Marketers at organizations of all sizes are tasked with promoting the company, building the brand, generating awareness, and all too often adjusting and responding to the demands of the sales team (many of whom don’t understand or appreciate the value of marketing content in the first place).
What is the Role of Sales and Marketing?
Sales and marketing teams at enterprise-level companies share a similar role of attracting new customers and increasing the company’s bottom line. However, both teams often experience disconnect with one another.
Sales teams need content and collateral created by the marketing team to help close their deals. When marketers spend valuable time and company resources on creating content the sales teams say they need, they rarely get more than a ‘thanks for that new product deck’ at the next kickoff. This, coupled with the use of CRM and marketing automation tools has kept marketers data-rich when it comes to an understanding of how customers interact with public-facing materials... but those tools are not delivering an understanding of what is actually happening in the field during direct sales interactions with customers.
New suites called sales enablement platforms (like Bigtincan Hub) exist today to help give marketers the unique opportunity to build integrated and symbiotic relationships with sales. These platforms can finally help marketers understand how sales works (and vice versa) without having to send out tedious surveys or schedule lunch meetings to get insight into the sales process.
Previously, it’s been all too easy for marketers to just leave the management of the sales enablement program to the sales ops team. But Bigtincan believes that with a bit of time and focus – and a thorough understanding of sales enablement tools and the results that they can deliver – marketing teams can tap into what is happening in the field like never before.
Don’t believe us? Here are our top five reasons why sales enablement and marketing work well together. We’re sure you can think of five more – leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.
- Provides Insight on How to Consistently Create the Right Content
Marketing departments often have a limited understanding of what materials sales teams need to be successful. With next-generation sales enablement software, your marketers can understand exactly how your sales team works in the field – how they engage with customers, what materials they use, and how long they engage with customers. Plus, with smart sales enablement tools, marketing can even understand what content was shared by the sales team and whether that content provided valuable insights to prospects.
- Shows How Marketing Directly Affects Sales
Marketers are often left in the dark about sales – they overhear how sales are doing but it can be hard to know whether marketing is helping (or not helping) to close those deals. Sales enablement software empowers marketers with details about how your sales team uses their content, and when combined with CRM software like Salesforce.com, provides direct insight into which content is helping to close specific sales.
And what’s more — marketers can start to see how the sales team and customers interacted with that content, leading to the creation of more content that actually works. From this knowledge, marketers also have the numbers to show how important content is to closing deals.
- Transforms Content into Collateral
Just creating and refining content isn’t enough – your sales team needs to be able to adopt that content and use it in their everyday selling processes. Sales enablement software does just that, and syncs with devices like iPads and smartphones to provide a new way of engaging with customers that delivers increased levels of engagement (and, of course, more sales!).
By using tools like Bigtincan Hub (which is powered by AI technology) marketers have a helping hand in ensuring that salespeople have access to the right content whenever needed, helping to drive forward the selling process.
- Your Customer’s Solutions, Right in Your Sales Reps’ Pockets
Empowering sales teams with mobile devices like iPads and smartphones, in conjunction with smart sales enablement software helps sales reps present the right image to your target customers. Show prospects and customers what your business is all about – modern, technology-savvy, and leading in presenting and sharing as real thought leaders in the market.
The sales enablement tools available today help guide your salespeople to be more effective, present better, and get insight into which products are right to sell at what moment – all without the complexity of legacy portals and Intranets from yesteryear.
- Empower Your Teams to Work Smarter
At the end of the day, the top reason why marketers need sales enablement is to help sales teams be smarter. Imagine having an assistant that could work with salespeople to help them to improve how they work, recommending the right information and content to send to the customer, keep your sales and marketing teams connected, and even assist them to more effectively log their actions into tools like your CRM system. That vision is now within reach, with smarter AI-powered sales enablement software like Bigtincan Hub.
Of course, there are a lot more reasons why sales enablement increases the bottom line of enterprise-level companies but we believe that for marketers, sales enablement software is an innovative weapon that can be used to help close the gap between how marketers create materials and how the sales team uses that content.
With the power of sales enablement and marketing tools, marketers start to think differently, create more effective content, and get an understanding of exactly what content is helping sales teams close deals and expand the organization’s bottom line.
