THE SEISMIC SHIFT IN SALES ENABLEMENT

First, let’s be clear on the definition of sales enablement:

Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. (HubSpot)

Next, let’s remember two very important stats regarding current Buyer behavior:

  1. Buyers will have completed about 60% of their research before engaging with you as a vendor – and even in this last mile of the journey, they don’t want to speak to sales. (Forrester – Winning The New B2B Buyer – 2020)
  2. Instead 62% of these Buyers want a seamless package of smart content that is fully personalized and customized to them – through which they will finalize their purchase decision. (Demand Gen Report – 2020 Buyer Preferences Study)

Now are you seeing it? By the time your Buyers engage with you they are already in the “last mile” of the Buyer Journey nearing the sales decision. But they still don’t want to speak to sales people. So the personal(-ized) conversation that a sales rep would typically lead with a Buyer in this last mile now has to happen through content. And it has to happen quickly, sequentially, and seamlessly. You’ll only have a few touches before the purchase decision is made.

This content, therefore, should align with what the Buyer (or buying group) needs to know/prove at each pre-purchase consideration stage. And it should be fully customized to them, their company, their role within that company (and/or the Buying Committee), etc. – while allowing them to self-progress through each stage and asset in sequence. In other words, just as they would in a one-on-one conversation with sales, your Buyers have to fully understand through this content how the offering solves/meets their specific challenges/needs, the business/financial value it will bring to their bottom line, etc.

So it’s clear that where sales enablement has always been about arming sales people with “content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers” – you now need to make most all of that much more Buyer-facing, allowing them to consume it on their own. In other words, it’s the same conversation – it’s just “self-serve” now.

Knowing the above, it’s critical to ensure this last mile content does two things:

  1. It has to be far smarter than ever before, not only personalizing the messaging and graphics specifically to the Buyer, but it also must provide deeper strategic interactions that bring the Buyers value through exchanging specific data FROM them with customized answers BACK TO them – right there in the content – in real time. This is a two-way conversation that your traditional PDFs can never accomplish.
  2. The sales voice obviously HAS to be driving this content. And this is a big shift. In other words, sales must actively shape the messaging and interactions in this content, in conjunction with marketing, so they are sure that this sales conversation is happening the way it should.

As you can see, therefore, Buyers are completely blurring the line between traditional product marketing and sales enablement. And this is actually a very good thing – if your business can adjust to this shift. It means you can finally bridge the sales and marketing divide where so many businesses lose so many deals. You’ll have far more Buyers self-progressing to the purchase decision so that when they are ready to talk to sales, it’s to close the deal, not start the conversation.

This is why everything we do at Splashmetrics sits between your marketing automation and CRM platforms and efforts – as shown in the image above. This is exactly where that sales and marketing divide resides. From the last mile strategic planning and analytics in our Buyer Journey Intelligence platform, to the SplashMaker smart content that enables and empowers that two-way sales conversation described above – we help you finally bridge that divide once and for all. And that means…

More revenue. More ROI.

If you want to know more and/or see some examples of the above, give us shout via the chat. We’re standing by…