It’s no secret that marketers use data and technology to gain insights. It’s been this way for decades. But something big is now changing.
Sales enablement has changed the game. As such, it’s showing dramatic growth. The percentage of companies using these types of technology-led platforms has almost doubled in recent years. Many more companies will be buying into this space in 2019.
But what makes sales enablement a valuable tool? Mostly, it’s helping your staff to sell more by utilizing systems, platforms, and technological tools.
What are the benefits that come from sales enablement? And how do you sort the hype from real solutions?
1. Sales and marketing alignment.
FACT: Successful companies understand that marketing and sales must work together. High-performing businesses are more than twice as likely to report that their marketing consistently gives sales quality leads, and the best companies are also twice as likely to say that their sales team offers valuable insights for marketing.
Unsynchronized sales systems can spell trouble. For example, your marketers claim their valuable content goes unused. Meanwhile, your salespeople say they never found the right content. With everyone telling a different story, you’re not sure who is wrong or how to fix the problem.
A sales enablement platform gives your sellers a single rallying point. It’s transparent, so no hiding behind excuses. Suddenly, all the best and latest content from marketing is one place. This one-stop-shop approach reduces wasted time and money by aligning your sales and marketing teams.
2. Consistency with customers.
FACT: Without a centralized platform to store knowledge and customer data, your sellers are wasting more than 30 percent of their days just searching for what they need.
The buyer’s journey is complex to track. But modern business’s must stay agile and pay attention to the customer’s changing experiences. How do you support your salespeople to find, monitor, and follow trends in the marketplace?
A sales enablement platform serves as the central hub for all the knowledge in your business. Sellers can access this “knowledge fountain” whenever they need. Your experts, sellers, marketers, and leaders are all connected to this forum, which offers real-time insights and valuable data for the future.
3. A customized customer experience (CX).
FACT: 77% of buyers want their sales reps to integrate custom data or insights into their pitches.
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all, mass-market thinking. Today’s customer expects a personalized transaction that is thoughtful and authentic. To achieve this, sellers need to harness the data to refine their message.
However, you can’t spend hours nurturing each customer. Is there a way to automate this?
A sales enablement platform is part of the solution. It helps disperse all of marketing’s broad thoughts into bite-sized, sales-ready packages. The technology puts the power in the sales reps’ hand to quickly and accurately harness data to find successful content for each buyer.
4. Monitor performance and results.
FACT: The majority of marketing content never gets used at all. Less than 10% of content gets used more than five times.
Your business could be hemorrhaging thousands of dollars on creating content that never gets used.
Why on earth is so much content going unused? Perhaps it might help to take a look from your sales team’s point of view. They may not use the content because:
- It’s not easily accessible.
- It’s unusable due to technical issues.
- It’s not right for a certain platform, such as mobile.
How do you improve this fragmented environment?
A sales enablement platform allows you to get closer to your content than ever before. Through the sales enablement platform you will be able to:
- Audit your current stock
- Identify your top-performing content
- Eliminate your lower performing sales materials
- Survey your sales team’s activities
- Produce regular reports for leadership
By taking a deep dive on your current resources, you can cut down on the clutter and enable sales to produce at a higher level.
The benefits of sales enablement: further research.
These benefits are just the beginning. There are many more potential benefits to research. But the amount of complex marketing technology out there can be overwhelming.
FACT: There is a mind-numbing number (over 5,000) of solutions being offered in martech.
The best place to start in sales enablement is within your own business. Think about what your buyers want. This will keep your marketing and sales teams happy, and more importantly, help your team rally around the most important person to your business — the customer.