7 Easy Things Marketers Could Do To Align and Enable Sales 

Hey you, hotshot marketer, ever wondered how easy life could be if all your marketing prowess converts into profitable sales pitches? Or even better, into conversions? Ah, wouldn’t that be bliss?

 

But that’s not how things work right? Your content gets lost, it does not convert or worse, no one even knows what you did! Now where do you think all this goes downhill? Oh, it's the sales team, they did not do THE job. Typical! 

 

Now, wait. Take a hundred steps back. Did you ever pause to reflect how YOU, as a marketer, can align with and enable the sales team?

 

If YES, what follows is just for you!

 

If NO, then drop all that you are doing and read this NOW! 

 

Sales and marketing or rather Smarketing is one of the vital parameters that determine the growth of any organization. As the word suggests (read insists), it is ideal that both these teams function on some level as a single entity in order to achieve optimum results. But instead they work rather distantly from each other, as separate ‘departments’. 

 

What seems so simple is often the hardest to achieve!

 

 

Defining marketing and sales alignment

 

 

Marketing and sales alignment means to get both teams working together around the same revenue cycle, in order to generate leads and improve buyer experience. This is the single most important opportunity that any organisation can channel towards betterment. Alignment of the teams could exponentially increase ROI and lead acceptance. 

 

It is an undeniable fact that these two teams work hard, but, separately, toward achieving the best they can. Hence  more often than not, their efforts tend to be less fruitful. Having similar moonshots, unites them.

 

When this happens, sales enablement becomes second nature and it empowers them to act more productively. This alignment takes that leap and bridges the gaps. 

 

 

Roles and goals   

 

 

“Oh, I’ve done my bit. Let the sales team take care of what they need to do.” Has this been your voice, dear marketer? 

 

Here is why almost every effort you take goes down the drain. 

 

We are all for setting boundaries and putting up walls, but not when growth is at stake. When you behave as an individual (as a marketer or as a sales rep or even as the CEO), you see only yourself. The attitude shift comes only when you truly believe in the value of the company, when you look at yourself as an integral part of it and as an extension of what your brand represents. This is when you define your role but work together to target common goals.  

 

When you fixate on roles, goals become singular. Sales takes care of sales and marketing takes care of marketing. Sales enablement gets lost. A marketer is futuristic while a sales rep is an opportunist. Both have the potential to conquer, only while together. 

 

Industry leaders are starting to believe that ‘sales enablement’ is THE golden rule to measure the success and performance of a business. 

 

Customers have started to go after an experience rather than just a sales pitch. When this competition toughens, you as a marketer have the power to create, distribute and share content that enables your sales team to sell - the experience. 

 

 

What can you as a marketer do to enable sales?

Here are 7 Easy Things!

 

 

Read. Act. Repeat. Let this be your mantra, you marketer! 

 

 

Strategise and define sales oriented content

 

 

You create this daily. It is your bread and butter. But, not all the content that gets churned out can help generate and close deals. It is more likely to become, well, useless, untouched or never even heard of. But, with the right strategy, you as a marketer can help bring change. 

 

Define clear cut plans. Know your audience persona and make something that your GTM teams can proudly take to the market and confidently close the deal. Content has the power to speak, impress and close deals by itself. So get on with that now! 

 

Once you start creating ‘binge worthy content’ where can your sales team find them? This is where using a single channel platform like Paperflite can benefit both teams.

 

Here lies true sales enablement. 

 

 

Seamless sharing 

 

 

While addressing the benefits of having a single channel platform, we need to say that we’ve all been there in that panic mode where you simply can’t find what you are looking for. This does not help anyone! 

 

Your marketing team puts in hours of hard work curating, researching, analyisng trends, buyer personas and several other key factors to develop a piece of content. But for all this to go missing at the time a sales rep needs it the most, is a misfortune. 

 

But, what if we tell you that you can spin this bad luck to your advantage? With Paperflite, content discovery becomes easy. A marketer just has to upload the document and a sales rep can simply type in what he needs to find and it will magically appear. 

 

Here we have to address ‘sharing’ both literally and figuratively. Hence, it is important to open the lines of communication. At the end of the day, the sales team are the ones that actually face a customer. So be open and hear them out. Seek opportunities to gather first hand customer feedback (both the bad and good). This will enable you to define objectives that get productive results. 

 

Now, go ahead, share, share and get that deal!

 

 

Work with sales toward common goals

 

 

While creating relevant content and sharing that content is paramount, to get there, you, dear marketer, have to work on par with the sales team towards common goals. Analysing customer retention patterns is a good place to start. When you know what worked, you want to do more of that, again, together. 

 

Next is to work toward building a customer experience that helps with conversations and retention. Create joint KPIs while also carefully evaluating ROI. A team that works together stays together, as cliche as that sounds!  

 

 

Track and analyse data that generates revenue

 

 

When you make mistakes, you learn. And with that said, analysing customer pain points from a sales perspective opens the window toward creating targeted content. As a marketer, you rely on your ability to conduct in depth analysis and research. Channel this expertise into producing content that converts. 

 

And when you use Paperflite, you have the luxury of tracking your content. When we say track, we mean track every square inch of how your content performed and how long was spent on it. When you have this, you are bestowed with this exclusive opportunity to know what’s working and you get better with every copy. 

 

 

Remove or revamp channels with less conversion rates 

 

 

As a marketer, you have access to multiple resources. You know what performs and what will get thrown out. Making proper use of those resources determine your success. Boosting content that converts, reactivating cold leads, removing channels that don’t do well and revamping avenues that have less conversion rates ought to be your primary focus. This will help sales teams get better with every pitch. 

 

 

Adapt to technology that aligns both teams

 

 

What a lovely world you live in, you gifted marketer? When you have the right technology at your disposal to help you achieve your targets at every stage, all you have to do is to use it to get you where you want to go.  But here, you need to take your sales team with you. Sales enablement is your endgame. 

 

 

Best softwares that enable sales:

 

 

Paperflite: A real time end to end sales enablement and content management software that gives you analytics that matter, helps sales reps find exactly what they are looking for and provides quite literally everything your team needs to make conversions happen. 

 

Pipedrive CRM: An award winning software that will help you track real progress and is a cloud based CRM. It will help you recognise and capture unique opportunities, 

 

Seismic: A sales enablement software that helps you store, organise and edit lead capturing data. Helps teams access information instantly and enables them to target customer conversions. 

 

HubSpot Sales Hub: A powerful sales enablement CRM software that helps manage sales pipelines and shapes data into a single integrated platform. 

 

 

Catch Up! 

 

 

We’ve shown you the best of everything. Although there is one more thing that is most basic but most essential - just catching up! 

 

Get to know the team and bond over happy hours. This helps solve real time problems and eases ego clashes (we all know that’s something to work on). You get to know the person behind the name tag. 

 

Participate in demo sessions, get to know the attitude of your team while they are making a pitch. Study their shortcomings and create content that enables, supports and distinguishes them. Now, here lies your actual challenge. 

 

We’ve said so many things. You might know that these are vital but how can you actually know if these work? Because at Paperflite, we practise what we preach!

 

 

Just leaving this here

 

 

After you’ve read this, you are enabled as a marketer, thereby helping your sales team win the battle. When you are wondering if a software is something you need to get them there, reach out to our team at Paperflite and book that demo!