The line between digital marketing and sales is becoming increasingly blurred. More companies are aligning their sales and marketing departments into seamless teams with shared goals and objectives. Why? When aligned, sales and marketing are more efficient and have higher sales win rates.
This article will explain how sales enablement can help increase your marketing ROI and close more deals.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is essential to a well-aligned team. It equips sales with knowledge, processes, and tools to maximize every sales opportunity.
Together sales enablement and digital marketing can improve sales productivity, drive revenue, and increase customer loyalty. As this article explains, sales enablement can help businesses get the most return on investment (ROI) out of their digital marketing dollars through improving close rates, creating efficiencies, and increasing scalability.
Improving Close Rates
Sales representatives need content at different stages of the sales cycle. Whether it’s a long-form blog or an infographic, the right material should be delivered at the right time to the right customer. That’s why a content strategy for sales enablement should be part of a company’s digital marketing strategy.
A 2019 study found that 31.8% of participants had a content strategy in place. For organizations that had a well-defined strategy, their enablement outcomes were five times more likely to be positive than those with a less defined plan.
The study also found that a partial or poorly implemented strategy led to close rates below the study’s average. In contrast, the respondents with a content strategy in place had:
Without a comprehensive plan, companies can quickly lose control of their content resulting in a negative impact on the bottom line. So, what does a sales enablement content strategy look like? It starts with the customer and uses the following steps.
Content should be created for specific personas, and for a clear purpose; otherwise, it will be ineffective. Through collaboration, sales and marketing can create a cohesive strategy that increases the company’s close rate.
Creating Efficiencies
Many companies are unaware of how much their misaligned sales and marketing groups are costing them. Companies are always producing more content, but are unaware of inaccurate existing content. They fail to realize unneeded duplication and poor content interactions with customers, all of which impact the bottom line.
For example, old content persists on the web; more useful information doesn’t appear in search results, and inaccurate content appears across different delivery channels. Instead of continuing to create poorly used content, develop a plan that leverages digital marketing to meet sales enablement needs.
A well-aligned sales and marketing team enables businesses to look at digital marketing and sales enablement as part of the same process. It makes it possible to be more efficient and cost-effective.
When digital content is targeted so that visitors find it useful, informative, and personalized, sales has the confidence to direct potential buyers to the web. Sales personnel no longer have to spend time creating their own content because they could not locate or did not trust the marketing-provided materials.
Through collaboration, digital marketing knows exactly what sales needs at any point in the customer’s journey. They can deliver the right content using the best medium and format to connect with the customer. Material no longer has to be recreated because it was misaligned with the sales cycle. Now, content can be tweaked to deliver a more personalized experience for the customer.
Combining sales enablement initiatives with digital marketing can:
When sales and marketing work from the same customer map and personas, they create an experience that moves the customer seamlessly through the sales funnel. Making information readily accessible and easily understood creates a positive customer interaction that can reduce the time to close. These efficiencies help companies realize a more cost-effect sales process that maximizes the ROI of digital marketing.
Increasing Scalability
Every business wants to grow. Some companies seem to grow painlessly, while others struggle to scale up their operations. Many organizations fail to scale because they are unable to replicate their processes. Enterprises with robust sales enablement systems use their knowledge and processes to scale because they have repeatable systems.
When it’s time to scale, it’s time to simplify. But simplifying operations is not simple, it takes careful analysis to streamline processes and remove unnecessary content. The truth is that business growth tends to create complexity, and that translates into more meetings, longer processing times, and less customer interaction. Unless organizations are vigilant in their efforts to simplify, they can quickly become mired in the resulting chaos that inhibits growth.
Aligning sales and marketing simplifies the process of creating and delivering content that works with a company’s sales enablement strategy. It also means that as more sales staff are hired, their training can be easily replicated. From the start, new hires will know where to find the needed materials, and they can quickly direct a potential buyer to a web location for more information.
An integrated sales and marketing strategy means better use of company resources. Digital marketing efforts will not have to be recreated, adding to scaling costs. Instead, marketing can focus on expanding into new markets. With collaborative efforts, sales can scale, knowing that the needed content will be available at the right time. And marketing can move forward, knowing what content is required at each point along the customer’s journey.
Making Your Digital Marketing Investment Count
In today’s environment, potential buyers are bombarded with information, and the more data they collect, the more difficult the decision process becomes. That’s why aligning sales and digital marketing strategies to deliver the right amount of information at the right time in the sales cycle is essential to success.
If you are looking for ways to integrate your sales and marketing strategies, contact WEBITMD. We can work with you to develop an end-to-end approach to digital marketing that takes advantage of sales enablement initiatives.
We can ensure that your digital marketing efforts are part of a broader strategy to provide sales enablement tools to sales representatives.
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