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10 Surprising Strategies to Increase Your Sales

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“Nothing happens until a sale is made.”

  – Thomas J. Watson

There is one fundamental truth in business growth, and it applies irrespective of the company or industry: In order to grow the organization you ultimately have to increase sales.

Not every organization is ready for growth, but those that are quickly discover there are many variables. It is often difficult to know which strategies and tactics to consider both individually and collectively.

In this article, I will share ten of my favorite strategies to accelerate your sales and drive growth. Some of these may be surprising, but they have proven to be successful in organizations I have been involved with, and I am confident they can work for you too.

But first, an important reminder…

Four Sales Growth Levers

Every go-to-market tactic (and there are many) has a common objective; namely to directly, or indirectly, improve sales results.

There are ultimately only four sales growth levers, which enable any sales tactic to work. Despite the vast number of options and the many complexities of executing growth tactics, it is possible to map each one of them back to one of the following four principles:

  1. Increase the number of clients. Identifying and turning more prospects into new paying clients.
  2. Increase the average transaction. Getting each prospect or client to spend more at each purchase.
  3. Increase the frequency that the average client buys from you. Getting each client to buy from you more often.
  4. Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of each step in the marketing and sales process. Driving greater “funnel velocity” and conversion throughout the buyer’s journey.

In the sections that follow, I will share ten proven strategies that leverage one or more of these core principles to accelerate your sales.

1 – Appoint a (Competent) Growth Leader

I often talk to clients about getting the right team on the bus. The most important one is the bus driver!

In order to execute a strategic growth plan successfully, you will need a proven growth leader. This individual needs to “own” the development of growth strategy, and the subsequent execution of the plan.

A weak, or non-existent, growth leader will doom the growth plan from the start.

It might be the head of growth, or the VP of sales, or the Chief Marketing Officer. The title is ultimately less important than having a leader responsible for driving the growth agenda for the organization.

2 – Fire Your Worst Sales Rep (Immediately)

Sales teams tend to follow a bell curve of performance. A few high performers, the majority in the acceptable but not stellar middle, and then the bottom of the pile. There is almost always someone bringing up the rear.

Growth leaders should quickly get rid of those underperformers who are incompetent in their role or just coasting along. They are a drag on the entire organization.

Underperformers come with a huge cost. They always consume a disproportionate amount of management time. They usually cause resentment and friction in the team. If allowed to fester long enough, they become a cancer that can literally destroy a sales organization from the inside out.

Competent growth leaders clean house quickly and get the right team on the bus that they are driving.

A new growth leader should make a top-to-bottom review of the sales team a top priority. Provided they truly are much worse than the rest of the team, fire your worst sales rep as soon as possible.

Not only does this send a strong message to the rest of the team about establishing a performance culture, it also makes logical sense. Your organization is probably investing significant marketing resources generating leads. Don’t waste valuable leads on underperforming sales reps. Give them to those who have proven they can close deals.

Invest your newfound extra management time in making your best sales reps even better.

3 – Know Your Target (Deeply)

One of the most significant, and often overlooked, leverage points when developing go-to-market strategy is to define your sales target.

Many startups struggle with this, and it is very common for more established organizations too.

What do I mean by “know your target”?

The logic behind this recommendation is straightforward – every individual (for a B2C company) or every organization (for a B2B company) cannot be your target. You need focus in order to be successful. Without focus, your messaging will flounder in the marketplace, and your team will waste a lot of precious time and energy chasing bad deals.

If you are very clear on your target then you the luxury of just focusing your marketing and sales teams on those targets.

Based on analysis of existing customers, and researching the market, most organizations are able to create a definition of their best target with a little bit of effort.

In marketing circles, this is called an Ideal Client Profile (ICP). Knowing your ICP provides a great target for lead generation, it also helps to refine the value proposition and messaging into tailored language that will appeal specifically to that ICP.

4 – Understand (and Respect) the Buyer’s Journey

The vast majority of sales organizations get this topic completely wrong.

Most sales teams force prospects into their pre-defined sales process and pipeline stages. Why do they do this? Sometimes it is based on implementing a trendy sales methodology, or a model the head of sales brought with them from their prior company. More often than not, it is simply because it is the way they have always done things and nobody has bothered to ask one simple question…

“How do buyers want to buy?”

By asking this simple, yet profound question, a sales organization can begin to map their buyer’s journey. Once you know your buyer’s journey, you can then align this to your sales process instead of force fitting your sales process onto the buyer.

If you put your “buyer cap” on this makes sense, right?

