Incorporating a Sales Enablement Approach Into B2B Marketing Strategies

Developing a sales enablement strategy is crucial for creating an effective business-to-business sales and marketing strategy. Without a sales enablement strategy in place, sales teams and marketing teams will find it challenging to accurately identify needs, make design solutions and deploy initiatives to generate revenue.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is a strategic and collaborative process that provides sales teams with deliberate tools and content to effectively and successfully move clients through the buying decision.
A sales enablement strategy allows companies to look further than just the end goal. It pushes sales and marketing teams to focus on the entire customer journey and position themselves to solve a client’s problem.

As a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, we recommended diving deep into understanding sales enablement by completing their free Sales Enablement Certification. Below are a few insights you’ll learn from the course.

Who Is Responsible for Sales Enablement?

Responsibility is evenly distributed between the sales and marketing teams to create a successful plan of action. Hubspot so creatively coined this collaboration as “Smarketing.”

Marketing teams should be accountable for providing a variety of resources, such as content and conversion data. This allows a sales team to effectively reach and move potential buyers through the sales process.

In return, sales teams are responsible for communicating needed resources and applying them in the most thoughtful and practical manner. It is pivotal that sales teams identify and track frequently asked questions during the pre-sales process. This will help inform the type of content needed from marketing teams to better appeal to potential customers.

Establishing Unified Goals Between Sales and Marketing

Realistically, the sales enablement process will only produce beneficial results and revenue if both teams are invested in the performance. A Sirius Decisions research study showed that 19% more growth occurs when businesses align their marketing and sales departments and encourage better communication.

It is crucial for a sales and marketing team to align on defined revenue goals, build audience personas and create content. It’s also essential for sales training sessions to be part of a regular sales and marketing collaboration routine for both teams to update and evolve their best practices.

How Do You Build an Audience Persona?

Building audience personas, or a target audience, will help understand your ideal target buyer. This makes it easier during the initial sales process to tailor content and sort out your qualified leads from non-qualified leads.

1. Leverage demographic and psychographic data. This can be done through surveys and interviews with thoroughly scripted questions with both sales prospects and current clients.
2. Adjust personas to reflect previous buyers that worked well with your team. To start, develop a list of clients that includes their goals, challenges, watering holes and shopping preferences.
3. Combine these results and filter for similarities to give a rich description of your ideal audience persona.

What Is Sales Enablement Content?

Sales enablement content includes relative information and examples that the sales team can leverage in the sales process to better inform potential buyers and motivate them to the next stage of the sales journey. Some examples of sales content management tools include:

• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Blog posts
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Online demos
• B2B social media marketing posts
• Messaging templates

Building a B2B Sales and Marketing Strategy Using Sales Enablement

For a B2B company, it’s imperative that your B2B digital marketing strategy and B2B sales strategy include more than just brand awareness and closing deals. Using and defining sales enablement in your own best practices will ultimately create a more efficient and effective sales force for both your business and your buyer’s journey.

With our sales enablement team and an elite sales enablement tool and software, like Hubspot, we are now able to provide a premium advantage to easy team collaboration, email marketing integrations and templates, analytics tools and many segmentation capabilities that will better prepare us for our future B2B clients. Not to mention, we are a Hubspot partner!

Are you a B2B company? Contact us to get the conversation started on how we can plug B2B digital marketing strategies into your sales enablement strategy.