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7 Sales Enablement Activities That Can Make a Difference for Industrials
If your sales enablement activities are not helping you hit your KPIs and goals, it may be time to refresh your sales process. Sales success begins with a strong foundation of planning and nurturing to properly equip your teams with the targeted industry knowledge, content, and technology to drive prospects from awareness to action.
But nurturing a sales lead into a new customer isn’t easy for manufacturers and industrials, because the industrial sales process is never linear. Your first prospect is often not the actual buyer. You’re likely nurturing an entire team of purchasing and executive-level decision-makers and influencers.
Below are a few activities that can help you better target your sales enablement efforts to reach the right audience, better align your efforts and resources, and help your sales teams get closer to their goals for business growth.
We’re stating the obvious here, but sales enablement should always start with a plan. Creating new sales brochures, pitch decks, and other sales collateral will waste your resources if you don’t have a plan for how to use them. What are you trying to accomplish? What is your roadmap to reach your sales goals?
B2B marketing sales enablement is a strategic initiative that requires organizational commitment. For it to succeed, there has to be a vision, a plan, a way to “sell” the idea internally at your company, and a mechanism for tracking progress toward your goals. Your first activities should include:
Who are the target customers you want to reach? If you’re aligning your sales efforts with your marketing team, you may have already created your ideal customer personas (fictional representations of your ideal customers based on actual data).
The personas in your target industries represent the decision-makers who ultimately decide whether or not to partner with your company. This can be challenging as there often are many influencers in the complicated, elongated industrial buying journey.
Your influencers may include engineers who are often the first point of contact as they research your company’s products and services, and they may be key influencers in the buying decision. Influencers often include finance or purchasing managers and asset managers or facility managers. Of course, your decision-makers will include higher-level management, such as the owner of a small facility or a C-suite-level executive at a large industrial operation.
Of all the sales enablement activities we’ve discussed so far, aligning your marketing and sales efforts is one of the most critical activities for reaching your sales goals.
Think of your marketing department as your partner or key stakeholder in your sales enablement projects. Success depends on sales and marketing sharing the same overarching goals, with a common understanding of the buyer journey so that they can coordinate meaningful interventions.
Both teams need to align on critical activities, such as:
As we noted above, your marketing team’s efforts should support your sales efforts and vice versa. One of the biggest hurdles for both marketing and sales is differentiating your company’s products and services from your competitors.
Why should your customers choose your brand over the competition? Making this case is your value proposition. How will your company’s products and services benefit the persona in their position and how will your value proposition benefit their company overall? Marketing should go to sales, customer service, and other teams who interact directly with your customers to develop your personas and value propositions.
Every value proposition will have different aspects that appeal to each persona. But all value propositions should have this in common:
Creating content is one of your biggest marketing and sales enablement activities for driving industrial customer prospects deeper into your funnel. As more of the research and buying journey moves online, content — and how that content is delivered — takes on a growing importance.
To ensure you don’t lose a quality lead in your complex sales funnel, your content model should account for:
Ultimately, B2B marketing sales enablement is about discipline and processes. The ability to know the value of leads by varying sources, and how they move through the funnel at different speeds, allows you to more effectively experiment with your tactics. You rely on data for insights into your production operation; your sales operation should be no different.
Technology is critical to executing sales enablement at scale so that your sales team can focus on what they do best. The key is to integrate technology systems early on to ensure proper organization, attribution, and access to customer data that will empower your industrial sales and marketing teams to be more effective.
The ability to source, score, and track leads through the marketing and sales funnel is crucial. If you are not leveraging marketing and sales technology collaboratively, you are starting at a disadvantage. And scoring and tracking leads are growing in importance as the industry relies more on digital leads as personal sales networks diminish for a wide variety of reasons.
All these factors should be considered as you evaluate your marketing tech and sales stacks, such as your CRM, marketing automation system, and sales content personalization technologies for nurturing leads into sales conversions.
The cliche about how “everyone in our company is in sales” is not accurate. But in many ways just about everyone in your industrial company can help with sales enablement.
It takes a team, from marketing to sales to customer service to IT, to work together to make sure you are creating exceptional customer experiences at every stage of their buying and customer journey. This starts with training.
Your sales reps need to understand what sales enablement means for them to buy in, which means it’s up to you to lay the foundation for understanding why a sales enablement strategy is critical to your organization. This requires communicating with them about the process, defining individual expectations, and orchestrating proper training so that they can adopt the system and work it to their advantage.
Engage sales reps early and often in the development process. Train your existing sales reps and incorporate sales training into your customer onboarding process. Plan ongoing training to help nurture new sales and create new organic growth opportunities.
If your sales and marketing teams and systems are not aligned, your company is likely losing quality leads or missing opportunities to convert leads into sales. Visit our website to learn more.
At INDUSTRIAL, we have 20 years of experience developing manufacturing digital marketing services that boost outcomes for both marketing and sales, with A-to-Z sales enablement support. Let us help you re-energize your sales enablement processes.
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