Sales Enablement Marketing: 3 Ways to Leverage Marketing to Support Sales Efforts

Many of us on the Magnetude team have been immersed in sales enablement marketing since it began gaining traction in the B2B tech sector around 2006. To level set, we often get asked by clients to define sales enablement in the first place as it’s a concept that has changed and evolved in recent years. We like HubSpot’s straightforward definition: “Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.”

More closed deals means more revenue—so you can see why  in the enterprise space, most successful companies have embraced sales enablement marketing as a critical priority for a number of years now. In fact, a study by Sales Enablement PRO found that organizations who have had sales enablement processes in place for more than two years are 48% more likely to experience high buyer engagement.

For smaller B2B firms, prioritizing sales enablement may seem daunting due to budget constraints and limited resources. However, understanding the discipline of sales enablement and focusing on best practices that do apply well to smaller firms, such as effective content strategy, affordable sales technology, and implementing basic sales training programs, even smaller firms can see significant improvements in their sales processes.

Sales Enablement Best Practices

1. Content

Content marketing is a critical component of most B2B marketing plans in today’s world, and the benefits extend to sales enablement as well. So, what content do sales reps need to move their prospects through the buying cycle? What content will prospective customers seek out to help inform their purchase decision? Answer these questions to help your sales team reach their buyers with the right content at the right time.

The content can take many forms, from case studies to whitepapers to videos and more. The key to using content effectively in sales enablement is to be diligent in organizing and communicating what content you have (by audience, decision-making stage, etc.), as well as what gaps you have in your existing content inventory, and how you will prioritize and execute to fill those gaps. By now, we all know that 70%+ of the buyer’s journey happens before a buyer even talks to sales, so the focus needs to shift to looking beyond the categorization of “Sales Tools” and to the concept of “Buyer Journey” content planning and content development.

2. Analytics & Sales Technology

What visibility does sales have and need into what their prospects are doing? Which pages on site are prospects visiting? Who’s downloading which content? Who’s responding to email campaigns? Sales enablement tools can answer these questions and help you locate and reach your best prospects.

Having the right marketing and sales technologies in place can really make a difference in how your sales and marketing team operates and communicates. There are countless tools out there to empower sales enablement—especially with the boom of AI. Select a few tools that allow you to have a single view of the buyer’s journey and closed loop reporting on sales and marketing performance. Once basic reporting is in place, the true sales enablement value begins when you start to leverage this foundational reporting to pull insights and drive tangible improvements to the sales process. For example:

• Lead scoring helps alert sales reps to prospects who might not yet be on their radar, but who should be bubbled to the top of their list based on engagement. For example, if a prospect downloads an eBook on your site, checks out a couple of case studies, and then visits your demo request page, wouldn’t most sales reps want to receive an alert?
• Automated workflows can help make sales reps more efficient and trigger nurture emails to a prospect based on a set of criteria to gauge their readiness to buy or move them through the decision-making funnel, perhaps from awareness to consideration.

HubSpot is a very popular marketing and sales platform that powers many sales enablement marketing initiatives. The key to success with HubSpot (and any of these tools) is clear communication and simplicity. Read our blog, A Step-by-Step Guide to Driving Marketing and Sales Collaboration in HubSpot, for more insights.

3. Training

What knowledge and education does my sales team need to more effectively engage with and sell to our target market—a stronger understanding of our solution? A deeper view of the customer and their pain points? Do they need to be better equipped to handle objections or understand competitive positioning?

While sales training is an extremely important function of sales enablement, it is often an area that gets neglected in smaller firms due to lack of resources. In reality, firms with small sales teams usually don’t need to invest much to train their reps. Perhaps all that’s needed is a solid sales presentation, good documentation on objection handling, and an arsenal of client success stories to infuse into sales discussions to build credibility.

But firms planning for a faster growth trajectory who expect to build up their sales team can create a lot of efficiencies and faster ramp times (translating into a faster ROI on new hires, higher productivity, and ultimately more revenue, faster) by investing in a basic sales onboarding and ramp toolkit.

Additionally, for any firms who rely on channel partners to drive sales, training and enabling those partners is critical—and also an often neglected area. Think of it like internal sales enablement, but for your channel partners. Our post on B2B channel marketing & sales covers this issue and provides recommendations for fueling channel programs.

A bit to the left of true sales enablement…

While these don’t fall directly into the sales enablement camp, brand awareness and demand generation are certainly functions to keep in mind in support of reaching sales goals.

4. Demand Generation

For many salespeople, lead generation is what they think of when they think of marketing. Solid demand gen programs will help drive awareness, interest, and engagement with the types of prospects that sales need to engage. These programs should be aligned with an organization’s growth strategy, with sales targets, and with needs and preferences of the target buyer.

Demand generation spans a range of channels including email marketing, website conversion optimization, digital advertising, and events, to name a few.

5. Brand Presence

Last but certainly not least, a company’s brand presence is critical to enabling sales. Branding can unfortunately get downplayed as marketing ‘fluff’ in some environments, or a luxury investment not suited for smaller firms. But a strong brand presence is what gives sales the credibility in the market to get their cold calls answered and their companies into the choice set in the first place. In fact, a recent study shows that 80%–90% of buyers have a set of vendors in mind before they do any research (and 90% of them ultimately choose a vendor on their “day one” list).

Investing in branding does not necessarily mean writing a large check to a creative agency for a new logo (though sometimes firms surely do benefit from that), but rather, there are numerous ways a firm can help build up its brand presence bit by bit, over time. Examples include having a polished look & feel (website, collateral), an active and thoughtful social media presence, engagement in relevant events and associations, participation in micro-communities, relationships with influencers, public relations efforts, and more.

While the areas outlined above are not exhaustive, they provide a robust starting point for firms looking to make improvements to how the organization can support sales. Magnetude’s sales enablement services can also help CEOs, sales leaders, and heads of marketing quickly rally around a plan to drive growth through a focus on the right activities. Contact us to learn more or get the conversation started.