Content plays a critical role in educating customers and prospects, making sales enablement a natural extension of content marketing.
Pam is the author of Effective Sales Enablement: Achieve Sales Growth Through Collaborative Sales and Marketing
Automated marketing and sales enablement
Email is often our most common form of automated marketing.
Over time, with the integration of social media, social selling emerged, and it has allowed sellers to add other features to their automated marketing platforms.
Every organization automates its marketing differently, so your automation efforts will look different than those of other people around you.
Most people consider sales enablement to be related to sales training and development. If we expand it, though, we’ll recognize that there are things marketers are doing to enable sales.
Sales and marketing aren’t the same, but they complement each other.
Sales and marketing
Consider sales an additional marketing channel for your organization. With that in mind, consider the things you can do using existing marketing elements to better support your sales team.
Consider the example of a whiskey company who wanted to increase its shelf space in a specific city, so it offered to run specific paid ads on social media to drive foot traffic to the stores.
Who doesn’t appreciate more foot traffic?
This kind of effort requires sales and marketing to work together and think through some of the elements that marketing can use to support sales.
Sales and marketing people tend to lose sight of the fact that they are doing the exact same things every day.
Struggling to collaborate
Sales and marketing have the same business goals and they should work toward them together.
Things get complicated because their department goals are different. Sales focuses on revenue while marketing focuses on brand recognition.
Sales also has more of a short-term priority than marketing, which tends to have more of a long-term mission.
Finally, the two departments tend to have different resources and support allocations available to accomplish their tasks.
Sales and marketing can never be 100 percent fully aligned, but is it possible to find commonalities? Can we drive a joint initiative together?
Joining sales and marketing
In smaller environments like emerging startups, sales and marketing tend to work closely together.
In every organization, the mandate to work together must start at the top. Without direction from the leadership, the two teams will avoid working together because it’s more difficult than working separately.
It’s similar to parenting. Two kids from the same family have different personalities and different interests, but parents can lead them to work together and facilitate their relationship despite those differences.
Enablement ingredients
The three critical keys to enablement are
- training
- content
- coaching
Sales and marketing teams should try to understand those on the other side of the equation. Marketing is probably on the forefront of digital communication, and they can help sales understand how to use digital platforms well.
Have a conversation with your marketing department to learn from the things they already know.
“Collaborative Sales And Marketing” episode resources
You can connect with Pam at pamdidner.com. You can also grab a copy of her book, Global Content Marketing: How to Create Great Content, Reach More Customers, and Build a Worldwide Marketing Strategy that Works or Effective Sales Enablement: Achieve Sales Growth Through Collaborative Sales and Marketing
Her challenge is this: if you read her books and don’t find anything of value in them, schedule a call with her to let her know. She’d love to hear about your challenges and help you find solutions.
This episode is brought to you in part by prospect.io, a powerful sales automation platform that allows you to build highly personalized, cold email campaigns. To learn more, go to prospect.io/tse. It will help you with your outbound to expand your outreach and it allows you to set it and forget it. Your prospecting will never ever be the same.
TSE Hustler’s League
We’ll use prospect.io in the upcoming semester of TSE Hustler’s League to focus on prospecting. We’ll give you insights and tools that will help you gain new customers. In addition, we’ll provide training and strategies that you can implement today to ensure constant flow in your pipeline.
Check out our new semester of The Sales Evangelist Hustler’s League. We’re taking applications for the semester beginning in January, and we can only take a limited number of people.
This episode is also brought to you in part by Maximizer CRM, personalized CRM that gives you the confidence to improve your business and increase profits. To get a demonstration of maximizer, go to the sales evangelists.com/maximizer.
Click on the link to get a free demo of what Maximizer CRM can do for you. It integrates your marketing campaign as well as your CRM, and it works whether you’re a small organization or a large one.
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