Once you understand the buying process of your prospects, you can then help them move along that path. Providing potential buyers with the right amount of content and sales interactions, at the right time, will accelerate your sales.

This will also make it easier to buy from your organization. A great technique for growth leaders is to put yourself in the buyer’s seat. Attach yourself to the buyer’s journey from lead stage all the way to a closed-won client. At every step try to remove friction, strive to make it easier to buy from you. Some common areas of opportunity: your collateral, your website, your pricing, your contracting process, implementation and startup, etc.

5 – (Make Sure) Marketing Enables Sales

Unfortunately, it is all too common to discover a dysfunctional relationship between marketing and sales within organizations who desire growth.

This broken dynamic is often blamed on poor delivery, but I think the issue goes deeper. It is the direct result of poor alignment and bad communication between the two groups.

In any effective go-to-market organization, marketing enables sales.

How does a growth leader make sure this happens? By creating metrics and accountability that both marketing and sales agree upon.

If the sales team thinks all the leads they get from marketing are crap (a very common complaint) then have them create a definition of a lead which they will gladly accept. This becomes the new standard.

If the marketing team thinks sales does not invest enough time in the good leads they receive (also a common criticism) then have them define the minimum threshold of activity for accepted leads, and build a process to nurture those leads that are not ready or those that are rejected.

Removing all the friction between marketing and sales can have a dramatic impact on sales performance.

A nice side benefit of this increased collaboration is better market feedback for the marketing team to use in developing content and refining messaging.

6 – Increase Your Prices (for New Customers)

Pricing is one of the most complicated, and often neglected, components of a growth strategy. Getting it right involves as much art as it does science.

Here is a radical suggestion: Increase your prices by 10-20% for new customers starting today.

Just like that. Boom!

You can always discount back down to yesterday’s list price, but at the very least, you have set the negotiation bar higher.

Raising prices on existing customers introduces significantly more risk, and should only be considered after careful deliberation. Smart organizations build pre-negotiated increases into their contracts, or at the very least have a well-rehearsed narrative that justifies the increase (greater costs, significantly more value, etc.)

Raising your prices is much easier if your product/service is good, and differentiated, and delivers real value to your customers…

7 – If You Don’t Know (Ask Your Customers)

When they attempt to charge more, some growth leaders discover their organization does not have much pricing power. They wake up to the realization that their product(s)/service(s) are in a commodity position with many alternative options for buyers.

These leaders need to revisit their differentiation and value proposition in order to make it more distinctive and valuable.

If you don’t know what else your customer wants, or even why they buy from you, get out of the building and ask them. You will be surprised at how honest customers will be if you ask them questions like this.

When you get back to the office, share these insights with your team and encourage them to bake them into what they do. This will help to improve your messaging, your sales, and ultimately your ability to charge more.

8 – Fire Your Worst Customer (Really)

When I am talking to CEO’s and growth leaders this next recommendation is always more controversial than firing your worst sales rep. Here it is:

Fire your worst customer.

I readily admit it is counter-intuitive to fire a paying customer in order to increase sales, but hear me out.

This highly symbolic move can have a long-lasting impact on your organization. Here’s why…

When you are out talking to customers, also pay attention to your support team and your financials. It really helps if you have profitability data at a customer level. What you will likely discover is your worst customer(s) come with a significantly higher service cost…often negating their contribution to the bottom line.

These customers cause stress, employee turnover, extra work-around processes, and many other bad support dynamics. Getting them off your books will send a message to your internal team that they are valued.

It will also send a message to your sales team…

I’m not saying this is true for your organization, but I have definitely seen sales reps (who are keen to make their numbers) chase after deals with customers they know are going to be a problem down the road. Firing a bad customer will reinforce to your sales team that there is a model for what a good and profitable customer should look like.

There is nothing more liberating (and symbolic to the team) than to cull a bad customer from the roster.

9 – Institute a Monthly Quota (Not Annual or Quarterly)

There is nothing like well thought out metrics to drive desired behavior in sales teams.

The metric most often discussed with sales teams is their sales quota. Unfortunately, this usually comes out of an annual budgeting process and is, by default, often expressed as an annual target number.

This is a mistake. Why? It is too far out in the distance to keep the attention of most sales reps. Smart growth leaders implement monthly sales quotas, not quarterly or annual ones.

Why is this important? Annual quotas are too far removed; they do not shine enough heat and light on immediate sales activity. Quarterly quotas take most of the pressure off sales reps for the first two months of the quarter.

