Gone are the days when marketing simply fulfilled sales support requests or only engaged potential buyers briefly in early stages before passing the baton to sales.
Today, industrial buyers live online, so your company’s success depends on a seamless marketing and sales journey that creates value at every stage in the industrial buying process.
As an agency partner to industrial companies who don’t always see the importance of a strategic sales and marketing alignment, we often answer questions about the role of sales enablement in a modern industrial company.
To help you take that critical next step to making industrial sales enablement a foundation of your growth strategy, let’s clear the air on some of these common questions.
Industrial sales enablement is a systematic approach to aligning sales and marketing around the customer. This is critical to ensuring potential buyers can easily access the information they need to make an informed decision on whether your company is the right fit. It’s also critical to ensuring your sales team has the resources they need to make the most out of the limited opportunities they have to engage buyers before they decide.
This does not mean every marketer has to become a sales person, or that every sales enablement strategy is just another marketing tactic under a different name. It’s all about creating a collaborative program where sales and marketing join forces to create a consistent communication experience for the customer — both existing and future.
According to Gartner research, B2B buyers spend less than 20% of their time meeting with potential suppliers (including your competitors).
Sales enablement isn’t just important to manufacturing; it’s a necessity in today’s digitally-driven buying landscape.
Developing your sales enablement strategy is key to:
Before diving in, it’s critical to remember that a successful industrial sales enablement program requires a systematic approach that engages every team in a concerted, collaborative effort. This will facilitate a healthy departmental alignment that will strengthen the buying experience for the customer.
While industrial sales enablement is a wide-ranging effort that should be tailored to your company’s unique processes, there are three main initiatives that an effective sales enablement program typically contains:
Before you can build or execute your industrial sales enablement strategy, there is critical groundwork to be done to lay out the vision and get the buy-in you need across the organization.
Setting the stage with sales enablement planning may include:
The early bird gets the worm. Integrating tech systems as you develop your sales enablement program will provide sales and marketing with more timely access to data that they can leverage to drive leads and sales.
Consider adding these key technologies to your sales enablement arsenal:
If your content doesn’t reach every point of the buying journey, you’ve lost a customer before you’ve had a chance to deliver your message.
To get the most bang for your content buck, consider:
Traditional industrial sales operations often function in “silos,” which means your sales team is probably missing opportunities to create value at key steps in the buyer journey. Breaking down these communication barriers requires marketing and sales to interact, empathize, and learn from each other to strengthen the buying experience.
Not sure how to start your sales enablement journey? We’ve helped hundreds of industrial sales and marketing teams transition to a modern approach and meet the sales challenges of today and tomorrow.
We can help you equip your sales team with the tools and expertise they need to reach more qualified leads and close more deals.
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