B2B Sales Enablement: How Marketing Can Help Sales Sell More Stuff

60% of B2B marketing content sits unused by your sales team.

That means the majority of your biggest marketing investment is left for dead on shared drives, never to be found and never to have generated a lead or single dollar of revenue for your company.

Cue the finger pointing between sales and marketing.

It’s a tale as old as time. Or at least as old as sales and marketing.

B2B sales enablement focuses on getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at your company at the right time and place.

We all know content is a critical tool for your sales team.

And if you’re not equipping sales with the content they need, you’re losing the attention and interest of your most valuable leads at the most critical points in the buyer journey.

So what do you do about it?

Use these B2B sales enablement tips to stop the finger pointing between your sales and marketing teams and start selling more stuff.

1. Align on your buyer personas and the buyer journey

It’s critical that buyer personas are developed by your sales and marketing teams together. 

They need to have these upfront conversations to understand who they’re selling to, what they’re most interested in and which topics to create content for.

Prior to creating any piece of marketing content, ask yourself, “Would any of my target customers want to read this blog? Download this marketing guide? Attend this webinar?”

Sales and marketing also need to have a shared understanding the buyer journey.

The more both sides understand the buyer journey, the more likely you’re able to successfully align your content to buyer needs, anticipate the buyer’s questions and overcome any objections they may have.

1. Let your sales team know when and where they can find marketing content

Between lead research, outbound prospecting and follow-up activities, they’ve got enough to keep track of on their own. They can’t keep track of everything marketing is publishing.

Let your sales reps know when new marketing content is created and where they can find it. They can’t use your marketing content if they don’t know it exists.

Work with your sales reps and explain the importance of the latest marketing content, where it fits along the buyer journey and how it can help them have more impactful conversations with their leads.

1. Allow your sales reps to personalize marketing content

Sales reps want the ability to modify content to align with their buyer’s needs.

They want to show that they’ve done their research and they truly understand the buyer’s current situation. By doing this, sales reps can differentiate themselves from the sea of competitors.

This means marketing should create content that supports sales reps without handcuffing them.

Create templates for sales reps so they can easily customize content in order to meet the buyer’s needs. These templates can identify which elements can be modified and which elements can’t be changed while still communicating a unified marketing message. 

1. Test and refine your marketing message with your sales reps

Set it and forget it. This may work for rotisserie chickens, but it definitely doesn’t work for your marketing message.

Your marketing team should ask for constructive feedback about the messaging being used. Is the message relevant? How is it being received? Is it compelling? Does it suck?

Sales reps have the best information on what objections and recurring questions appear in the conversations with leads.

The feedback loop between sales and marketing is crucial to optimizing and shortening your sales cycle.

In closing

The key to successful B2B sales enablement is for your marketing team to treat your sales team as if it were one of your own clients.

This two-way communication allows your marketing team to tap into the sales team’s first-hand knowledge of your target buyers and create content that directly relates to their needs.