I have heard pushback on this topic from sales teams who claim they have a longer sales cycle and/or high-ticket products/services, and therefore this does not work for them. The complaint is they have a low volume of transactions that cannot be measured monthly. That is fine. If this is the case for your organization, then consider measuring interim activity metrics that you have proven will ultimately result in sales quota achievement.

10 – Invest in Client Success (No Matter What Your Business)

This suggestion applies to any business, and is quite possibly the best idea of them all.

Here’s the logic: Depending on whose research you believe, and the industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Furthermore, the consulting firm Bain found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

If you help your customers to optimize and better use what they have purchased from you, then they will return the favor in the form of loyalty. The payback in terms of renewals, referrals, upsells, and lifetime value can be huge.

The best part is you don’t need to invest more in marketing and sales, you just need to keep more of the business you have already sold.

Sales Is the Fuel for Your Growth

Growth leaders ultimately must increase sales in order to achieve their organizational growth objectives. What makes growth strategy interesting and exciting is that every organization and market is different, and the levers to increase sales are different for each unique situation.

The proven strategies and tactics in this article have worked for me, and the organizations I have been involved with during my career as a growth strategist. My expectation is that some, if not all, of them can also work in your organization.

As always, please share your feedback, and feel free to give me a call if I can help.

-Onward

About the author: Kimball Norup is the founder of 1CMO Consulting, a business strategy and growth advisory firm based in Sonoma, California. To read prior articles, or sign up to receive future ones by email, click here.

There is No Excuse for Not Knowing Your Target

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“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

– Lewis Carroll

Two of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make when they are developing a strategic growth strategy involve the targeting of sales prospects.

The first mistake, and by far the most common, is simply not knowing who their target is.

The second, commonly found in early stage go-to-market organizations, is to assume everybody is a prospect.

The bad news: Many startups struggle with this, and it is sadly all too common for more established organizations as well.

The good news: It is not too difficult to develop a working definition for your organization.

Before diving into this topic, let’s start with a simple definition of “target market.”

Defining “Target Market”

Defining the target market for the products and/or services you are selling is a fundamental part of developing a strategic growth plan.

A quick online search will yield many definitions, here’s a pretty good one:

A target market is a group of customers within a business’s serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.

Know Your Target

Developing an effective definition of your target market is one of the most significant, and often overlooked, leverage points in a go-to-market strategy.

What do I mean by “know your target”?

The logic behind this recommendation is straightforward – You need focus in order to be successful. Without focus, you will flounder in the marketplace and waste a lot of precious time and energy chasing bad deals.

Defining your target provides clarity for your team.

If you are very clear on your target then you also gain the luxury of focusing your limited marketing and sales resources solely on those targets. It is often just as powerful to know who is not a target, that way you can just ignore them.

Before getting in to details on “how” to develop a target market definition, let’s look at the other significant mistake many growth teams make.

“Everybody” is Not Your Market

It is very common in the startup world to hear excited company founders exclaim their market opportunity is almost infinite because “every company needs our solution.” (This is often supported by some lame back of the envelope math showing that they only need to convert 0.1% of the market in order to exceed their rosy sales projections!)

I have heard this many times from growth leaders and their sales teams.

Their enthusiasm and excitement is awesome.

As any venture capitalist or experienced investor will tell you, it is also very dangerous. Why?

Because, unless you have unlimited go-to-market resources, then every individual (for a B2C company) or every organization (for a B2B company) simply cannot be your target.

If everyone is your target, then your growth team will never gain the insights and experience they need to truly understand the prospect and deliver a meaningful value proposition.

You have to focus.

Ultimately, the life of your organization depends on it.

When times are great, many early stage organizations can get away with a loose or non-existent definition of their target market.

This kind of luck rarely lasts. It tends to get exposed by competition, exhausting the pool of early adopters, diminishing marketing ROI, or lack of sales skill.

Tips on Targeting

Most organizations find that they are able to create a working definition of their ideal target(s) with a small amount of effort. A great way to begin is with an analysis of your “best” existing customers, and using this as your starting place.

With a little more research, you can scan the broader marketplace to identify other logical segments that are also potential buyers for your products or services.

In marketing circles, this research is called segmentation, and the resulting definition is referred to as an Ideal Client Profile (ICP).

  • Knowing your market segmentation helps you prioritize opportunities and organize your go-to-market team and plans.
  • Knowing your ICP provides a great target for lead generation, it also helps you to refine the value proposition and messaging into tailored language that will appeal specifically to that ICP.

