How To Align Sales & Marketing For Seamless Sales Enablement

We can’t stress it enough: Today’s buyer is more self-reliant than ever, making it through 60% of his buying process before even contacting a vendor. So how do you make sales happen when buyers aren’t reaching out to your sales team?

The only way to achieve sales enablement in today’s competitive market with its self-informed buyer is by aligning marketing and sales into a powerful “revenue department.”

You’re all here for the same reason, so act like it.

Let’s face it: Your sales people and your marketing people don’t always get along. They’re often on different pages when it comes to the tactics, and they may even resent each other from time to time. The sales team blames marketing for not churning out enough qualified leads, and the marketing department blames sales for not capitalizing on or following through with the leads they do offer up. But one thing’s for sure: Both teams have your company’s best interests in mind. Both teams are working toward a common goal -- sales enablement and higher revenue -- so why not work together?

Sales can no longer work in a silo.

Forbes reports that 50% of B2B sales staff isn’t making their quotas. That is not a statistic you want anywhere near your company. Your sales and marketing teams can play the blame game all they want, but that’s not going to get your company anywhere. While the teams are squabbling, the buyer is sprinting off into the welcoming arms of your competitors.

And you wonder why buyers report that 97% of the time they spend with your sales team is “unproductive.”

The days of sales acting like a lone wolf, single-handedly staking out and scrounging up sales, are over. With longer sales cycles, self-reliant buyers, more people involved in the B2B decision-making process and the evolution of products to solutions, sales can no longer afford to hunt alone. They need sales enablement support, and this support has got to come from your marketing department.

United under revenue.

What do marketing and sales have in common? They want to increase your company’s revenue. So why not align them under that common goal? Why not create a department that’s designed specifically to drive revenue? If that sounds logical to you, you’re thinking clearly. Creating that revenue department is exactly what you have to do if you want to survive in today’s cutthroat market.

Be all about the B2B buyer.

So what does this revenue department look like? For one, it’s all about the buyer. Peppers & Rogers Group tells us that 81% of companies with dedication to positive customer experiences outperform their competition -- but you don’t need a fancy stat to tell you that. It’s simple: Buyers want to be treated with respect. They want to be treated like the informed, savvy and independent decision makers that they are. So the business owners that ground their operations and company culture in that remarkable buyer experience are simply going to win out. Period.

That remarkable buyer experience isn’t going to happen when your sales and marketing teams are squabbling. This is when the buyer gets ignored and throws his hands up in frustration, likely giving up on your company altogether. Only by aligning your sales and marketing efforts -- by merging the departments into one, cohesive force -- does the buyer get that experience he’s looking for. And that’s when sales enablement happens.

It’s not necessarily about resolving differences between marketing and sales, although that’s certainly not a bad idea. More importantly, though, it’s about resolving the differences between your company (both teams) and the buyer.

The Seven Tenets Of The Revenue Department

1. Sales and marketing must unite under the common objective of revenue generation.
2. Marketing must create content that supports the entire buying process, not simply stopping after sales accept their leads.
3. Sales must connect targets’ pain points with your company’s remarkable solutions.
4. The connections between buyers’ pains and your company’s solutions serve as the foundation of the powerful, buyer-centric content that marketing must generate.
   1. These hyper-personalized content marketing materials are tailored for each buyer and strategized to coincide perfectly with each step of the buying process.
5. It’s not just the marketing department that gets in the content game. Sales, too, must consistently leverage highly tailored content campaigns during the sales process to keep the buyer warming up to your company.
6. Marketing must have visibility into all content that’s sent out to buyers to assess buyer acceptance and campaign success.
7. Sales needs to apply lead nurturing campaigns, in conjunction with marketing tactics, to “rescue” dormant leads. 

Need help uniting your sales and marketing teams under a buyer-centric revenue department? Fill out the form below to get serious about sales enablement by catering to today’s savvy, self-reliant B2B buyer with Accent Technologies.