Press Pause for Sales Enablement: Establishing the Baseline

Register now for the upcoming

Press Pause for Sales Enablement webinar.

Our last Press Pause post introduced the new webinar we’re launching about Content strategy for sales enablement programs. The webinar presents three reasons to press pause.

This post focuses on the first reason to press pause: Establishing the baseline.This post focuses on the first reason to press pause: Establishing the baseline.

Sales enablement shares a core value with content personalization: customer centricity. Without it, content is a push process rather than a collaborative strategy. Establishing a baseline requires deep knowledge of the needs of multiple customer segments as well as understanding who touches the customer inside your own organizations. A successful sales enablement program requires:

• Content: Sales enablement needs quality content that sales reps can find and utilize appropriately for specific situations and sales plays.
• Training: Reps must be trained in not only sales skills, but product, marketing/industry and business skills as well.
• Tools and Technology: After the content strategy is established, the right technology is needed to execute against the process. This function also overlaps with training, as tools and technology add functionality and complexity.
• Strategy and Execution: Sales enablement goes beyond winning deals and extends to hiring and onboarding, forecasting, budgeting, and performance reviews.

Things to consider when designing or enhancing a sales enablement program include:

• Know the full buying center: A buying center is all of the people who touch a purchase including actual decision makers and those who influence the decision makers.
• Understand their role in the journey: The next step is gaining deep insights into the journey for each role in the buying center or for a specific purchase use case.  You need to understand what moves people along the path to purchase and drive a shared view of this process inside your organization. Often, competing workstreams create different views, nomenclature and approaches. Without a shared vision, performance suffers.
• Don’t forget partners: Partners are a distinct persona for many B2B journeys (primarily Channel Partners). For example, some of our major tech clients derive 75%+ of their revenue from partners(VARS, ISVs, Distributors, etc.
• Plan for new content needs: Once you understand the buying center and the content needs, you need to think about how it impacts your enterprise strategy and how to create needed assets.

When content nurtures the first 60% of the sales cycle, it is imperative that sales and marketing work closely together. Many organizations today create content that fails to consider the multiple roles that content plays in both demand generation and sales. According to Aberdeen Research, structured sales enablement programs lead to:

• 62% higher sales quota attainment
• 205% more revenue growth
• 725% higher sales velocity
• 23% increase in lead  conversion

Creating the right content for every part of the sales journey and customer lifecycle is essential to deliver a consistent and unified content strategy that optimizes both sales and marketing effectiveness. It also supports personalization and omnichannel initiatives.

The Press Pause for Sales Enablement webinar presents probing questions that an organization should address in order to determine their readiness to succeed. Key things we’ll discuss include:

• Identifying the complete buying center and the specific content needs of all
• Roadblocks to aligning sales enablement efforts with other marketing and content work
• How to optimize the data captured in platforms for better content strategy

Join us on October 10.