There’s a fundamental shift happening in technology marketing around the globe today, as the formerly adversarial relationship between sales and marketing is being replaced by a new level of collaboration driven by the need to achieve shared goals. Marketers face increasing pressure to provide sales with content that meets a specific need at a specific point in the sales cycle and at the same time marketing departments are challenged to reduce customer acquisition costs. This means that marketers need to shift from supporting, to enabling the sales team.
CMO’s at many technology companies are implementing more refined sales enablement programs to better the alignment of these two departments. But here is the bottom line, these sales enablement programs, no matter the intention of both sales and marketing are only going to be successful with the appropriate leadership in place. Too often, marketing and sales attempt to align with each department head calling the shots and driving the strategy with their department needs in mind. This tends to cause confusion and hampers the process.
ITSMA’s most recent study Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact suggests sales enablement needs to fall under a unified leadership in order to be the most effective. It helps assure that the burden to improve performance will be shared fairly between marketing and sales. It also creates a single point of authority and accountability for improving the processes that marketing and sales share. Julie Schwartz, from ITSMA details six reasons as to why sales and marketing need to share the accountability and leadership for effective sales enablement efforts:
- Integrate a split buying process. Many companies still treat the buying process as having two separate and distinct pieces, with marketing generating leads and then handing leads off to sales. But marketing and sales should collaborate to move the customer/prospect through the entire customer buying process, not just hand off leads.
- Create a single system for tracking leads. One of the best ways to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales is to integrate a marketing automation system with sales’ CRM system to track lead generation and nurturing. But that kind of integration requires leadership.
- Reduce indirect selling activities. Shared leadership would also help eliminate the inefficiency that’s occurring right now in the sales process. Salespeople spend 23% of their time on indirect selling activities (lead generation and tracking, planning, account management, creating presentations, customer research, after-sales service, etc.). This is time that could be better spent in front of customers.
- Make marketing accountable for that reduction. If sales enablement is all about reducing the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, marketers need to be taking steps to reduce the time that salespeople spend on activities that marketers could be doing more efficiently. But until more marketing organizations become accountable for reducing the time sales spends in indirect selling activities, improvements are less likely. We found that just 11% of marketing organizations are held accountable for doing this now, whereas 37% are in the planning stages. A strong, shared marketing and sales leader could convince the other 51% to get started soon.
- Help marketing improve its most effective programs. In our survey, marketers told us that the three most effective sales enablement activities are reference programs, ROI/price justification tools, and client briefing centers. To be effective, all these programs require close collaboration between sales and marketing.
- Know what the other hand is doing. We found that companies that are succeeding at sales enablement use quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of sales enablement activities, such as:
- Number of closed deals influenced by marketing
- Number of opportunities in the pipeline
- Number of sales-ready leads generated
If we are going to close the gap between marketing and sales and truly reduce the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, it’s time for marketing and sales to get together.
