Sales Enablement is Key in Building Confidence Among Salespeople
CMOs and CSOs are giving a lot of importance to sales enablement practices. Content, marketing automation and customer data management have become the pillars of any modern-day sales enablement campaign. Marketing teams are spending a lot of their effort in fine-tuning their content and analytics to achieve a more effective and sales-friendly revenue generation model. Sales leaders are working very closely with their peers in Marketing, constantly passing feedback on how their content and buyer’s outreach campaigns influence the sales journey in the digital era. If left ignored, misalignment of sales and marketing reduces revenue according to a new report published by Highspot. Salestech plays a very important role in making your martech stack more potent and effective in revenue generation. The new research from Highspot finds majority in sales and marketing roles in Europe believe misalignment between their functions has a negative impact on revenue. Over half say they don’t understand which assets are driving results with potential prospects. Two thirds in the UK are concerned about the impact the cost of living crisis will have on their ability to hit KPIs. Highspot spearheaded a research into sales enablement practices and identified the most relevant trends and issues. These issues impact the alignment between sales and marketing teams, by looking at key confidence indicators and barriers to success.
Why should Teams Seek a Better Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Collaboration with marketing teams is the biggest morale booster for sales people. Sellers feel more confident when they have support from the marketers. This collaboration helps the sellers to meet their targets even during tough conditions of economic recession, inflation and talent attrition. In fact, 39% of the respondents told Highspot that economic turbulence is a top concern for them when it comes to meeting sales targets.
According to Gartner, sales enablement is the secret weapon to achieve alignment between sales and marketing.
Lack of Alignment Arises Due to Poor Planning and Poor Visibility in each other’s Stacks
In the lat few years, marketing technologies and sales technologies have grown independent of each other. But, with the rise of AI and automation, martech innovators are developing new capabilities that give both teams greater visibility into each other’s outcomes. In fact, this is the biggest influence on CMOs approach toward building a sales enablement-driven revenue generation strategy.
71% of sales and marketing professionals agree that a lack of alignment between their teams has had a negative impact on revenue.”
Highspot’s European State of Sales & Marketing Alignment 2022 report
The report, which surveyed those in sales and marketing roles in the UK, France and Germany, finds alignment, communication and collaboration between sales and marketing teams are crucial to sales success and bottom line ROI. In fact, according to the research, the vast majority (71%) of sales and marketing professionals in Europe agree that a lack of alignment between their two functions has a negative impact on revenue for their business.
Only 36% of sales and marketing respondents across all markets believe they have full visibility and ability to prove the impact their function is having on company revenue. A further 30% of salespeople alone also state that lacking visibility over which behaviors and assets are contributing to closed deals is a barrier to their success. In the UK alone, 43% of sales and marketing respondents believe too many overlapping and different systems between the two functions is a major issue in their success and collaboration.
Confidence-building Key to Sales Enablement Success
Marketing and sales teams are equally concerned about the potency of content and sales materials provided to them. 41% of the sellers lack confidence in their available sales materials which they present to a prospect. In addition, 33% think they would fail to gather enough information to share with the prospects, thereby prolonging the sales cycle. The report shows this lack of clarity around results and revenue is having a negative impact on confidence.
With just over half (53%) of sales respondents saying they feel ‘somewhat confident’ in hitting their targets over the next 12 months, and only 28% ‘very confident’ in doing the same, it’s clear sellers need more support and better tools to be successful in their roles. Of those who are confident in hitting their targets, 46% say good collaboration and alignment with the marketing team is the reason behind their confidence, further supporting the importance of alignment for success.
Sales leaders are focusing on engagement and training to boost salespeople’s morale and confidence. These efforts erase the barriers in sales that often result in misaligned communication between the two most important revenue generation functions of the organization.
Of course, it’s not just internal issues that affect the ability to hit targets. Macro economic events were identified to have an impact on sales and marketing confidence as well. Across all markets, well over half (58%) of sales and marketing professionals identify the cost of living crisis as one of their top concerns when it comes to hitting their targets in the next 12 months.
In the UK, this concern rises to 67%, with a national recession (38%) and Brexit (31%) also identified as problematic issues for sales success over the next 12 months.
Andy Champion, VP & GM for EMEA at Highspot says: “The next 12 months will be challenging for businesses across Europe. Sales and marketing teams have an opportunity to drive real change, but in order to succeed, you need to understand the barriers to seller success. From revenue visibility to training and onboarding, our latest research identifies key pain points that you can address with sales enablement to empower your people, strengthen alignment and drive efficient business growth. Economic turbulence is on the horizon – now is the time to equip your teams with the tools they need to weather the coming storm.”
Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, training and coaching they need to engage buyers. Alongside this it provides valuable insights to the marketing teams and bridges the gap to foster better collaboration between the two functions.
72% of those surveyed in sales and marketing roles agree that implementing sales enablement is something their company should consider in the near future.
Conclusion:
Sales enablement can solve all major problems that arise due to the misalignment between sales and marketing activities. In fact, intelligence-driven sales enablement can remove frictions in the way different tools and techniques work in the martech and salestech realms. CMOs and CSOs should work in sync to adapt enablement-centric processes to ensure better buyer’s experiences and higher retention rates which directly result in enhanced revenue generation.
So, what does your sales tech investments for sales enablement look like? Are you planning to amp up your investments in sales SaaS products in 2023?
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