What Does Sales Enablement Have to Do With Demand Generation?

Marketing and sales alignment is key to the success of your tech startup. 

According to IDC reports, B2B companies that cannot align sales and marketing teams around the right technologies and processes have cost them up to 10% or more yearly revenue. In the case of a billion-dollar company, this could mean losing up to $100 million yearly. 

Luckily, sales enablement initiatives driven by a comprehensive demand generation strategy can help unify marketing and sales and, as a result, increase revenue for your company.

If you still haven’t heard of the term “Sales Enablement,” you probably haven’t paid much attention to sales trends and strategies. This article will explain sales enablement and how to implement it in your company.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the needed resources to close more deals. These resources can include knowledge, tools, content, and information to sell your products or services efficiently. Sales enablement helps companies keep up with evolving buyer expectations. 

By assisting the alignment between marketing and sales teams, companies can deliver content that inspires meaningful conversations with customers, especially as they reach the negotiation period of the sales funnel. 

Organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to the 42.5 win rate for those without. 

However, you must remember that sales enablement isn’t a beginner issue. As a startup, sales enablement shouldn't be your priority if your significant barriers to growth are amateur sales efforts, poor lead generation, lack of quality content, or poor messaging.

Who Owns Sales Enablement?

Both marketing and sales teams own sales enablement.

Marketing provides sales with the needed resources to sell effectively. These resources often include product guides, blogs, and videos, that ease the communication between sales representatives and customers. The materials help leads decide whether or not they should convert. 

The relations go both ways; thus, sales teams can request marketing teams to provide them with materials they can share with leads to guide them through their buyer’s journey. 

4 Sales Enablement Best Practices

Below, we will go over four sales enablement best practices that will help your efforts. 

1. Create High-Quality Content

The point of sales enablement content is to help your sales team educate prospects and build credibility. Remember that various buyer personas have specific needs and that each stage of the sales cycle requires different types of content. 

2. Focus on Buyer Experience

Since sales enablement is about empowering your sales team to engage buyers, the buying experience should be the center of your efforts. To improve the buyer experience, ensure your sales reps understand the buyer and their journey. 

3. Train Your Sales Team

Successful companies provide ongoing training across their tools, content, and workflows so that sales representatives know exactly what will be most effective throughout the sales cycle. There will always be new information and technology for your sales reps to absorb and use, so the training needs to be continuous. 

4. Streamline With Technology

The right technology stack can fuel your efforts by helping in many sales cycle stages like goal-setting, tracking revenue, training, forecasting, etc. According to the CSO Insights survey, 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to improper tools. 

Final Thoughts

Revenue keeps any business afloat, and sales are crucial to revenue generation. In this context, the growth of your entire company depends on whether your sales team has the support they need. 

The key to sales enablement is alignment on company goals, access to the right tools and resources to support sales, and clear communication between marketing and sales. 

Every company has a different approach to sales enablement, so make sure you experiment and see what works for you. 

Want to learn more about demand generation? Go to our blog and find some insightful tips to help your business grow!