Stop Letting Your Sellers Down: Bring Your Content Marketing Strategy into The Enablement Era
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Enabling your sellers has never been so achievable. Forrester Research recognizes six distinct execution goals for sales enablement to help you define your expectations and set realistic milestones for 2017. These slides will help marketers understand these goals and discover how to recognize shortcomings in your own sales support processes. You’ll takeaway ideas and actions to transform your priorities, fulfill that revered promise to your sellers, and drive top line growth.
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Stop Letting Your Sellers Down: Bring Your Content Marketing Strategy into The Enablement Era
- 1. 1 Daniel Rodriguez VP, Marketing Bring Your Content Marketing Strategy into The Enablement Era Stop Letting Your Sellers Down
- 2. 2 We are in the ENABLEMENT ERA
- 3. 3 25 Years Ago The Mad Men Era 10 Years Ago The Lead Gen Era Today The Enablement Era Awareness Awareness Consideration Awareness Consideration Conversion Impressions Leads Revenue per repKPI: Marketing’s EVOLVING ROLE
- 4. 4 CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT 79% indicate content marketing being important or very important Demand Metric Research Corporation Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved. 9% 3% 9% 35% 44% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50% Very unimportant Unimportant Neutral Important Very important
- 5. 5 ASSEMBLE ALIGNDEVELOP ENGAGE LOCATE POSITION Transforming your content marketing strategy to enable sales HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER
- 6. 6 Develop “Ensure that sellers have the appropriate skills and attributes to engage in effective conversations to progress, negotiate, and close on a solution that maps to buyers’ needs.” – Forrester
- 7. 7 Mobility Universal Accessibility Case-specificity Lead Delivery Traceabilty Develop your team using a TRAINING STRATEGY WITH STAYING POWER 1 2 3 4 5
- 8. 8 Position “Deliver content that consistently represents the brand’s promise and can be customized to address the specific needs of the buyer.” – Forrester
- 9. 9 Position your sellers to MAXIMIZE every interaction WITH CONTENT …and personalizing that content is imperative in today’s buyer-led sales process, as 76% of those currently personalizing content for their sales team report that they will be increasing the creation and usage of personalized materials in 2017. Content now plays a crucial role in sales success, with 64% of B2B content marketers reporting that supporting the sales team is their top objective… MarketingProfs © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
- 10. 10 Position your sellers to maximize every interaction, AND SEE THE RESULTS 1. Maximize time spent selling 2. Increase customer engagement 3. Shorten sales cycles
- 11. 11 Align “Give sellers relevant and actionable information about the buyers whom they meet and the businesses that they are helping succeed.” – Forrester
- 12. 12 Name: Mike Johnson Job Title: Director of Marketing Buyer Persona: Marketing Pains: Content in disparate repositories resulting in content going unused because sellers can’t find what they need Align the data CAPTURED BY MARKETING AND PASSED TO SALES
- 13. 13 Enablement Connects THE MISSING PIECES
- 14. 14 Locate “Enable quickly locating or recommending appropriate content that aligns with the buyer’s journey and upcoming conversations.” – Forrester
- 15. 15 Less than 1/5 of marketing executives indicate that they are completely happy with their content management methods. MANAGING CONTENT so it’s easily located remains an issue for many marketing teams: 52% of marketers say content goes unused by salespeople because they can’t find it… …and 56% say they are bogged down by custom one-off requests for updated collateral. Gatepoint Research © 2016. All Rights Reserved.
- 16. 16 Content in the right context in the RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME Make content available where reps spend the most of their time: In Salesforce. In Outlook. On Mobile.
- 17. 17 Engage “Support content sharing or distribution platforms that demonstrate innovation, are compatible with modern buyers’ expectations of how to consume content, and share and support the capture of data about these interactions to feed back into improving execution of all sales enablement goals.” – Forrester
- 18. 18 Real time analytics to focus intelligence on the prospect: • When message was read • Which documents were opened • Which pages were viewed • Time spent on each page Consumption analytics across entire team: • Which sales rep is using what • Where are sales reps accessing content • How are sales reps sending content • At what stage in the buyer’s journey is content being sent Engage using INSIGHTS THROUGH ANALYTICS
- 19. 19 Assemble “Equip sellers with the ability to quickly configure, price, and quote value-based proposals that closely tie to customers’ situation as well as build RFIs and RFPs.” – Forrester
- 20. 20 What does it look like when you’re getting it right? Sales reps are fully equipped with the right content at the ideal moment of engagement on any device so as to maximize their time selling. Fully branded compliant materials approved by marketing are accessible to inside and outside sales reps in any selling situation to ensure message consistency and brand integrity. Sales reps deliver a personalized presentation in every prospect and customer meeting using customizable templates, reports, and slide decks available to them in seconds. Marketing has full insight into what content is being used, how its being used, and in what selling situations so content production hours are allocated to the creation of content that works.