B2B sales organizations often choose to segment their market by readily available data points about their prospect organizations. This data can be publicly available, data you purchase, or data generated by your sales/marketing team. A few common examples:

  • Company size
  • Employee headcount
  • Annual revenue
  • Industry vertical
  • Geographic location or region

B2C companies may look at their potential buyer’s demographic data like age or sex, household income, home ownership, or geographic location.

Target or Die

For growth leaders and their go-to-market teams the imperative is clear: Know your target, or risk failure.

If you invest the time to segment your market and develop a clear profile of your ideal customer, then you will gain a huge advantage. Your marketing team will focus on generating more of the “right kind” of prospects, your sales team will close more deals, and the organization will grow.

This is win-win-win.

– Onward

About the author: Kimball Norup is the founder of 1CMO Consulting, a business strategy and growth advisory firm based in Sonoma, California. To read prior articles, or sign up to receive future ones by email, click here.

Why Your Biggest Competitor is “No Decision”

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“A business unit needs to decide what need it aims to satisfy in what group of people and with what value proposition that distinguishes the business from its competitors.” – Philip Kotler

The world of B2B sales is complex, difficult, and in our hyper-competitive global marketplace, it grows more challenging every day.

Every industry is undergoing transformation in some form, with many aggressive competitors chasing the same deals, and an overwhelming number of communications channels bombarding prospects with messages.

Each company has overloaded buyers, scarce resources, internal politics, and complex buying processes.

To make matters worse, the further up the enterprise food chain you go, the more challenging it becomes…resulting in longer and more complex sales cycles.

Bottom line: It is not easy to be a B2B buyer, or seller, in any market.

Unfortunately, because of this complexity many deals result in “no decision” – where the buyer ends up choosing to do nothing, rather than trust any seller or potential solution to satisfy their need.

It does not have to be this way.

While there is no single “silver bullet to growth“, there is a proven strategy smart sellers can use to increase their odds of converting B2B prospects to closed-won clients.

Even though this strategic approach is not difficult, the vast majority of B2B go-to-market organizations do not do it.

Why?

Because it requires them to think.

The Complexity of B2B Sales

Here are a few statistics I have heard over the last 12 months that illustrate how challenging and complex today’s B2B sales environment really is:

  • 90% of B2B web searchers have not selected a brand before starting their search. (Status Labs)
  • 57% of the average buyers journey is completed before there is ANY contact with a seller. (Gartner, CEB – Corporate Executive Board)
  • 74.6% of B2B sales cycles to new customers take at least 4 months to close, with almost half (46.4%) taking 7 months or more. 12-15 months is not unheard of for complex solutions. (Marketing Charts)
  • 10.2 people are now involved in the average enterprise buying decision. This is your “buying committee.” (CEB) – If you look at the deals at the end of your pipeline, how many members have you identified for each?
  • 40% of buyer journeys result in no decision. (CEB)

This is not a pretty picture if you are involved with B2B marketing or sales.

How do you navigate through this?

The answer is with better clarity and insight about your offering, and your buyers.

Clarity and Insight Lead to Better Messaging

There are three important insights you need to get started.

  1. First, you need absolute clarity on your offering – the products and/or services you sell. What are the benefits? The strengths/weaknesses of your solution versus alternatives? What results will your offering deliver? This is your value proposition.
  2. The next question to be answered is, what types of organization is ideally suited to be your next client? Will your solution work for any size company in any industry in any geography, or is it more targeted? Define your answer in the form of an Ideal Client Profile (often called ICP in biz dev circles!)
  3. Finally, get clarity on who your typical buyer is (or more often, the members of the buying group)? Begin to develop a “persona” profile for each, highlighting their typical demographics. You should also begin to think about how you could make the value proposition of your offering more relevant to each persona.

With these insights in hand, you can now begin to think about your messaging.

Consider the Buyers Point of View

Why is messaging so important? Because messaging is where we tailor the value proposition of our offering to something each individual buyer actually cares about, and is motivating enough for them to take action.

Until we do this, there is likely not going to be any sale.

A great way to begin thinking about this is to answer the following question: What is the buyer’s job to be done?

Ask this for each persona you have identified in your typical sales cycle. Then you can begin to think about their challenges. Their fears. Their concerns. What is preventing them from doing their job?

This will point you in the right direction.

Can you identify the specific pain, problem, or potential opportunity that your product or service will solve for them?

Sales happen when you can clearly demonstrate how your offering uniquely:

  • Removes or reduces pain
  • Fixes a problem
  • Creates new capability or opportunity

Once you understand the “job to be done” by your buyer and the client organization, then you can begin to shape your offering to win.

