Marketing for Sales Enablement

According to Tech Marketing Blog, there’s a fundamental shift happening in technology marketing around the globe today.  The formerly adversarial relationship between sales and marketing is being replaced by a new level of collaboration driven by the need to achieve shared goals.  Marketers face increasing pressure to provide sales with content that meets a specific need at a specific point in the sales cycle.  This means that marketers need to shift from supporting, to enabling the sales team.

So wouldn’t it be great to run a campaign that exhibited good brand adherence, a compelling message, was industry relevant, client specific and even role specific for every recipient?… Of course it would, but can it be done cost effectively in a timely manner without compromising our brand?… Yes It Can!!

You just have to keep 3 key things in mind:

• What do you want to say?
• To whom do you want to say it?
• Pulling it all together 

Here’s an outline of how to approach a targeted, one-to-one marketing effort that will help support sales enablement:

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY?

• How can you impact a business and how will that impact translate into value? 

1. Will it help your customer to grow? (Be specific)
2. Will it help reduce costs? (Be specific)
3. Will it make more efficient use of resources? (Be specific)

• Include references where possible 

1. Who have you already helped with this?
2. Do you have different references for different industries?
3. Quotes are better than stories

TO WHOM DO YOU WANT TO SAY IT?

• Will the message work in multiple industries or geographies? 

1. Plan on multiple versions of the central message that can be applied to different industry verticals or geographies
2. Your collateral can be assembled later, but the message and the industry provide the basis for a template 

• What about roles? 

1. Would you have the same conversation with a COO or a CFO?
2. You should plan on a template version for each role within each industry

 PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

The goal here is to create an industry relevant, client specific and even role specific marketing piece with good brand adherence and a compelling message that can be used to really support and enable the sales rep to have meaningful discussion with the prospective client.  THIS IS WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT… a meaningful discussion about how YOUR solution can HELP solve their issues. 

by: Binita Patel, Director of Marketing @ Stratascope (binita_patel@stratascope.com)

Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement

Marketing alignment has become quit the buzzword recently, but what does it really mean.  My own biased background has been on the sales side so my reference point has traditionally been that marketing is aligned when they are doing exactly what sales wants them to do, regardless of whether or not sales knows what it is doing or what it wants.  Product Managers have told me that marketing should be aligned to the products and solutions being offered.  Makes sense in a way, you wouldn’t want to market a Mercedes the same way that you would market a Daewoo.  Marketers have told me that marketing is aligned when sales finally sells the product the way that marketing has said they must.  Obviously, I am trying to get to a point.  In my last post, we talked about starting the training process by understanding or creating your value proposition in cooperation between sales, marketing, and product management.  If we are going to achieve marketing alignment, we have to understand what we want them to be aligned with.  The easy answer is that marketing should be aligned with your value proposition and your customers’ buying process (which is mirrored in your sales process).

I’ll talk about lead generation in another post, so let’s focus on the assets that marketing should be producing to support (i.e. enable) the sales (i.e. buying) process.  Think of the buying process as a series of conversations that buyers have with prospective sellers that eventually lead them to a purchase or the realization that their money would be better spent elsewhere.  Based on your value proposition, what are the types of conversations that your sales teams will be having.  Once you have an idea of the conversations, it becomes much easier to identify, design, and deliver the best assets possible.  You might be considering video clips, webinars and other social media for the front end of your demand generation funnel.  As opportunities move through the buying process, your sales organization may be in need of more detailed and specific assets such as solution presentations, integration and implementation guides (If marketing does not own these, they won’t be very useful before the sale, where they can be very powerful), solution whitepapers, industry whitepapers, customer testimonials, case studies, and reference stories.  Assets don’t have to be static either.  Live interaction with customers and industry experts should also be considered as part of your portfolio of available assets.  As you move on to the later stages of the buying process, what types of assets will be required?  Will you need value calculators, quantified success stories, or negotiating crib sheets?

I wanted to discuss the asset side of the equation first so that I could paint a picture that really shows the scope and depth of the assets that will be needed.  This is where you need to truly focus on alignment.  It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed.  That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked.  If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need.  Marketing is not supporting them.  Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.

In summary, marketing alignment is easier to talk about, or more specifically to complain about than it is to achieve.  Think about your value proposition and your customers’ buying process, think about the conversations that will lead to a sale, create the assets, and then find a way to deliver them to the right place at the right time.  Finally, ask yourself how you are going to keep it all “fresh”.

I am off to Virginia for a family vacation next week, but I will pick up where I left off on the 28^th.

-Bruce A. Brien, CEO, Stratascope Inc.

The core problem with Sales Enablement

Why is it so difficult to enable a sales force to become an effective selling machine?  I believe that there are multiple facets to this problem that companies must address.  Assuming that you have developed or selected a sales process and methodology that are appropriate to your offerings, let’s look at what is necessary to enable the sales force (Sorry, but if you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that I love lists!).

1. Sales Training – The entire sales and marketing organizations must understand the methodology and process being followed.
2. Marketing Alignment – Based on the methodology and process chosen, the marketing organization needs to produce assets and deliver campaigns that fit appropriately into the methodology.
3. Sales Intelligence – Organizations need access to their own history of transactional records, support records, project status reports, customer surveys, close ratios, deal sizes, cycle times, and their overall effectiveness.
4. Market Intelligence – You need to be aware of your prospects world and point of view, their current market outlook, their industry, their performance, issues, and initiatives.  You need to know who is in charge and how decisions get funded.
5. Competitive Intelligence – Your sales teams need to know what they are up against.  It is difficult during this age of accelerated technological development to keep this information fresh but it is critical in order to be able to differentiate your offerings.

I think it is difficult for a sales executive with a solid offering to be successful and efficient without following a proven methodology, without timely access to supporting resources, without any historical background, without knowing their prospects industry or organization, or without knowing what the competition brings to the table.  When I talk about sales enablement, these are the components that I believe have to be brought together.  The core problem is that a deficiency in any facet can derail the entire process.

The problem is compounded by the fact that minor deficiencies might just slow you down or cause a deal to be smaller than it could have been or to lose an occasional deal that should have been secured.  Couple that with an unstable economy and you have a recipe for disaster.

Let’s look at an example.  Our sample company does $10 million in annual revenue with a 40% close ratio and an average deal size of $100k on a 90 day sales cycle.  That means that the 5 sales reps are each closing 20 deals per year while working 50.  They are focused on 12-15 deals at a time.  If our sales enablement capabilities cause a 3% drop in our overall effectiveness, our sales people will only be working on 48 deals and closing only 18 of them for an average price of just $97k.  The result is a revenue picture of $8.7 million or a drop of about 13%.  Assuming you have fixed costs in the 25% range and an operating profit of 15%, profits would drop by a whopping 47%.  The compounding effect can be devastating.  A 3% drop in sales effectiveness can easily result in the loss of half of your profits.

You could re-coup your lost revenues by hiring another sales rep at a cost of $150k and be faced with the same problem next year when your efficiencies drop further or you could address the core of the problem and shore up each part of your sales enablement platform for similar monies while building a solid foundation for future growth.

Next week, I’ll continue this discussion with some details about each facet of sales enablement.

-Bruce A. Brien, CEO, Stratascope Inc.