Marketers - don’t let Sales have all the fun in Sales Enablement! CSO Insights reports that only 8% of Sales Enablement functions report into Marketing, with the remaining percentage reporting to C-Suite and Sales management.
While it makes sense to an extent that Sales Enablement would report into Sales, why isn’t Marketing getting more skin in the game? After all, more often than not, Marketing teams are the ones managing a Sales Enablement platform. It turns out, there are huge benefits to tackling Sales Enablement head on as a marketer.
So, if you’re in Marketing and your organization is considering a Sales Enablement platform, why care? Here are 3 great reasons for marketers to get involved in managing Sales Enablement.
- Sales is an extension of your brand: It’s common knowledge at this point that buyers are doing more and more research on their own before ever talking to a salesperson. According to Hubspot research, the breakdown is: only 19% of people want to talk to a salesperson during the awareness stage, 60% want to talk to a salesperson in the consideration stage, and only a surprising 20% want to talk to sales during the decision stage. That’s not a lot of time to deliver additional value for a salesperson!
As marketing and sales become more intertwined, and responsible for one another’s success, it becomes more and more important that each team delivers a consistent experience to the buyer. So, in that short amount of time that you have in front of a buyer, sales acts as an extension of the marketing that has been done up until that point. Sales is an extension of your brand. So, giving them the tools they need to easily maintain brand consistency is imperative. One way to help sales stay on-brand is to give them editable templates, created in Bigtincan Content Creator Pro, that have certain areas locked down for editing and swapping snippets. Marketing maintains brand control, and Sales gains the ability to personalize content. - Without a Sales Enablement platform, you’re wasting budget and time: Organizations spend on average 26% of their marketing budget on content creation. However, about 70% of content goes unused by Sales. That’s a lot of wasted budget, and a lot of time wasted creating content that no one is using.
Sales Enablement platforms demystify content usage by tracking how often content is viewed, shared, and downloaded, and by who. By looking at usage reports, marketers can easily see what content is used most, what content moves the needle the most, and what content needs to be edited or removed. Then, when it comes to creating new content, marketers can have a clear picture of what content is worth spending budget and time on creating. Platforms like Bigtincan can even attribute content to opportunities in CRM. What better way to prove ROI on content than to have a clear view into what opportunities marketing content has driven forward? - Sales Enablement platforms help you save yourself and the sales team the aggravation of locating content: Do any of these questions sound familiar: Do we have a one-pager on this? Where do I find that powerpoint? Which version of this deck is the most up to date? How can I send this huge file? What is the best Ebook we have for this use case? Chances are, those are pretty common questions coming into a marketer’s inbox or voicemail. Sometimes, as the marketing team, you know the answer to those questions, but often times you don’t. Which one is the most up to date? Which one would work best?
Sales Enablement platforms like Bigtincan can make those questions obsolete, by automatically delivering AI-recommended content to users’ devices, only presenting relevant content based on role, and automatically updating content to the latest version, regardless of what CMS it lives in. Less searching and surfing for content for sales means more time selling, and more time available for marketers to do their mission-critical jobs.
As a marketer, there are huge benefits to getting involved in Sales Enablement, and managing a Sales Enablement platform. To dive deeper, don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinar: The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Sales Enablement with Adobe.