- 21. 21 All six execution goals achieved DEVELOP POSITION ALIGN LOCATE ENGAGE ASSEMBLE
- 22. 22 Tweetable Takeaways In 2016, 64% of B2B content marketers cited supporting the sales team as a top objective – what are your content objectives? @SeismicSoftware Evolving content marketing into The Enablement Era results in effective marketers and delighted sellers #B2Bcontent @SeismicSoftware
- 23. 23 To learn more about how Forrester evaluates the sales enablement automation space, visit seismic.com
Editor's Notes
- Marketing has an unfulfilled promise to sales: help to drive revenue. The desire, and requirement, that marketing be held accountable to fulfilling this promise has ushered us into the Enablement Era.
- How has this expectation for what marketing provides to the organization evolved? 25 years ago, marketing was mostly PR and ad agencies, focused entirely on helping to create awareness. The sales team was on its own. In the past ten years, we entered the Lead Gen era, where marketing is responsible for creating leads. There is accountability at the top of the sales pipeline, yet when leads are handed over to sales they are still on their own. With the relatively newfound responsibility for leads, which can be measured in dollars, has come the increased expectation that marketing can fulfill its promise to sales to help them drive revenue. After all, that’s what the lifeblood of every company is: revenue.
- Where does content marketing fall in all this? Nearly 80% of B2B marketers report content marketing as being important or very important. So with that, we know the function is top-of-mind, however today’s marketers know the name of the game now is to optimize their content strategy, personalize their content to maximize usage, and elevate content ROI to ultimately support their sellers and maximize the usage and effectiveness of their content.
- With that said, the sales enablement space is growing because more B2B marketers across industries see sales enablement as a key way to address their top challenges in fulfilling their promise. Those challenges span from content creation to content delivery, and with each obstacle comes a feeling of let down from your sellers. But, enabling your sellers has never been so achievable. Forrester Research recognizes six distinct execution goals for sales enablement to help you define your expectations and set realistic milestones for 2017. Develop, Position, Align, Locate, Engage, Assemble. Let’s dive into each one of these and identify common shortcomings in your sales support processes and how sales enablement could be the answer to overcome these content obstacles and drive top line growth.
- Develop. Congratulations! Your newest round of sales reps has passed through the onboarding process with flying colors. Each rep has had the training and assessments necessary to reach a quota-carrying capacity. Each has been assigned a team, territory, and CRM login to diligently track all sales activities and deal progress. The onboarding chaos for this round of reps is over, but most sales leaders and trainers are left thinking: Now what? You hope that reps are going to remember everything they learned in training and will approach every selling situation armed with insights and training experience. But you know that reps are more likely to forget half of what they learned within five weeks, so you’ve given them access to all of their training materials that they can access through email attachments or in a file folder labeled “TRAINING DOCS.” These materials should be an adequate safety net for when reps need a quick refresher of what they learned in training, right?
- There are five characteristics of a successful training strategy to enable your sales team long-term to engage in effective conversations with their buyers. Mobility - reps should be able to access content from mobile devices—such as tablets and smartphones—on the go Universal accessibility - content should be available offline and from the programs that reps are working in, such as CRM or email Case-specificity - integrate with a CRM to serve up content based on specific characteristics, such as industry, role, and stage of buying process/sales cycle Lean delivery - deliver only the most relevant content to reps, so reps don’t have to spend time searching for the right materials Traceability - in order to analyze what content is most useful and effective for reps, content usage should be tracked and analyzed
- Position. It’s no secret that leveraging marketing content to enable sellers is two fold. Not only does the content that’s being made available to those sellers need to be on-brand, on-message and up-to-date but it also has to be customizable so the seller can maximize the value of the interaction with their buyer. What happens when you, yourself, get on a call with a sales rep and they don’t know what you do or even how their solution can help you? You feel instantly turned off, not a priority for them, and don’t want to interact with that sales rep in the future. It’s crucial for marketing to deliver content that is specific to the buyer persona, industry, and stage in the buyer’s journey while also allowing for the seller to personalize that content as needed to “wow” the buyer, every time. We see this importance in the data.
