Sales Enablement: A Key Goal of B2B Marketers

As B2B marketers, many of us have mainly focused on lead flow to sales as our key driver. Lead flow is definitely an important and vital part of good B2B marketing and sales alignment, but it is not the only area that should be focused on. Marketing can also bring insights, process, and relationship-building tools to the sales teams they serve, and by doing so, give their sales teams a better ability to understand, manage, and close deals with their prospects.


In a new eBook - "Beyond Lead Flow - Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation" - 5 main areas that marketing can enable sales are discussed.


The 5 main areas where marketing can enable sales are:

1. Understanding Individual Prospects - their areas of interest, level of engagement, and hot buttons



2. Understanding Accounts - who the key players, who are your internal champions, and who still needs to be engaged in order to move a deal forward



3. Understanding Territories - which accounts are actively engaged in buying processes with your company within each salesperson's territory



4. Building Relationships - providing your sales team with a strong relationship with prospects through personalized marketing to their prospects



5. Maintaining Top-of-Mind Presence - assisting sales with any sales calling campaigns by actively maintaining top-of-mind presence of your brand with prospects

The Sales Enablement eBook is free, with no registration required. However, if you enjoy the content, my only ask is that you share it with others:

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Holiday Time: Top 10 Wish List for Sales

An interesting chat between Rob Leavitt (http://tinyurl.com/66ox38) and Drew Neisser (http://tinyurl.com/6lsmdl) on Marketing as a Service got me thinking about Marketing's other customer - Sales. What can we as marketers do for them.

Okay, sales complains about marketing. But, it's the holiday season, so in that spirit, let's look at the Top 10 gift ideas for marketing to give to sales. Most of these are quick to implement and show real value to sales. Who knows, maybe next year, sales will even have you on their holiday gift list. (okay, I don't guarantee that, but it's a nice thought...)

1. Real-time alerts when their own prospects visit your website so they see interest as it happens


2. A weekly (daily?) list of their hot leads who have shown activity that week to help them make sure they are talking to anyone showing interest


3. All leads passed to sales scored explicitly (who they are) and implicitly (how interested they are), to give them insight into who needs a call


4. Lead score displayed in their CRM system for all leads


5. Account rollup showing the hottest accounts based on recent activity, so they can plan their day at a glance and know who needs a follow-up


6. One-click access to a marketing history for each contact, so they can see what each person has received, read, reacted to


7. Latest marketing collateral available to them in Outlook so they can download, modify, and send, saving them effort in creating content


8. Trackable emails sendable from Outlook so they can see when their own prospects click on emails sent to them directly


9. Marketing communications being automatically sent "from" each salesperson rather than from a corporate address to help develop their relationships


10. A nurture program available to them to add their "not ready to buy" leads to, with one click, so they can be kept warm until they are ready to buy

Am I biased, can all these things be done with Eloqua? Yes. But, regardless of your Demand Generation platform, they're great ideas to get sales more engaged and enthusiastic about your marketing efforts.

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