Grande Guide To Sales Enablement - Marketing Automation | Demand Generation

What’s a “Grande Guide”?

We know what the typical day is like for marketers. After all, we are marketers ourselves. Between brainstorming and strategy sessions, last-minute requests and impromptu meetings (“It’ll just take a minute, really!”), and trips to meet colleagues and customers, you can barely find time to breathe, never mind keep up with the latest marketing trends. That’s why we’ve developed the Grande Guide series. In the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, you can become proficient on a key marketing topic, in this case, sales enablement.

Why Sales Enablement Matters
Today

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to be sold. Especially by a salesperson. Really, when was the last time you even answered an unidentified call at work, much less listened patiently as an overeager sales rep fumbled through a script? The same is true for your prospects. That’s why they avoid your salespeople until the last possible minute, instead educating themselves by accessing publicly available information and connecting with peers online until they’ve narrowed down their options. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates that the buyer’s journey is 70% complete by the time a sales person is contacted.

While you can’t blame prospects (in fact, odds are, you follow a similar process when you are the prospect), this shift places buyers in control of the sales cycle. And that forces corresponding changes in how your organization sells. The winning sales rep is not the one who can “hunt,”“arm,” or “close,” but the one who consults with prospects to simplify their decision-making process based on a keen understanding of buyer interest and behavior. When a prospect finally reaches out, your sales rep had better understand everything there is to know about the buyer and be prepared to deliver value. Immediately. That’s where sales enablement comes in.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement – also referred to as sales readiness – is about helping today’s salesperson deliver the right content to the right person at the right time to facilitate this (mostly independent) buying process. And it’s up to you to get your sales team ready, namely by making it easy to access and use the following:

A prioritized list of who to contact next based on lead quality and purchase intent

Behavioral data that summarizes prospect interests and intent

Tools that help salespeople track their hottest prospects and alert them to key activities as they advance through the buying process

A library of content aligned to specific stages of the buying process that helps build trust and rapport with the buyer – and ultimately encourages the prospect to reach a favorable purchase decision

Why Do I Need to Understand
Sales Enablement Personally?

Your success as a marketer depends on your ability to help the sales team sell. While a number of factors play into this success, passing on knowledge and content is key. After all, many salespeople spend inordinate amounts of time researching prospects, contacting those unlikely (or not ready) to move forward, and creating content to facilitate the buying process.

What if you could tell your sales reps what each prospect is interested in so they could communicate more intelligently about topics that resonate? And what if you armed your reps with the tools and content to easily engage and keep in touch with hot prospects? Your salespeople could then focus on building strong relationships with prospects and guiding them to a buying decision – and your perceived value would really rise.

Why Does My Business Need to
Understand Sales Enablement?

So why should your company care about sales enablement? If your organization is like most others, it spends a lot of money on sales. And because it’s making such a big investment, it wants to squeeze out the most productivity and greatest results possible from the sales team. Sales enablement allows your company to do just that.

Sales Enablement Basics

Effective sales enablement helps your marketing team pass higher quality leads to sales, allowing your sales reps to focus on higher priority activities. This in turn drives a steadier, more predictable pipeline. Plus, when your sales reps are reaching – and even surpassing – their quota faster than ever before, they’ll be eager to stay on board. Just as important, your organization will better understand how marketing demand translates to pipeline and how conversion rates impact revenue – ultimately enabling the “holy grail” of sales and marketing: better alignment.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by terminology and techniques when it comes to sales enablement. But here’s all you really

need to know – sales enablement covers the sales side of the revenue cycle, including:

Which prospects are displaying behavior and engaging in activity that makes them promising buyers

What topics sales should focus on to engage each prospect in a high-value, relevant dialogue

What tools and techniques are available to track their prospects throughout the buying cycle

What information they can quickly access,customize, and send to prospects to help them navigate the buying process.

The Key to Success:
Understanding Digital Body
Language

Your marketing organization is in a unique position to help sales thrive when it comes to sales enablement. But you’ll fail unless you understand how and when buyers are interacting with your website, content, and campaigns. It’s not enough to generate high-quality leads, as challenging as that may be. You also need to deliver the information that sales needs to close business. And that means being able to understand prospect interest and intent based on what they are doing on your site. In fact, understanding prospect behavior is more powerful than knowing demographic information, such as the data you get from a list broker or capture via a registration form.

For example, on your registration form, a prospect might indicate interest in one of your solutions. But a greater need might become apparent when you see what content the prospect downloads and the time she spends viewing your online demos and Webinars. With this information, your sales rep can engage in a more targeted, relevant conversation with the prospect – which helps accelerate the close.

Sales Enablement Tools and
Technologies

You and your sales reps can – and should – tap into a number of tools and technologies to get your sales enablement efforts humming along. Here are several you can’t afford to overlook:

CRM or SFA to manage sales activities, including daily tasks,activity record-keeping, lead routing and disposition, and opportunity and forecast modeling.

Marketing automation to bridge your marketing and salesdatabases, and connect marketing activities to sales leads/ opportunities in CRM and other favored tools.

Tools designed to help sales reps quickly identify opportunities, communicate with prospects, and close deals:

Send real-time email alerts directly to sales when hot prospects visit your website, containing visitor details like pages visited, length of visit, and search terms used.

Decipher a prospect’s online activities and behavior so your sales people can focus conversations on topics that resonate with buyers.

Enable sales to access and customize pre-built templates and track recipient response directly through their email program. > Automatically email a report to your sales reps’ inboxes on prospect activities so they can track important contacts, companies, or hot leads.

Sales Enablement Best Practices

When it comes to excelling at sales enablement, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, follow these proven best practices.

Share relevant information. When you send leads to sales, do you provide any insights into the prospect’s recent activity? You’d be amazed at the amount of information marketers collect on websites and through campaigns, but don’t share with the sales team.

Incorporate a proven sales technique. Focus on your top reps – what communication techniques do they use to engage prospects? How can you pass these on to all your sales reps?

Arm sales to engage. Start with “foundational” email templates on the following topics; they are easy to draft and will get used frequently:

Fast facts about the company – maybe with a link to a fact sheet or “about us” page on the website

“I understand your pain” – customized messages that match the subsets of your prospect database

“Check out this online demo”

“I recently switched jobs and joined an exciting new company ...” – a big hit with newbies >Test your sales enablement tools. Get feedback from a small group of reps before rolling tools out to the entire sales organization. This helps develop sales champions for your initiative and builds credibility for your efforts.

Make it easy. Make prospect information and tools available in the environments that are familiar to your sales team, such as CRM, Microsoft Outlook, and mobile devices.

Don’t force adoption. Collaborate with salespeople to demonstrate the benefits of your tools – then publicize successes to the rest of the team.

Sales Enablement in Action

Not convinced of the impact sales enablement can have on your organization? Check out these examples of success.

Plum Benefits contracts with companies to offer employee perks, namely discount entertainment tickets. By tagging pages on its site to track online behavior and pushing that data into Salesforce.com, Plum Benefits enables its sales team to generate higher revenues when talking to prospects. For example, a prospect might indicate on a form that she is interested in ballet, but her onsite behavior shows she was viewing sports and concert tickets. With this insight, the sales rep can make a cross-sell.

Meridium provides software that helps companies track and manage the performance of their production assets. The firm’s inside sales team spent hours qualifying prospects by looking up information. By tracking what’s happening on its site and combining the information with data collected via form submissions, Meridium can proactively arm the sales team with additional insights. This sales enablement process allows the inside sales team to focus on higher value activities, such as sending relevant content to prospects. Thanks to targeted delivery of relevant content, Meridium’s sales cycle

has been reduced by 3 to 6 months. Plus, by integrating Eloqua with its CRM system – and delivering marketing campaigns through Eloqua – Meridium has realized a 30% increase in sales opportunities.

What’s Next in Sales
Enablement?

While it’s important to be up to speed on the here and now, it’s also smart to think ahead. Here’s what we see on the horizon for sales enablement:

Going more mobile. Whether they’re on the road or grabbing lunch, sales reps want to respond as quickly as possible to prospects. It will become increasingly important that your sales team can access information about an opportunity and the prospect’s online behavior from their mobile devices so they can do just that.

Integrating CRM with social. As more and more prospects turn to their social networks for input and advice on buying decisions, your sales force needs a way to tap into their activities. We’ll see greater integration between sales tools like CRM with social media channels. Salesforce Chatter is a prime example.

Getting predictable. Sales reps are always looking for a way to shorten the sales cycle. Soon they’ll want you to predict the next best course of action with hot leads based on your analysis of how similar buyers responded to your content and website while still in research mode.