As the economy declines, how can marketers optimize sales enablement to best support the sales team?
Today, one of the top concerns for marketers across all industries is the upcoming recession. Most critically, marketers are doing their part to best support the sales team through these uncertain times by helping to optimize sales enablement. Research proves that 84% of sales reps achieve their quotas when organizations employ a best-in-class sales enablement strategy. Now more than ever, having the right sales enablement strategies in place is essential to providing the sales team with the tools and resources they need to sell effectively during a time of economic turmoil.
In conjunction with sales enablement leaders, marketers must prioritize sales enablement to recession-proof the organization overall. But how? Below, we’re sharing three ways marketing can optimize sales enablement to boost revenue even during a recession. Let’s dive in!
The voice of the customer (VOC) refers to the feedback you gain from customers, whether in the form of testimonials or statistics that showcase their positive results with your product or service. VOC provides prospects with real success stories from industry peers. This third-party data establishes credibility, with concrete evidence of the successes that organizations similar to the buyer have achieved since purchasing the product. Marketers can optimize sales enablement strategies by infusing VOC throughout all sales enablement content. By adding the voice of the customer to support sales claims, buyers are more likely to:
For example, say a buyer is interested in how your product can save them time by automating a certain task, yet isn’t fully convinced that your product is the right fit. Empowered with an arsenal of customer reference points such as video testimonials, your seller can share relevant testimonials with the buyer to highlight how your product has saved customers time and increased productivity.
Not only can VOC be used to win new deals, but it also can help up-sell, cross-sell, and renew deals with current customers. Recently, Gartner found that collecting and using customer feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%. With a recession looming ahead, bumping up your revenue by 15-20% is no small feat.
Incorporating the voice of the customer is a critical component of sales enablement strategies, and providing sellers with resources that will influence buyers to make a purchase. With Enable Us, marketing can easily request video, text, or audio testimonials that address key concerns. Your team can review customer responses, curate the most impactful testimonials, and publish them into a digital sales room (DSR) instantly for the prospect to view.
During a recession, the sales team has to do more with less. Each hour the team spends should be focused on revenue-generating activities, which means that menial administrative tasks need to be automated and limited as much as possible. When sales reps spend an average of 440 hours a year looking for the right content to share, one of the best ways to optimize sales enablement and maximize sales’ productivity is by simplifying content management with the right tools.
Yet, many companies organize sales content in multiple places — Google Drive, personal folders, or offline — which is extremely confusing to navigate and makes it tough for reps to locate relevant content. As if unorganized content isn’t enough of a headache, a lot of sales content is often outdated. With a lack of up-to-date and relevant content, sellers are forced to take time out of their day to make adjustments to the content themselves. Maintaining this “system” is time-consuming, detracting both sales and marketing teams from performing their job function. Most importantly, it makes it harder for the sales team to locate the content they need when they need it — slowing down sales velocity.
With a central content management tool like Enable Us, marketing can curate, manage, and track all sales content in one location, offering a single source of truth for all teams. Sales reps know exactly where to find, access, and share the right content based on buyers’ needs. The easy-to-use sales enablement platform enables sellers to perform their jobs efficiently.
Take a look at the inspiring story of how Talview, a talent measurement company, leverages Enable Us to organize its sales content into a purpose-built library so sellers always have access to everything they need.
For years, marketers have been able to track most areas of marketing — emails, web traffic, events, webinars, social media, you name it — yet, tracking the effectiveness of sales collateral is still a challenge. Behavioral buyer data coupled with advanced seller performance as it relates to buying interactions, content sharing, content consumption, and more allows you to make data-driven decisions regarding collateral creation. This multi-layered data can be the game-changer in uncovering exactly what buyers want to see from the seller at every stage.
First, implement the right sales enablement technology (link Enable Us) to gain insights into seller behavior, such as searches, views, shares, and downloads. With this newfound visibility, you can analyze the data to inform your larger strategy for sales collateral and tools. For example, searches for pricing yield no results, informing your team that pricing information is unavailable in your content library. This prompts your team to create a pricing guide to fill the gap. Or a new product video hasn’t been viewed or shared with buyers by the sales team. Based on this insight, you develop a training program to highlight how and when to use the product video, resulting in increased engagement with the asset.
Second, the same sales enablement platform can capture buyer insights to optimize the sales process. Every time a buyer views and engages with content in a digital sales room (DSR), the platform captures detailed buyer analytics on what content is (or isn’t) being viewed, for how long, and if shared with colleagues. In addition to informing sales on how to tailor DSRs to each buyer, marketing can use these insights to evaluate what content resonates with buyers based on deal stage, industry, and buyer role. This optimizes marketing’s time and resources to develop effective, relevant content that enables buyers during the buying process.
As the recession approaches and selling becomes more difficult, vital insights into seller and buyer behaviors, what content can accelerate deals, and more will be the difference between deals lost and deals won.
By keeping sales enablement efforts at the forefront of your marketing agenda, you will be better prepared when it comes to protecting revenue flow and business growth during a time of recession. It’s time to optimize sales enablement in your organization. Contact us to discover how you can better support your sales team through the recession, and beyond.
Get exclusive access to key tips and strategies to recession-proof your sales and marketing programs by downloading our Sales and Marketing Playbook for Navigating the Impending Recession.
