Over the past couple years, there’s been plenty of talk about sales enablement services. If you’ve heard of sales enablement, you may have also heard people say that businesses should now be expecting it and their marketing teams should be delivering it.
If you haven’t heard of sales enablement, here are a few good resources to give you the rundown. Or, if you’re into the whole brevity thing, here’s HubSpot’s definition:
“Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.”
So, we’ve given a lot of thought as to whether this service aligns with what we’re trying to do as an agency. And the more we thought about it, the more it began to look like a perfect fit.
Sales enablement is all about formalizing a playbook to accomplish the things we already know are important for many of our clients. These include:
- Establishing clear goals
- Staying accountable to those goals
- Collaborating with greater efficiency and transparency
- Closing more deals
- Growing revenue
- Demonstrating clear ROI
We are, of course, a marketing agency, and we know that having a reliable marketing partner who can consistently generate and nurture qualified leads is a win for our clients. That said, there can still be a disconnect for certain types of businesses if sales and marketing aren’t closely coordinating when it comes to the bottom of the sales funnel (i.e. how leads are handled).
While it’s one thing to give lip service to the importance of things like communication and alignment between sales and marketing, it’s another to actually offer a formalized service that instills and enforces real cooperation.
One Revenue Team
By offering sales enablement services, we’re able to take a proactive role in creating the alignment many of our clients need to fully capitalize on marketing leads.
Rather than having one marketing team focused on generating leads and one sales team focused on closing them, our hope with sales enablement is to function as one highly collaborative team – the revenue team.
Is Sales Enablement Right for You?
Not every business is a fit for sales enablement services. By nature, it requires having a sales team that’s open to change, trust, accountability and collaboration – so in many ways it’s a matter of culture fit.
In terms of logistical fit, we walk through a few common questions and challenges that indicate a need for sales enablement services here.
