Sales and Marketing Alignment

How to Use Account Based Marketing to Drive Business Success in 2019

Now that technology has allowed virtually every consumer experience to become more personalized, it’s not surprising that marketing has become more customized, too. Just as inbound marketers create a buyer’s journey that gives individual buyers the kind of content they’re actively searching for, account based marketing, or ABM, is creating a better way for marketers to target an account or company.

More than 80% of marketers say that their ABM initiatives outperform other types of marketing investments. The key word here is “investment.” ABM requires a much different approach than traditional marketing services, and, in order to be successful, it’s critical to put the work in up front before you pull the trigger.

7 Key Elements of a Great Sales Enablement Strategy

In order for your sales enablement program to be successful, you or your content marketing agency need to have a well-thought-out strategy in place. This strategy will direct your efforts, keep you on track to reach your goals and help you see when (and where) you need to make adjustments.

Think of it like a business plan for your sales enablement program. You wouldn’t start a business without identifying your objectives and determining how you’ll reach them. The same should be true of your sales enablement program.

The right strategy helps you define and collect all the different components involved in your program and determine what needs to be accomplished by each person who is responsible for each step. It also offers a useful set of guidelines to follow as you grow, because it provides a documented reminder of what you want to accomplish and serves as the foundation for your growth.

To begin creating your strategy, bring key stakeholders from both sales and marketing together to provide input. This will ensure that the strategy you create is attainable and reasonable, and it’s also easier to get buy-in from all departments when they’re given the chance to participate.

As you outline your strategy, here are seven essential elements to include that will lead to a great sales enablement strategy.

How to Choose the Right Technology to Supercharge Your Sales Enablement Strategy

For organizations that use content marketing to promote their business and spread awareness of their brand, sales enablement is all about aligning sales and digital marketing specialists in order to propel the sales process forward. While that requires having team members work side-by-side to improve efficiency, it depends heavily on technology to bring those processes together.

There’s a significant payoff in having the right technology; a study by Forrester Consulting found that companies who use sales enablement technology are able to increase the speed of closing deals by 43% and boost company growth by as much as 60%.

Implementing technology is an important step, but it can only be done after you know what processes it needs to serve and what you expect it to do. Once you outline your processes, you have to identify what types of sales technology stack will support and further them, then ensure that everyone involved knows how to use that technology to its fullest.

After all, the greatest technology in the world is only effective when it’s being used properly. If you don’t believe that, hand a smartphone to your grandmother and see what happens.

How to Get Started With Sales Enablement

The way customers buy products has changed dramatically with the growth of e-commerce, but many businesses still depend on the old way of selling. Not surprisingly, that doesn’t yield the same kind of positive results that it used to.

The fault can’t really be placed on sales teams; without the proper tools to sell in this new environment, they can’t adequately compete. But, when given new ways to educate prospects, they can make significant progress.

That’s why sales enablement, a relatively new concept that has grown out of the unique needs of today’s business environment, has gained so much traction.

Sales enablement creates the processes that provide sales departments with the tools, information and platforms they need to increase their effectiveness. As they become more efficient at leading a potential customer through the buyer’s journey, they can provide that lead with the experiences and information needed to make a purchase.

In doing so, they’ll see greater success when it comes to closing deals.

That sounds great on paper, but what does that actually mean — and how does it work? Does it really work? Let’s take a closer look at sales enablement and how it can improve your company’s effectiveness.