With this deep understanding of your buyer, you can position your product/service, and develop the appropriate messaging to communicate the unique benefits you deliver.

Without it, you are competing with every other loud voice in your market.

The Only Solution

Always remember that in every deal you are first competing against the opportunity cost of the buyer doing nothing at all.

Many organizations and decision makers arrive at a “no decision” outcome because the “pain of the same” appears easier, less expensive, less risky, or less disruptive than making a change.

You will lose to the status quo, the dreaded “no decision”, every single time if you do not clearly demonstrate the unique benefits of your products and/or services, and inspire them to take action.

As sellers, we have to show buyers that our solution will uniquely remove their pain, solve their problem, or deliver new value to the organization.

Unless you connect the dots between your offering’s value proposition and the buyer’s “job to be done,” and convince them that your solution is their only solution; you will likely not be successful.

Developing clarity on your value proposition, ideal client, and buyer’s “job to be done” are your secret strategy to developing effective messaging and greater B2B sales success.

-Onward

The Only 4 Ways to Increase Sales

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“When you stop growing you start dying.” – William S. Burroughs

Almost every business organization includes growth as a key component of their strategic plan.

This objective inevitably translates into “we need to sell more.”

It is very easy to overcomplicate this – do not feel bad, most organizations do!

However, it does not have to be that way if you remember the simple sales strategy framework in this article. As you will see, we can map every marketing and sales tactic back to one of four core strategies that increase sales.

Many Tactics to Consider

We know that marketing enables sales. Therefore, developing and executing a growth strategy should be a shared responsibility between the two functions. When you consider that growth strategy truly sits at the intersection of marketing and sales, it makes logical sense that both should own it.

If there is not a dedicated growth leader, then the responsibility typically falls to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), or Chief Sales Officer (CSO) depending on the size and structure of the organization.

Regardless of who it is, the objective of the growth strategist is to integrate the go-to-market functions of an organization, and develop/execute a coherent strategic plan to grow the business. There are a myriad of different marketing and sales tactics to consider, deployed in many different combinations and flavors.

Here are some examples of common growth tactics:

  • Increase inbound or outbound marketing
  • Rebranding
  • Sales team expansion
  • Sales training
  • M&A to buy market share
  • Upselling and cross-selling
  • Innovation of new products or services
  • New market entry
  • Pricing
  • Distribution
  • Channel partnerships
  • Etc.

This small sampling from the nearly infinite menu of marketing and sales tactics is a great illustration of why you need an experienced growth strategist on your team.

The 4 Core Strategies to Increase Sales

All go-to-market tactics have the objective to directly, or indirectly, increase sales. Despite the confusing array of options and the many complexities of executing these tactics, every one of them maps back to a few core strategies.

There are fundamentally only four ways to increase sales:

  1. Increase the number of clients. Identifying and turning more prospects into new paying clients.
  2. Increase the average transaction. Getting each client to spend more at each purchase.
  3. Increase the frequency that the average client buys from you. Getting each client to buy from you more often.
  4. Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of each step in the marketing and sales process. Driving greater “funnel velocity” and conversion throughout the buyers journey.

A Bias To Simplicity

An experienced go-to-market leader begins to build a strategic plan for growth by first evaluating these four strategies in the context of the organization and the marketplace. With the identification of a strategy, or combination of strategies, they will then begin layering in appropriate marketing and sales tactics to create the plan.

There is always a tendency towards complexity when strategic planning. I hope that this simple framework with the four ways to increase sales will provide some structure to your planning, and help you focus on the most appropriate tactics for your growth strategy.

-Onward

Marketing Enables Sales

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“In a great company everybody sells – not just the salespeople.” – Larry Ellison

Marketing enables sales.

In the world of growth strategy there is probably no more fundamental, yet frequently misunderstood, concept than the highly dependent relationship between marketing and sales.

In my work as a growth strategist, this concept is the starting point and a core intellectual foundation for building almost every go-to-market strategy and plan.

For business leaders who are responsible for growing the organization (if we are being honest, this should describe every leader!) this is a critically important concept.

Marketing and sales are vital functions of almost every organization, yet they often live in isolation. Even worse, in many companies they have an antagonistic if not completely dysfunctional relationship. Yet, marketing and sales need each other in order to be successful.

Basic Definitions, and the Challenge

For maximum effectiveness, marketing and sales have to be tightly connected, and working in an aligned and coordinated fashion. