by aggregating content interactions and performance through dashboards and reports, or, for very large companies serving thousands of customers can use AI techniques to determine the most effective content for different prospects. Using these data-driven approaches, rather than relying on anecdotal results or the opinion of marketing and sales, means more attention is being paid to generating the most value for the customer and in the process making your company their choice when purchasing.
One of the key roles of sales enablement is its ability to help fill the gaps in your content strategy, using data-driven recommendations to make your content library more comprehensive. Enablement will also offer up suggestions for pieces of content that should be re-evaluated, based on performance data, so the buyer experience becomes more intuitive. This allows your team to review hours and budget, allocating resources to filling gaps in your content and promoting proven, effective content.
You’re Not Considering the Customer
All sales and marketing should start and end with the customer in mind. In the same vein sales enablement begins with the customer too. Every facet of your enablement system must consider customers’ needs or pain points and, in turn, the customer journey.
Simply put, customers, not sales people, now control the sales process. With the sheer quantity of information available online, customers don’t need sales reps to teach them about products and services. Prospective customers will often seek out their own information online before approaching a sales team about a particular need, the basics of what a product does or can provide is usually covered in their own research. The task sales teams now have is making sure that the customer has correct, concise and highly relevant information at each step of their buying journey.
Unfortunately, a lot of sales organisations are still using outdated sales processes that just don’t work anymore. For example, cold calling has largely gone the way of the dodo, whereas social media platforms are essential as they’re where your clients are – online. In fact, 78% of Salespeople using social media outsell their peers. That is a huge percentage that simply can’t be ignored. The best way to tackle the issue of relevancy of sales channels is to use a mix, keep multiple channels available for use, and then target the client with the right content on the appropriate channel.
Marketing and sales teams are the primary beneficiaries of well implemented, integrated sales enablement services. The enablement function fully equips sales teams with the necessary tools and specific data insights to bring added perspective to client interactions.
