5 Ways To Boost Sales Enablement Through Marketing Content
Sales enablement has gained more attention over the past couple of years and for a good reason. It can make or break the entire sales process, no matter how much effort your sales reps put into persuading leads and turning them into wins.
According to the latest statistics released on sales enablement by CSO Insights, organizations where a similar strategy is implemented experience improvements in two of the most important KPIs.
- The percentage of salespeople achieving quota improved by 22.7%
- The win rate percentage for forecasted deals improved by 14.5%
We know that sales enablement can make a tremendous difference, so how can businesses achieve higher revenue rates through it? And how can marketing departments help and prep sales representatives to close deals faster? Keep reading, because we have answers to all these questions.
1. Data Collection Matters
Data collection within companies is under constant scrutiny. However, when it comes to sales enablement, collecting the data your sales teams might need in a single location does make a difference.
Companies should look into solutions that allow them to compile and process the information on their deals, accounts, and contact information from a single place. According to Forbes, salespeople spend only 35% selling. The rest of their time is eaten up by searching for documentation, data, and information.
Smart customer intelligence tools, like Sugar Hint, can expand your sales team’s view and knowledge on campaign activity, correspondence, interactions, and more, between leads and marketing. This gives them more context that helps them to better engage with prospective customers.
2. Learn Your Sales Representative’s Language
If only sales and marketing could speak the same language! Unfortunately, linguistic nuances and terminology differences often mar what could be a symbiotic relationship.
The sales-marketing alignment has been discussed on numerous occasions, and even some of the most prominent marketing conferences have had sessions on the topic.
A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is different from a sales-qualified lead (SQL). To boost sales enablement levels within your team, train your marketing staff on using sales-specific terminology. Marketing teams must first learn how to communicate effectively by using the same terminology as the sales team uses. This provides a better overview of the approach when trying to convert MQLs into SQLs, and ultimately into wins.
The implementation of effective communication channels is another way to enforce better sales and marketing alignment. Communication hubs where two different teams can communicate and collaborate proactively has been proven to show results in this regard.
3. Make All That Great Content Easily Accessible
One of the easiest ways sales enablement can be achieved within companies of all sizes is by making all documentation, content, including use cases, white papers, videos, webinars, and more, easily accessible to your sales teams.
Here is what Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market at SugarCRM, thinks about sales enablement and the alignment of marketing and sales.
“A sales enablement platform that makes it easy for the sales team to find content and documentation, including white papers, use cases, case studies, videos, and more, is the first important thing companies should consider in their sales enablement efforts.
Secondly, the platform should be built with user experience in mind. So, when uploading the content into the knowledge base or platform, marketing staff should also include the most frequently used search queries to match the ones used by their sales teams. This makes it easier for salespeople to find relevant documentation and surf the knowledge base.”
—Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market at SugarCRM
4. Structure Makes Everything Easier
This point can be easily related to the previous one. Regardless of the number of relevant documentation uploaded to your company’s sales enablement platform or knowledge base, breaking everything into small categories will boost your sales teams’ abilities to generate revenue for your organization.
For example, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market at SugarCRM, Christian Wettre, has noticed that the best-performing type of content sales representatives can use when trying to convert leads into wins, is video content. So, when building a knowledge base with sales enablement in mind, you should place all documentation and marketing materials into different categories, so your sales teams find it and share it with their leads more effectively.
The best way to decide on a knowledge base structure is to discuss with your sales team and see how they would like to see all marketing content structured within it.
5. Educate and Train
To help your staff make the most of a sales enablement platform or knowledge base and acknowledge its real potential, invest in training and onboarding programs for your teams.
Sales and marketing alignment is the cornerstone of a profitable company. This means you have to first invest in a robust but flexible CRM platform – and Sugar is both – that allows you to build a flawless knowledge base for your sales teams!
We can always help you perfect your Sugar instance to leverage marketing content, and meet your sales enablement goals! Give us a call; we can’t wait to discuss more with you!
