For today’s full-stack revenue marketer, delivering consistent results and measurable ROI impact can feel reminiscent of Sisyphus trying to push that fabled boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down again and again.
The fact is that marketing is pushing a boulder up a mountain. It spends 28% of its budget (not to mention the soft costs associated with headcount) on creating content, but 65% of content produced for sales is never used. Sales teams scream for more and better content, but they often can’t find content that already exists.
This inefficiency leads to a vicious cycle: Deliver more content, only to have sales ask for even more. Push the boulder, watch it roll down again.
For content that is used, marketing often has no visibility into how it performs, and thus has no ability to improve quality or measure ROI. For us revenue marketers, this is anathema. Marketers must be able to measure the performance of content in order to improve quality.
And let’s not forget our entrepreneurial sales reps. They often modify content in order to meet the needs of the customer and changing market dynamics, and should! But as presentations are customized, marketing teams lose visibility into these changes, and consequently, they lose ability to improve sales content in real time to match the needs of the market. Tracking these changes immediately, understanding them, making micro improvements and then sharing them across the organization represents a real opportunity to make the sales teams more effective and stay ahead of the competition.
It’s for these reasons (and many more) that sales enablement is a necessity for marketing.
Don’t be fooled by the word “sales” in the name. A sales enablement platform should be one of the tools in the marketer’s toolbox. It completes the stack from top of the funnel to revenue and enables closed-loop analysis of content and sales process performance. It starts by providing a better way to organize and manage content for sales, and gives sales and marketing teams the platform to scale and continuously improve content and customer engagement performance.
In fact, one key element that differentiates modern sales enablement platforms such as Highspot from outdated solutions is the closed-loop analysis that enables both marketing and sales to systematically improve. Sales can easily tell marketing what content doesn’t work, because it has the data to back up its claims. Marketing can, in turn, just as easily analyze what content and pitching strategies the best sales reps use and optimize based on customer engagement and revenue influenced.
If you’re ready to stop pushing the boulder up the mountain, consider the following sales enablement benefits:
Recommend the best performing content to sales.
Highspot’s content targeting and recommendations can deliver the right content to a sales rep based on each specific selling opportunity — customer size, industry, go-to-market segment, product, opportunity stage, or whatever you want to configure. Machine learning measures content performance and scores recommended content so that the sales rep always finds the best content.
But if the rep is looking for something different, Highspot’s “Amazon-like” experience with intelligent semantic search and filter-based browsing helps reps find the content they are looking for quickly.
Anywhere worldwide. Any device. Your preferred app.
Today’s larger sales teams are distributed across the country and around the globe; working from their laptops and in their cars on mobile devices. Today’s enterprise software must be cloud-based and mobile ready. We also know that sales reps are creatures of habit — they have a favorite workflow and don’t want to mess with it. Highspot works where sales reps work; in Outlook, Gmail, or ToutApp and Salesforce.com. And for marketers, Highspot syncs with almost every enterprise content management or EFSS system, so we can plug into your content collaboration and production workflow.
Improve content quality.
Unrivaled sales enablement performance analytics let you measure what works — and what doesn’t — from content usage and pitch performance to customer engagement and impact on revenue. Drill in and filter based on any Salesforce field, to better understand performance by sales org or go-to-market segment. And only Content Genomics™ enables marketers to map the evolution of content customizations and analyze content ‘families’ (including all permutations of an original piece of content) as a whole to give you actionable insight. Powerful analytics are a requirement to assess the value of your content and improve quality and performance.
Align better with sales.
Multiple third-party studies like this one and this one (and this one) show that companies in which marketing is well aligned with sales perform much better across many business metrics—revenue growth, quota attainment, sales velocity, and more. Along those lines, a recent Highspot survey of 400 sales, marketing, and sales enablement professionals uncovered that 50% of organizations with a focused alignment effort in the form of sales enablement saw an increase in sales conversion rates of 10% or more, while 23% increased conversion rates more than 20%.
These are just three of the many reasons why marketers need sales enablement, too. If you’re ready to take control of your organization’s content conundrum, I recommend checking out our Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement. And if you’re evaluating solutions and want to learn how Highspot can deliver results, contact us to schedule a customized demo.
