Sales enablement is the process of providing sales teams with the resources they need to win more deals. It covers content, tech, training, data and much more.
It’s essential in modern B2B organisations. Why?
Because it helps sellers connect with buyers with the right information at the right time, as well as win more deals.
In a landscape where buyers do most of their research before engaging with a salesperson, it’s vital to make those moments count. Sales enablement makes it happen.
However, there has always been a discussion in the B2B sales industry about where a sales enablement team should sit in a business. Is it part of sales or marketing - or does it sit on its own?
The fact is:
Sales enablement starts with an engaged, creative marketing team, fully aligned with sales.
In this article, we’ll look at how marketing and sales can come together to create effective sales enablement strategies.
Scroll 👇 or use the menu to see five ways that sales enablement can support your reps.
Why sales enablement matters
Buyers hold the cards in today’s B2B landscape.
When they engage with salespeople, having researched the marketplace, they need reps to add value with relevant content and insights. This content will primarily come from the marketing team and is often based on feedback from the sales team; they’re the ones on the frontline speaking to prospects.
Successful sales enablement depends on B2B marketing and sales teams talking to each other. While companies have always relied on revenue, marketing teams haven’t always been focused on the bottom line.
In today’s B2B environment, marketers have to think more about how they can support sales, aligning around revenue goals rather than focusing solely on lead gen.
Will Yang, Head of Growth at Instrumentl, told us why sales enablement matters to marketing:
"I’ve been in sales for over a decade, and I still can’t get over how many people I talk to think that sales are 'over there' and marketing is 'over here.'"
"The truth is that they go hand-in-hand: marketing is all about creating demand, and sales are all about fulfilling that demand."
"So it only makes sense that the two teams work together to make sure you have the right information when you need it - and that you have a good understanding of what your customer wants."
Five ways that marketing drives sales enablement
1. Define ideal customer profiles
The marketing team is the keeper of your company’s ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
What's an ICP? In a nutshell:
They're the type of people most likely to buy your product; people who you can target through content marketing and more traditional sales techniques like cold calling.
When devising sales enablement strategies, it’s marketing’s role to ensure your ICPs are front and centre. With a well-defined ICP, your salespeople and marketers will know:
- Who to target.
- When to target them.
- What content and messaging will resonate with them.
With this info, your reps will be able to call only those buyers who are ready to buy.
Creating an ICP must be a joint effort between sales and marketing. Veniz Maja Guzman, Digital Marketing Specialist at Promet Source, shared a quick tip for easy collaboration:
"Sales should include marketing in client meetings so they can gather information that would be helpful for defining the ICP."
And Arham Khan, co-founder of Pixated, gave us his checklist for developing an ICP:
Identify your most valuable customers
Targeted leads are easier to find once you understand the buyers you've already won.
Sales should therefore begin by building a list of their current customers and seeing who is getting the most value from the product or service.
Interview your top customers
Of course, perhaps the most obvious way to find out what your best buyers love about your brand is to just ask them directly!
Set up a call to explore their buying experience and process, how they found you, why they made the purchase, and how they're benefitting from your product or service.
Analyse the data
What insights can you extract from having spoken to your best buyers? Are there any recurring patterns or shared characteristics among them?
By identifying any similarities, you get one step closer to building your ICP.
Create your template
Your framework for building your ICP doesn't need to be overly complicated.
Break it down into simple sections: industry, geography, budget, company size, buying process, decision-makers, business goals, technologies, pain points.
Hone your findings
The process of creating an ICP doesn't end after the initial build; it evolves as you discover more and more about your best buyers and as your brand adapts to your audience and industry.
Seek regular feedback from top customers, examine your revenue data, check out where your web traffic is coming from, and look for patterns in recent successful deals - are they all coming from a select few lead sources?
2. Create effective content
Marketing has many responsibilities in sales enablement, but the biggest one is:
Creating content for sales to share with potential customers.
This content could range from whitepapers and eBooks to blogs, landing pages and podcasts. Marketing can also craft email sequences that nurture specific types of leads and help them on the buyer’s journey.
There are a few things this sales enablement content needs to do:
- It must be relevant and tailored towards your ideal customer profile.
- It must position your product as the solution to your prospects’ problems.
- It must reach them at precisely the right time, when they’re most likely to buy.
To do this effectively, sales and marketing must collaborate to choose the best approach. While sales reps may have the best frontline insights, marketing knows what creative strategies will resonate with buyers.
