As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt daily life, businesses of all shapes, sizes, and sectors are facing challenges very few expected to encounter. While uncertainty remains, what we can say with confidence is that an organization’s capacity to be agile has never been more vital.
The ability to respond rapidly to changes in the internal and external environment without losing momentum is critical to both navigating the current situation and bouncing back. Now, more than ever, sales and marketing share common goals — customer acquisition and retention — and must be working in true partnership to sustain their businesses. Doing so requires sales enablement — a must-have function and technology for every business navigating today’s uncertain economic landscape.
Sales enablement technology enables cross-regional revenue teams to work together more efficiently and effectively in the face of change by combining intelligent content management, clear sales guidance, and better buyer engagement data. Here are the three ways it can help boost your organization’s collaboration — during the current crisis and beyond.
Maximize the Value of Content
Sales enablement platforms allow teams to organize, find, share, customize, and analyze content — all within a single repository. From whitepapers to case studies, these items are clearly grouped and labelled, and semantic search makes it even easier for salespeople to find and share the right content with the right person at the right time — and then track who has viewed it. This means your salespeople are better equipped to meet buyers’ changing needs and provide real, personalized value at every turn — something buyers crave when human connection is diminished in a virtual world.
What’s more, marketers can rest assured knowing their time and resources are well spent. Sales enablement technology helps marketing teams ensure that all customer-facing roles have access to the same branding, messaging, and content. Further, they can glean insights on how their internal teams and external customers engage with their content, allowing them to measure, optimize, and demonstrate their impact on the bottom line.
Leverage the Power of Guidance
In the same way that marketing automation has transformed companies’ abilities to reach, engage, and nurture larger audiences, sales enablement is giving sales teams tools to better engage modern buyers, helping them close more deals and ensure customer satisfaction at all stages of the journey. How? Through what we call guidance — context alongside content.
In order to have the most effective conversation, salespeople need to understand what they need to know, say, show, and do in every unique selling scenario. Now, with advanced enablement technology, marketing can provide detailed guidance alongside every asset, and enablement teams can create comprehensive sales plays that resonate and drive positive business outcomes. With guidance, leaders have the ability to turn their strategies into action and present credible evidence of the direct impact that enablement activities have on business goals and revenue.
Measure, Optimize, Repeat
The ability to track and analyze content usage and performance throughout the sales cycle is a major benefit of sales enablement, helping teams constantly improve their processes, pitches, and collateral. Rather than overloading your teams with data, sales enablement analytics provide insight into what content drives revenue and what’s just noise.
Questions worth asking might be: Which case studies are being used most? Which eBook has yielded the highest number of views from prospects? Or which presentation is associated with the most deals won? Metrics that answer these questions are incredibly valuable for improving collaboration and optimization. And during a time when buyer expectations are rapidly changing, keeping a pulse on what’s working has never been more important.
Drive Success Today and Tomorrow
By placing sales enablement at the heart of your revenue teams’ operations, you can accelerate collaboration and achieve the agility you need to navigate uncertainty with control and confidence. To learn more about how sales and marketing teams can work together to deliver exceptional buyer experiences in the new virtual world, check out Forrester’s latest report, The State of Digitized Selling.
