Building a Sales Enablement Superteam

The term “sales enablement” makes it sound like Sales is a passive recipient of Marketing collateral. They’re not. Just look at some of the highest performing ABX organizations, their Sales teams are super active. Winning Sales teams participate in the ideation, creation, and publication of assets. But what happens on the other side of the curtain? Does your Sales team know what Marketing is up to?

In this blog, we’ll take a look at what Marketing teams have cooking while Sales is busy selling and how you can participate to your own advantage.

Want to get into Marketing’s good graces?

Lend a helping hand by participating in some of their key deliverables, below:

Building Personas

Marketers create archetypal versions of customers to better segment them and personalize their outreach. Their job is to be the arbiters of customer truth with aggregate insights that aren’t always obvious to Sales teams who, by the nature of their role, are narrowly focused on winning a few accounts at a time. Marketers see the forest, not the trees, and are often sitting on a lot more insights from longtime customers and industry analysts than they have time to share.

How to participate:

• Ask for soundbites, stats, and quotes
• Connect them to prospects or customers for interviews
• Offer customer anecdotes

Outcome: More enticing Marketing outreach into your accounts.

Campaign Priorities

Salespeople are often on monthly or quarterly sales cycles, but marketers have the luxury of long-term planning and think in half-years and years. They can afford to plan multi-channel campaigns far in advance that’ll run automatically, and ensure future pipeline.

How to participate:

• Ask about upcoming priorities
• Participate in planning joint campaigns
• Point out hidden pockets of demand
• Point out missing pockets of coverage

Outcome: More upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Asset Creation

Marketing teams employ content strategists, writers, and designers who, above all else, keep the brand consistent and appealing to prospects. Branding is based on the idea of singularity—that your company stands for one thing in the customer’s mind. A team of Marketing creatives have the ability to create assets that are both useful in deal cycles but which also reinforce the overall brand in the market, and lay the foundation for future deals. However, sales insights can often make them even better, and great things happen when the two collaborate.

How to participate:

• Build an asset wish list
• Pass along competitive assets
• Give asset-level feedback

Outcome: Higher outreach success rates, more effective competitive content.

When Sales is an active participant in ABX asset creation, quality rises. Those assets are more useful, influence more deals, have longer life cycles, and ultimately, save Marketing the time of creating new ones. That means rather than fixing what’s broken, Marketing can focus on creating even more sales enablement materials and generating even more demand.

Asset Distribution

One of the most daunting challenges marketers face is providing up-to-date assets to Sales teams. Where should they live? How to deal with multiple verticalized versions? How to retract outdated versions that are still in use? How should salespeople contact references? And most important, what assets are actually being used and which ones help earn meetings and win deals?

How to participate:

• Give enablement feedback
• Help select a sales enablement platform
• Over-communicate
• Submit references

Outcome: More relevant references, spend less time searching for assets.

Assembling a superteam?

Our advice: don’t sleep on it!

Sales-Marketing alignment is imperative to a winning account-based strategy. Marketing’s success is Sales’ success, and the more that your Sales teams can do to help Marketing get you the information you need, the more successful your pipeline will look and your quarters will wrap. Who doesn’t want that?!

To make your Sales-Marketing alignment dreams a reality. To learn how you can go from a reactive, lead-based model to a proactive, engagement-savvy, account-based model, download the new and improved ABX for Sales Playbook from our Sales hivemind. You don’t want to miss it.

And if you want more content, including helpful blogs, insightful videos, educational podcasts, and much, much more, head on over to DB Central – your content hub for all things B2B go-to-market.