We’ve written before on this blog about the importance of sales and marketing alignment. New research from Hubspot/Heinz Marketing further drives home the point showing more than 50% of companies that have committed to sales enablement efforts have experienced increases in sales conversion rates of greater than 10%.
Too often, marketing departments are overly concerned with getting leads into the top of the funnel only to ignore those that have been accepted by sales as qualified. However, marketing can play a very effective role in helping sales to convert leads that have stalled or are taking longer than average to close.
Here are some of the benefits of getting marketing involved with sales to help convert leads in the bottom of the funnel.
Benefits of Marketing Engagement in Sales Enablement
Increases sales team efficiency – A good friend of mine once told me, “good sales people want to spend their time hunting and closing, not creating brochures.” Too many times I’ve seen sales departments have to create the majority of their collateral, sales pitch decks and ROI calculators. Getting marketing to create these pieces helps content marketers and creative teams to understand the hurdles in closing deals AND lets the sales reps concentrate on what they do best (and what they are incentivized through commissions to do).
Fosters brand consistency – Left to individual sales reps, customer-facing content can turn into a mishmash using different fonts, colors and messaging. Sometimes the same product brochure from two different reps can look like it’s from two different companies. If marketing creates the foundation pieces, allowing for slight customization by sales reps, the look and feel of your company will be properly represented, which alone can increase deal flow and corporate valuation.
Improves content quality – If content marketers understand the messaging and personas at the bottom of the funnel, they can create more precise pieces for the top of the funnel for lead and demand generation campaigns.
Cultivates sales and marketing alignment – If your departments work together as a team to solve conversion problems, it’s much less likely there will be internal conflicts between sales and marketing personnel.
Plays well with account-based marketing (ABM) – One of the great aspects of ABM is it requires marketing to be involved in sales enablement efforts to be successful.
Sales Enablement Examples
Examples of sales enablement deliverables marketing can fulfill include:
- Alignment of business, sales and marketing goals
- Communication of consistent messaging and positioning via a branding framework
- Video and demo content personalized to individual personas
- Sales pitch decks
- Interactive return-on-investment surveys and calculators
- Competitive differentiation collateral
- Proper integration of sales CRM and marketing automation, including lead scoring
- Deployment of data analytics systems, including training
- Case studies
- Materials that address conversion objections, such as FAQs
Comments are welcome below if you have sales enablement experiences to share – good or bad.
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