So we've established that you need to get your marketing and sales teams working together and that sales enablement is a great way to do that, but what does that mean? What's actually involved in making that happen? A good sales enablement strategy has three key elements: a clear goal, a target buyer, and a content strategy. Let's look at each of these one at a time. First, you need a clear goal. Remember, sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. So the goal of a sales enablement strategy should be based on sales results rather than traditional marketing metrics. Here's Bertrand Hazard, Vice President of Marketing at TrustRadius: Measuring marketing on pipeline creation, routine contribution, that's way much better. Now, that's way much harder to do. It's easier to count the number of leads. But, if you can do it with a revenue lens, a metric lens, with sales, they are the first to understand that also both marketing and sales can be aligned, that's great. I mean, at the end of the day, marketing's number one goal is to drive growth for the organization. How do you measure growth? Growth is measured by revenues, right? It's not rocket science! That's how you think about it. A shared revenue goal is the most fundamental piece in a sales enablement strategy. Marketing and sales have to be aligned around a single revenue goal first, and then you'll be able to implement the processes, content, and technology that will help you achieve that goal. The next element of a sales enablement strategy is a target buyer. One of the most effective ways to empower your sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity is to help them focus on the people who are most likely to buy from you. For most sales teams, this is not an intuitive fact. Here's Steve again: Every year, the game for all salespeople is how're you gonna make more sales than last year? Okay. I ask salespeople, "What're you gonna do to make more sales than last year?" And this is what I usually get as the answer. I get three answers. All of them sound right, none of them are right. One: "Work harder." Oh, well that only works if you were taking like two hours off in the middle of every day. Here's another one, actually my favorite one: "Work smarter." Oh yeah. How would the 'work smarter' thing work? Would you go to the smart machine and turn it up from seven to eight? "Yeah, I was on seven." Like I tell people, my first year in sales, I had heard about that you could work smarter to make more sales and the goals go up. I was deliberately stupid. Yeah, in my first year, purposely stupid. Here's another one: "Be more productive." Well it's not really about being more productive, because, I mean, you could do certain things to be more productive, but sales people are already productive. And they often confuse busy with productive. But here's the bottom line, if you could be more productive, wouldn't you already be more productive? Of course you would. There's only one way to make more sales, is to maximize your time with people more likely to buy and minimize your time with the others. You have to help your sales team get focused on the right people. Because ultimately the time a sales rep spends speaking with people who are never going to buy is wasted. So if you want to improve sales efficiency, you need to increase the time reps spend speaking with more qualified buyers and reduce the amount of time they spend speaking with less qualified buyers. You need to implement the processes, content, and technology that will help them do that. Finally, you need a content strategy, and this strategy can't just be something marketing does on their own. In too many organizations, content is something that marketing produces without any help or input from other departments. Here's Marcus again: Too often when we talk about things like inbound, we say it from a marketing slant, and it sounds like marketers talking about marketing and thus it doesn't resonate with the marketplace, certainly not with leadership teams, because no CEO, in my opinion, has ever said I want to be the best inbound or content marketer in the world. Nobody says that, but I could see a CEO saying "when anybody has a problem in our space, I want them to think of us. I want them to think of our name. I want them to know that we are a go-to source." If you can change the way your company thinks about content, you'll probably find out that your sales team is already producing content, they just don't call it that. Here's Todd Hockenberry, Owner of Top Line Results: Salespeople are very important to this, because they hear the questions in the field. And when a salesperson gets a question, the answer is content. And they don't see it as content, but it might be a phone call. It might be an email. It might be a PowerPoint presentation they do to answer these questions. Well, feed it back to marketing. Pretty simple, but a lot of times, that doesn't happen. So to recap, there are three elements that will make up the core of your sales enablement strategy: A goal, a target buyer, and a content strategy. Once you have those things in place, you'll be able to build processes on top of them. And when all of that is in place, the cherry on top of your sales enablement sundae will be the technology needed to improve and accelerate those processes over time.
