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Fast summary
- Understand your ideal customer profile and the buyer’s journey to initiate content that resonates with specific customer needs
- Centralised systems, like MySocial.ai, supply marketing with insights that reveal which content is effective in the sales process
- Create consistent messaging across all content to build a unified customer journey
For as long as we can remember, there’s been this divide between sales and marketing teams with each pointing the finger at the other on what they could be doing better.
The thing is though, embracing the strengths of both sales and marketing and working together is a sure-fire way to win more business.
Marketers are adept at brand messaging and helping create demand en-masse, while sales have the knack of communicating core product benefits in exactly the right way that ensures the prospect feels that the product is what they need.
Sales enablement is about harnessing both those skillsets to achieve a common revenue goal.
Because despite any differences between sales and marketing, the collective goal is the same: To acquire and retain customers.
Why content = conversion fuel
Sales enablement bridges the gap between marketing and sales, ensuring everyone uses the same messaging and understands shared goals and customer personas. In practice, this often involves regular feedback loops that ensure your team is aligned as well as listening to your customers and consistently evolving processes and systems to sell more efficiently and at a higher momentum.
Sharing relevant content is the object of this exercise. By understanding your ideal customer profile and the buyer’s journey, marketing can initiate content that resonates with specific customer needs, leading to improved engagement.
So, how do you know if the content you’re sharing is hitting the mark?
This is where data-driven insights come in. Centralised systems, like MySocial.ai, feed marketing with insights and content that help maximise success in the sales process.
It involves monitoring data around post activity, including:
- Pipeline size and quality
- Conversion rates (both as a percentage and time to convert)
- Influenced revenue
- Number of likes, reactions, shares and comments
- Volume of impressions
- Engagement rate across posts
- Follower growth after a set period of posting
- Earned media value
This data allows marketing to refine campaigns, improve lead generation and concentrate resources on what delivers results. Collecting data that your sales team needs in a single location also helps to shorten processes, where outcomes are achieved faster.
This collaborative approach between marketing and sales enables the creation of highly targeted content that both supports sales efforts and enables them to easily adapt messaging in the field that’s aligned to the brand and their audience.
The benefits of this include:
- Better lead generation
- Increased sales performance
- More consistent, trustworthy brand message for customers
From analysing data, you can create consistent messaging across all content you share. This builds a unified customer journey, where people recognise the distinct voice of your brand and associate it with trust. This leads to an overall enhanced customer experience.
Marketing’s new role in buyer conversations
The sales process starts upstream; through content you share, including blog posts, eBooks and webinars, which address the needs and interests of your ideal customer. It attracts people who are in the awareness and consideration phases of the buyer journey, where they are interested in information related to your product or service.
The success of any sale is often reliant on your team being able to discern where the customer is at in their buyer journey. It’s also dependent on their ability to tailor their approach to best meet their needs and nurture them towards a purchase. As cut-throat as this sounds, understanding this can mean the difference between a sale, a lost deal or a disappointed customer.
The freedom for a sales team to solely focus on this isn’t easy. According to Forbes, salespeople only spend approximately 35% of their time selling. The rest of their time? Often consumed by searching for documentation, data, and information. Not ideal for productivity.
Sales enablement calls for a new approach to marketing and sales teams, which prioritises efficient resource management. Having a central platform for all sales and marketing assets, including playbooks and case studies, ensures marketing content is accessible, organised and used efficiently by the sales team.
When marketing is more focused on helping grow awareness (top of funnel volume), sales teams are better positioned to accelerate leads through the buyer journey and actively engage to improve outcomes for the organisation.
Tools that bridge the gap
MySocial.ai makes it easy to create and distribute content. The automation tools within the platform free up both sales and marketing teams from manual, repetitive tasks. This allows them to focus on higher-value, revenue-generating activities.
Make it easy for sales to share, and you scale influence at speed.
See for yourself today.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
