Freya Oxton-Grant
Both marketing and sales departments have one goal in common: helping their business grow.
However, this mission doesn’t mean they are both always on the same page. Sales and marketing alignment is a key pillar of a strong business as it makes sure both teams aren’t wasting time, money and effort, on misaligned strategies.
One key solution that can assist in sales and marketing alignment is sales enablement. It is a process that streamlines the interdepartmental tensions between marketing and sales teams and facilitates strong sales performance.
Sales enablement is an incredibly powerful tool for B2B businesses, especially building product businesses.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the practice of supporting your sales team with resources and information that makes their sales activities more efficient and effective, from researching and prospecting to meetings and closing deals.
When salespeople have the right information at the right time in the right format, they can more easily move deals forward and close on key opportunities.
You can read more about sales enablement in our blog here.
How Sales Enablement Works
Supporting your sales reps with the processes, content, training and technology they need to succeed in their activities is what sales enablement is all about.
Firstly you need a tech stack that enables them to track and monitor their conversations with prospects. It is also beneficial if this technology can follow a customer all the way through the sales process, from website visitor to closed deal, to understand how they engaged with your business.
This also allows you to see where to improve, and where leads are falling off track, in the buyer’s lifecycle. This sort of data allows sales reps to perform better, and research support this.
According to Aberdeen, individual sales-rep close rates are 24% higher in companies that facilitate sales enablement.
The next important step of sales enablement is the content sales teams have access to and can use effectively. Having an organised content library of case studies, whitepapers, articles, FAQs, and insights that help your target customer with their pain points will build trust in sales meetings.
Another useful resource for sales reps is a playbook for how your sales team should approach architects and specifiers as a unified voice. What are the key things you want people to know about your building product brand and how do you get that across in sales calls effectively?
Incorporating sales enablement techniques such as these will be incredibly beneficial for your building product business, including improving sales metrics.
According to HighSpot, over 75% of companies using sales enablement tools indicated that sales increased within 12 months.
How Does Sales Enablement and Sales and Marketing Alignment Work Together?
Sales enablement is a key step towards a unified and aligned business where sales and marketing teams collaborate successfully.
When departments are well aligned your company can benefit from higher quality leads and improved sales-win rates. Marketing knows who Sales wants to talk to and targets them. They nurture them over time before passing them over to Sales. Then Sales closes the deal using the marketing materials created for them specifically.
When it comes to building product businesses like yours, creating the most effective and streamlined sales pipeline begins with sales and marketing alignment.
You can read more about why you should use sales enablement in your building product business here.
Conclusion
One of the key issues with sales and marketing misalignment is that the content Marketing creates is hardly used by Sales, if ever.
Sales enablement is a great step towards setting up a system which means sales are equipped with the marketing materials that will benefit them, and even more importantly, close deals. It also means marketing is working hard towards helping sales with things that matter when it comes to sales meetings.
This is especially crucial if your marketing team is focussing too much on creating content for prospects in the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer’s lifecycle, rather than the decision stage.
Sales enablement facilitates your company to focus and streamline the sales process, benefiting everyone involved.
When sales and marketing are aligned, everything lines up and teams can work in sync.
Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.