Marketing and sales are two very important aspects of any successful business concern and both need to be functioning in tandem for maximized efficiency.
It is up to marketing to attract the ideal buyer which of course is no easy feat. You need a well-established inbound marketing machine to do so. The primary focus should be on creating engaging content so an interested buyer can become a fresh lead soon after taking action (for instance, downloading an ebook).
But what is the next step? What do you think happens when the responsibility of developing a lead is transferred from the Marketing team to the Sales team? In most cases, the leads run dry due to an inefficient sales enablement strategy.
Sales enablement is a set of strategies formulated by the Sales team to help nurture leads through specific processes, technologies, and tools (like HubSpot CRM) that ultimately boost the company's performance. Sales enablement focuses on the collaboration between Sales and Marketing teams to:
If you fail to ensure that both the Sales and Marketing teams are working in unison, according to IDC Research, a B2B company can incur a huge expenditure of 10% of revenue every year (for example, Calidus Cloud, 2015). The opportunity costs of underused marketing content can skyrocket to $2.3 million for enterprise organizations.
This occurs because, if this transfer is done cold, the communication that led to the first point of engagement with your website's visitor and the rapport you've built since then might quickly weaken.
You must ensure that both your Marketing and Sales team have good communication skills and aligned KPIs so that you can sustain the goodwill you have created with your new MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads). This is the reason why open and clear communication is required during the penultimate stages of the buyer’s journey.
Study the demographic, socioeconomic, and psychographic segments attached to your desired client profiles to determine your ideal customer.
Are they entrepreneurs? CFOs? Students? What is their annual income? New mothers? What is the scale of their business? Are they settled in rural areas or densely populated cities?
Comprehending the subtle differences among your ideal client persona groupings guarantees that every kind of lead or prospect is considered. Once the team members have understood the client’s needs, they can use HubSpot CRM to formulate strategies to convert a prospect or an MQL to becoming a customer.
You can organize buyer persona interviews (with present clients and lost opportunities) so that your team can understand how the ‘little things’ make huge differences.
All your documentation, especially the client copy, should have uniform formatting to ensure your goodwill with your customer doesn’t come at stake while the shift occurs from the Marketing team to the Sales team. Maintain a uniform language style that is common between both departments.
Create a branding of your company along with a guide and detailed notes to ensure all the departments are on the same page and there is no confusion in communication. Provide exhaustive details on the tone, language, images, and a brief presentation for what you offer that captures the essence of your company.
This serves as a guideline to maintain quality and uniformity when a prospective lead is in communication with various members of your team.
To maintain uniformity, you must ensure that both the Sales and Marketing teams are following a single CRM, like HubSpot.
Track all communications with your leads in detail, as well as data regarding their interest in your company. If you use HubSpot CRM, you will save time by preventing repeat contact or approaching a cold lead with a specific message, checking unnecessary emails, securely saving contacts, and classifying which ‘lead’ is currently in.
Both the Sales and Marketing teams should agree on a common goal and distinguish lead stages to ensure a smooth transition from an MQL to a paying customer. Discuss and assign a title for each step of the buyer’s progress.
When visitors download an ebook or subscribe to your e-newsletter, which phase engages them, and what kinds of follow-up messages are triggered by their actions on your website?
This is where buyer persona interviews will play an important role. Try to understand how your customers discovered your organization and all the third-party verification steps they had to go through before trusting you with your content and becoming a regular customer.
Defining each lead stage is as essential as having a lead scoring system. Study your visitors' actions to determine which lead is most likely to become a lead.
Keep in close touch with your Marketing and Sales teams. This is critical to ensuring congruence with priorities and tracking KPIs.
For instance, a prospective customer in a specific lead stage can feel like ‘this is the one!’ by the Marketing team but end up never being a paying customer.
Maintaining open and clear communication between the two departments will ensure they are on the same page.
These are behavioral patterns that interested buyers show when they are thinking of taking the next step along the buyer’s journey. Aim to prioritize those sales activities that have the potential of an MQL becoming a customer.
Use HubSpot CRM to make it easier for you to track which actions are yielding results and which aren’t. Figuring out this will help you strategize accordingly.
Last but not least, having certain email templates ready in hand and certain automated nurturing emails that add that personal touch will acknowledge your leads’ efforts in purchasing your service and maintain a healthy relationship.
The CRM customization tool in HubSpot CRM can help you design templates according to your buyer’s activity, entice them to engage further and build a strong relationship.
Sales enablement will only show results if…
To have a successful sales enablement program, you should ensure that your Sales and Marketing teams are on the same page.
To maintain a communication strategy between the two teams, you should ideally undertake an audit of the existing content. Having an unbiased third party do the job is usually a good idea.
The cost you incur in terms of lost leads is actually far greater than the cost you have to bear to get your teams aligned, so it's probably a good idea to begin the process as quickly as you can and ensure seamless sales enablement in the not-too-distant future.