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When we talk about Sales Enablement, we tend to focus mainly on the benefits for the sales force. But what about marketing? How does aligning these two departments also benefit the marketing department? We tell you all about it in this article dedicated to Sales Enablement Marketing.
Share personalized, relevant content
According to Forrester, 65% of the content produced by marketing is not used by sales. Alignment fills this gap by facilitating the exchange of information between these two departments. Sales teams can feed back information (photos, files, text info...) observed in the field, and give their opinion on the content used in meetings. The result? A 30% increase in the use of content by the sales force.
The other advantage of Sales Enablement lies in its ability to keep the presentations used by sales reps always up to date. As soon as a network is accessible, the application automatically synchronizes to download the latest available content and update existing content. This facilitates the dissemination of information, enabling the marketing team to work on a wider range of content (infographics, Business Cases, Customer Testimonials.....) tailored to the needs of the field. The application is a real opportunity gas pedal for marketing, which can provide sales reps with attractive, personalized and varied content.
Other important elements complete the benefits mentioned above. For example, it is possible to create contextualized content according to the sales path while maintaining the same level of graphic requirements as the brand's media. Marketing can arm the sales person with content adapted to each stage of the funnel, thus improving the relevance of their words. Finally, all users of a Sales Enablement application are notified when the prospect/customer has read or downloaded content shared by email before, during and after the appointment. This is very good information to perfectly adapt your B2B sales approach.
Analyze statistics to improve sales performance
Sales & Marketing alignment helps to gain a better understanding of the market. The statistics produced by Sales Enablement tools such as content usage statistics as well as appointment and purchase behaviors provide a base of information that will be used to better understand the environment in which the company evolves.
Digitizing your sales materials (say goodbye to paper and yes to the tablet) is an excellent way for the sales force to work more efficiently. It's also an opportunity for marketing teams to better understand sales reps ' needs and improve sales reps practices and tools.
Metrics that can be measured by marketing management include: Usage rate, content consulted by sales reps, customer user paths, number of shares per content, read rate of shared content. A real gold mine for marketing, who can monitor and measure performance on a monthly or daily basis. Other statistics can be used to track the development of skills and assess sales staff's mastery of offers.
Statistics should be analyzed as early as the first month of application deployment. This enables you to support sales reps who have not made immediate use of the application, in order to achieve a 100% take-up rate, to track the most and least used content and functionalities, to keep an eye on sales reps ' knowledge and find out when your teams need training, or simply to analyze the consistency of your targets with customer sales paths.
Automate and improve the quality of the data fed into your CRM
The effectiveness of a CRM depends mainly on the quality of the data that feeds it. However, a McKinsey study recently highlighted that 77% of companies consider that CRM data is of poor or very poor quality. This is an alarming figure when you consider that data has a direct impact on the profitability of your actions and on your company's image. Imagine a sales person dialing the wrong phone number or simply not having the right history of the relationship with his prospect before even making an appointment... Even more frustrating for a marketing department to know that its database contains duplicates. Over-solicited by e-mails, a prospect may consider an approach too intrusive and take a radical decision such as unsubscribing or declaring the sender as spam...
By connecting your CRM to a Sales Enablement application, all the information taken in an appointment by the sales person will be automatically dumped. The management is supplied with quality information, therefore perfectly exploitable for its marketing campaigns. It is also freed from declarative targeting of its prospects and is able to respond instantly and accurately to a question such as: which prospects in the last 6 months have received a salesperson who presented and argued a product A, shared a technical data sheet on this same product A but have still not ordered. This gives him an increased visibility on the future commercial actions to be carried out!
Beyond coupling with your CRM, the Sales Enablement application goes even further by integrating perfectly with all your applications and software (PIM, DAM, Drive, Sharepoint, Social Networks). Sharing information within the company is thus facilitated and the various users save time thanks to automation. To learn more: Download the Sales Enablement White Paper - Connectors
Continuously adapt your smarketing strategy
By centralizing your KPIs with Salesapps Board, marketing managers can better understand the information they receive and make better decisions. They'll be able to arbitrate their marketing investments wisely. Why invest Xk€ in a new video requested by sales if it's not used? Or what support budget will be needed to ensure that the new €Xk video is actually used by sales?
In another concrete use case, you can analyze the marketing content used by the most successful sales reps and replicate it to the rest of your sales force. As you can see, when you adopt a Sales Enablement solution, your entire sales force is tracked in real time, providing management with essential information for boosting sales tenfold.
Move up a gear with Sales Enablement Marketing
With Sales Enablement, not only will you never again produce marketing content blindly, but you'll also be able to adjust it according to your observations in the field. Your presentations will always be up-to-date, attractive and easy to personalize. Your Sales Enablement Salesapps platform integrates seamlessly with your entire software fabric and will be the real gas pedal of your sales and marketing performance.