- The objectives of a company’s content strategy are no longer only brand awareness and demand creation; a top objective for content marketing these days is supporting sales. This is a fundamental shift in how marketing teams across industries create and distribute content. With 64% of B2B content marketers reporting that sales enablement is a top objective for their content, marketing teams need to be aligned to their sales counterparts now more than ever. Marketing having the ability to enable their sales counterparts to quickly and efficiently personalize the content they’re sending to prospects is a huge part of marketers being able to control the branding, control the message, and support sales. Content personalization is among the most effective means to delivering that coveted one-to-one buyer experience that each and every buyer now expects. With the vast majority of marketers reporting to us that they employ some level of content personalization today and tell us they will ramp up that effort for next year, to effectively engage and delight your buyers, content personalization is a must-have.
- Putting content in context isn’t simply giving your reps mobile access to content. It’s not just employing tags or folders so reps can find content more easily. Content in context is not even serving up static content where and when reps need it. These are all adequate ways to empower your sales team and make them more productive, but thinking that they make your sales team successful is like thinking duct tape will fix your flat tire. Impacting sales effectiveness with thoughtful customizable content using sales enablement technology will result in your sellers spending more time actually selling, increased success in front of customers, and shortened sales cycles.
- Align. It’s simply not enough anymore to put the content where sellers can access it easily in preparation for a sales conversation. It’s up to marketing to enable sellers with the information they need to best serve their buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. What does this look like?
- Serving hyper-relevant content specific to the needs of the buyer based on what marketing has captured in your nurturing efforts is the quickest way to ensure sellers are prepared for every buyer conversation with the information and materials they need to facilitate a meaningful interaction. Integrating your marketing automation, CRM, and sales enablement instances will allow marketing to have a measurable impact at every stage of the buyer's journey, from first touch to close.
- Most fundamentally, enablement technology connects marketing automation that is the lynchpin of the Lead Gen era to the foundation of the sales team: their CRM. How can sales have the most personalized conversation possible? They need the relevant and actionable information about that customer to pass from Marketo or Eloqua into their CRM and then into the sales conversation, making it the most contextually relevant conversation possible.
- Locate. Think about it, ensuring sellers can locate what they need to engage in effective conversations…. that is absolutely the responsibility of marketing. It can be easier said than done. Many of today’s marketers create content to be used in specific selling situations, make it accessible for sales, but claim it’s not their fault that sales can’t find it or it goes unused. Why not put a system in place to eliminate that problem?
- Clearly a streamlined, efficient content management system is still a struggle for today’s marketers – the absence of an organized content management process leads to unhappy marketing teams that experience the majority of the content they produce going unused. Supporting sales no matter where they are and who their buyer is allows for them to stop wasting time sifting through folders for content. Put the right presentation, report or contract at the right stage of the buyer cycle next to the opportunity in Salesforce. Your sellers will feel confident that they’re utilizing the right materials.
- Content in the right context in the right place at the right time. Delivering content when and where sales needs it for each and every unique selling situation they find themselves in is imperative to contributing to sales effectiveness and subsequently driving revenue. Sales will love the freedom of not having to spend so much time searching for the right content and you as the marketer will have the peace of mind sellers are using on-brand, marketing-approved, content in every interaction.
- Engage. Content consumption analytics feeding the ability for sellers to better tailor their prospect outreach and in turn for marketers to use those analytics to measure content effectiveness and content ROI are at the forefront of priorities for modern enterprises. Bringing your content strategy into the Enablement Era includes putting robust measurement apparatus’ in place to see what types of content are being used and why at each stage of the buyer’s journey to drive best practices and ensure future content will be used.
- So, thinking long-term, you want to establish practices and processes to enable the measurement of content analytics. It’s imperative to know what content works and where/when it works through out the buyer’s journey to best drive improvements to your ongoing content marketing strategy while also seeing heightened ROI for each piece of content both with internal audiences (sales) and external audiences (prospects). Sharpening your team’s approach to content creation will be largely derived from these insights, thus improving the holistic content marketing effort within your organization. And once again, a subsequent benefit to getting this right is you’ll delight your sellers!
- Assemble. Equipping sellers with the ability to assemble these documents with marketing-approved content components right within your sales enablement solution eliminates much of the turnaround time and ultimately increases sales efficiency. Providing templates pre-filled with customer details, deal terms, and the latest data from your CRM… paperwork should be easy for sellers. Putting your sellers in the best position to win at this stage in the buyer’s journey with content is critical in fostering trust between sales and marketing.
- So let me show you what it looks like when an organization has transformed their content marketing strategy into one worthy of the Enablement Era… when sales and marketing are truly symbiotic and working towards the most effective and efficient processes possible. That’s how you prove you are driving revenue – you have measured insights into the highly personalized selling that is the hallmark of the Enablement Era.