Two years ago, the term “sales enablement” wasn’t even part of marketing conversations. Despite the pledge to use inbound marketing to align with sales, the conversation, and thus the marketing support, ended with the passing off of the lead. Because HubSpot knew the primary goal is to close the loop between our website, marketing strategy, and sales processes, they realized they were lacking providing sales with the tools they needed to get the most out of the information produced. So as HubSpot continued to build out new capabilities, they added the sales enablement toolset to help fill this void. And this has had a profound impact on a company’s ability to “close the loop.”
What It Means
Sales enablement is a term used that describes the primary goal of all marketing efforts. No matter the company or industry, all marketing shares one purpose, to increase sales. So if you are taking the time to utilize your website, content, and marketing efforts to help attract, convert, and nurture leads, you are doing all that to give your company the best possible chances to increase sales. Having your website in HubSpot’s COS and implementing a strategic inbound marketing campaign is great, but unless your sales department is bought in to the value of the leads you are producing, all that work could be for nothing. Sales enablement is about providing your sales people with the greatest capabilities, amount of context, and insight possible for each lead.
Your Basic Needs
In addition to the procedural buy-in required from your marketing and sales teams, you are going to need to provide your team with the right toolsets. You already know that HubSpot is an amazingly powerful toolset for your marketing team, but I'm guessing you don’t know how it can be leveraged from a sales support capacity. Firstly, the basic sales tool is the CRM. Simply put, there is no reason that different databases should be tracking the activity of your marketing communications with a lead than the sales touches of that lead. The information should be stored in the same place attached to the contact. That way the sales team can see all the history around the companies’ interactions with each lead. Context is everything in the sales game, so you might as well arm your team with everything you have to offer. Using the free CRM is a great way to make sure everyone is on the same page. And even if you use a different CRM for your sales team, just make sure the databases are integrated and communicating effectively, so everyone is working with the same information.
Take It To The Next Level
The Sales Pro tool offer an even greater visibility into lead interaction and offer greater capabilities like building email templates, loading and tracking documents, and calling and recording sales calls straight from the CRM. You can also build sequences that automate touch campaigns with personalized content and tasks based on either time or designated actions. You can also use the Prospects tool to easily view companies whose domains have been visiting your website. So even though a company visited your content but didn’t actually convert, you will be able to record and track their movement to give your sales team a jump on targeting interested parties.
Management, Reporting, and Attribution
The benefits of placing a focus on enabling your sales team with everything they need to be effective go beyond those simply to the individual. Every sales manager loves being able to efficiently see what deals have closed, what deals are in progress and at what stages, and how full is the funnel? With real time and customizable reporting around sales activity and deal tracking, the days of simply wondering whether your employee is hunting or how it’s going are over. Now your Vice President of Sales can easily pull only the most important information.
Simply put, sales enablement is about giving your teams what they need to be aligned and thus effective. So part of the challenge is to ensure that proper communication around deal tracking and lead feedback is occurring. With the correct procedures in place, your management should be able to easily track a new customer’s history from initial web conversion to customer close. They should always be able to clearly see where customers are coming from, so they can increase the focus on successful efforts.
Every person that tells me they use HubSpot to implement a digital marketing campaign and asks me what platform they should build their website in, I tell them to build it in HubSpot because it will help them better align their content and efforts with their strategy. I feel the exact same way about people asking about sales enablement. When possible, keep everything under one roof. Even if your primary CRM is elsewhere, just make sure the databases are communicating effectively because the information provided is simply too important to ignore. Luckilly for you, the team at HubSpot has been working very hard for the past couple of years to establish all kinds of integrations. To learn more about this methodology, feel free to reach out to us, or you can review our page on the topic.
