Bob Apollo from Inflexion Point wrote a blog article titled: Sales Enablement: the essential bridge between B2B Marketing and Sales. Both of our businesses understand the role of marketing in high value, complex sales situations.
The primary role marketing must play is in the targeting, identifying, attracting, qualifying, and persuading more of the right prospects and turning more of them into customers. Sounds similar to the role of a CRM foundational system for long-term business success.
Sales enablement is a hot topic and a rather recent concept.
To paraphrase, Scott Santucci of Forrester: Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all of your customer-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right people at the right time in a customers’ problem life-cycle.
Clues of a solid Sales Enablement Bridge:
This definition gives us some helpful clues about what we need to have in place before we can claim to have a really solid handle on sales enablement. According to Bob these are:
- It must be managed as a strategic process, not a tactical event
- It must embrace and involve all customer facing employees
- It must be a joint effort between sales and marketing
- It must serve to facilitate valuable customer conversations
- It depends on sales and marketing agreeing on what a perfect customer looks like
- It depends on sales and marketing jointly identifying the key stakeholders in the typical buying decision process.
- It requires that all marketing messages and sales tools are targeted at a defined stage in this buying decision process.
- It requires that we measure the return on marketing and sales investments in terms of:
- value of the pipeline created
- efficiency with which we convert prospects into customers and
- the ultimate revenue generated
I strongly agree with Bob that sales enablement is the essential bridge between modern B2B marketing and sales functions. It does fill the critical gap between highly targeted messaging and having productive sales conversations with the key decision makers and influencers among your ideal prospects.
Read more from Bob’s article here.
