Why Will Sales Enablement Strategies Be More Important Than Ever?

Marketing and sales misalignment is costing businesses more than a trillion dollars per year.

The misalignment is one of the main reasons why businesses fail to develop a successful sales strategy. Therefore, marketing needs to know more about sales, and sales need to learn more about marketing.

But what is sales and marketing alignment? And why is it important?

Sales alignment refers to the actions your salespeople take to ensure they’re in sync with the marketing department. This alignment is potentially the best opportunity to enhance sales enablement.

Here are the main reasons why your business should align sales and marketing before 2021.

Sales Enablement Allows for Remote Selling

Remote selling – or virtual selling, as it’s sometimes called – is a situation where a transaction is completed without the buyer and seller ever meeting. That means you and your prospect are never in the same location.

Because the pandemic has forced thousands of workers to work from home, remote working is now a requirement for many businesses. This new normal has left many sales organizations across the globe scrambling to find best practices that the salespeople can employ to rise above these new hurdles. Either way, sales professionals will have to conduct their customer conversations remotely.

Create Data-Driven Insights

Big data and analytics have climbed to the top of the corporate agenda. As the demand for timely product delivery accelerates, it becomes necessary for businesses to operate with data-driven insights that can accelerate business results.

The number of data sources that are available is growing every day. Leveraging this data can help sales and marketing teams create more customer-centric experiences and anticipate customer churn well in advance, with enough time to plan for retention. To that end, being data-driven isn’t the goal — it’s being insights-driven.

Organizations must access information and analyze it quickly to understand consumers better and measure marketing campaign effectiveness. Put simply, they will be able to do more of what worked and less of what may or may not work. Therefore, every marketer must know this phenomenon first-hand.

Enhance Virtual Customer Engagement

COVID-19 has literally changed the meaning of the cliché “digital or death”. In such unprecedented times, how do you keep your sales and marketing divisions healthy? How can you stay top of your marketing and sales game in a time of deep consumer unease? Well, now it’s time to go virtual.

The virtual experience is not only common for consumers at this point, but it has also become vital for businesses as it drives sales and growth. Consequently, companies must develop a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective virtual operating model. By taking a customer-centric approach to customer engagement, you can create new ways to engage customers and prospects.

Put Personalization at the Core of Your Business

It’s often challenging to know exactly where a customer is in the buying pipeline. But there is another option. You can use sales enablement tools to equip your sales team to deliver mass and quick communication. One of these tools is personalization.

Personalization will be the prime driver of sales marketing success in 2021. And because personalization is a proven tactic for improving communication with buyers, B2B companies can combine it with a positive shopping experience. An effective way to establish that connection is by aligning the sales and marketing departments. This increases efficiency, improves accuracy, and speeds up the sales process.

Marketing has used sales data to personalize communications for years. But it turns out there’s almost always more than one option when it comes to making a purchase. Why is this relevant? People are drowning in information and options. Therefore, getting it right isn’t easy, but plenty of B2B companies have shown that the more you personalize your customer interaction, the more efficiency, and organization you gain.

Thus personalization involves the consumer’s products they already liked and is often the key to bridging the gap to conversion.

Encourage Continuous Training of Sellers

Selling now requires a more educated and thoughtful outlook. For many sales teams, this requires a shift in mindset and behavior. Today’s sellers must stay on top of the latest sales tactics and be adapted to use the sales tools. Thus, your training solution needs to keep up with this new paradigm. Training must, therefore, extend beyond the textbook.

Sales training programs aim to help salespeople learn and develop. Training that is up to date enables your marketing and sales teams to establish new skills and methodologies or create new behaviors. The ultimate goal is improving bottom-line results.

Make sales training content and job aids available online and on multiple types of devices. At the same time, you can use mobile learning to develop your team’s skills and reinforce your sales process.

Improve Seller Productivity

Increasing the organization’s sales productivity is always the main topic of concern. Small improvements in average rep and manager productivity can significantly increase your sales number for the amount of time you spend actively selling.

If you want to increase your sales productivity, you need to focus on streamlining workflow and eliminating unnecessary or superfluous tasks. You don’t have to equip the salespeople with the newest gadget, but you need to know and define the steps successful reps take to win. Use what works and share those strategies with the entire team.

Take Advantage of Video Culture

In recent years, much of marketing has shifted to video streaming. Cultivating an understanding of video marketing is crucial for digital marketers. However, many marketers still aren’t using video as part of their sales and marketing strategy.

Facing the growing demand by customers for more connections via video, brands are incorporating video into their content in order to remain competitive.

The Bottom Line

There is no separation between sales and marketing teams when it comes to sales enablement. Sales enablement must be dynamic to adapt to these new expectations. Consequently, identifying the right balance between the sales and marketing teams can be a key difference-maker.

As a sales professional, sales enablement may not be a part of your job description. But, of course, learning never stops. At WEBITMD, we are passionate about ensuring your marketing and sales departments unite, align, and streamline their processes. Contact WEBITMD for more information.