Tania Clarke, Product Marketing Lead at Qwilr, gave us a content creation tip:
"So many sales teams spend hours customising and personalising content to stand out to their buyers. This process is incredibly manual and ends up leaving them with 40 different versions of the same deck, causing content chaos."
"Marketing can ease a lot of the pain felt in sales by creating content that speeds up the selling time with clear messaging for the ICP, clear use cases, examples, and proof points to sell the product effectively."
For Joe Kevens, Director of Demand Generation at PartnerStack and the Founder of B2B SaaS Reviews, effective content helps sales win more deals:
"Case studies are well-known to help conversions. Buyers want to know if the solution has succeeded for someone like them. That’s also why user review content can also help sales."
"At PartnerStack, we had G2 analyse the win rate impact of our buyers looking at review content on G2. G2 found that PartnerStack’s win rate nearly doubled when a buyer looked at review content compared to those who didn't look at it."
3. Implement tech that powers the strategy
As well as creating great content that helps buyers along their journey, your marketing team needs to play a part in ensuring sales can leverage it effectively.
There are several sales enablement solutions on the market that map content to each ICP and stage of the sales process. It should be easy for SDRs to find the content they need, which they can then forward to prospects.
Marketing must have input into selecting tech solutions for sales enablement, as they will be charged with creating the resource base that sales will draw from.
Adriel Hampton, Director of Marketing at Accurate Append, shared a practical tip from his company:
"Our marketing team provides guidance to the sales tech stack but we don’t dictate."
"For instance, we want the sales team to be able to have regular follow-up, lead scoring and clear attribution capabilities. The sales team has ultimate control of picking the stack that has these functionalities."
4. Align sales and marketing
Traditionally, marketing and sales teams have worked separately, addressing different challenges with different goals.
However, if sales enablement is to work, both teams must be aligned.
Where does alignment begin?
With communication! Marketing can take the lead on communication between the two teams.
Start by taking the time to ask sales what they need (rather than assuming they know). They can also be there to help sales get to grips with the new B2B marketing strategies, such as pointing them in the direction of new content and sharing success stories.
Will Yang shared a hack for making communication happen:
"Have regular meetings between all stakeholders involved in the sales enablement process. Ensure that everyone has input into what content is being created and how it's being distributed. All parties must feel heard and valued."
For Tania Clarke, a sales team is the most direct channel that marketers can use to amplify and test their work:
"I like to think of our sales team as our qualitative field testing team."
"When rolling out new messaging, positioning, or a new feature pitch, the sales team acts like your field testers to gather valuable data marketing uses to pivot quickly. That feedback loop is what drives effective GTM."
5. Pinpoint areas of improvement
Sales enablement has never been ‘set it and forget it.’ SaaS sales changes fast, and content that resonates today may not be as effective six months down the line.
Marketing must take a data-driven approach to evaluate sales enablement’s effectiveness. The best B2B marketers are always looking for areas to improve.
Again, it all comes down to communication. Set up regular meetings between marketing and sales. Give marketing access to your library of reps’ cold calls. Get insights into what your salespeople and prospects are actually saying to each other.
Only then can marketing test new approaches and make the appropriate changes.
Melissa Appleby, Head of Marketing at Affinity Payroll, agreed:
"Sales and marketing must have regular check-ins and establish open knowledge sharing to help improve sales enablement."
"Having an ongoing feedback loop will strengthen the efforts of both teams and will mean that more time, effort and budget is spent where it makes the most measurable impact."
Matthew Ramirez, Founder at Rephrasely, said that the best way to improve sales enablement is to tie it to customer success:
"That way, you’re not only enabling the sales team to close more deals, but also helping the company retain and grow its customer base."
Key takeaway
Sales enablement is about bridging the gap between marketing and sales; the goal is to provide sales with everything they need to succeed in this new world of business.
It needs to be a two-way street, harnessing marketing’s knowledge and creativity with sales’ real-time feedback, creating easily deliverable content that resonates with buyers. It’s an opportunity for marketing to take the lead in revenue-generating activities in the organisation.
As to whether your sales enablement team should be part of marketing or sales? It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the team is effective.
Companies that align their marketing and sales teams most effectively will be the ones that see the most success from sales enablement.
And where will that success be reflected most?
In their revenue numbers.
As Joe Kevens said:
"Revenue should matter to marketing. And enabling sales to close deals drives more revenue."
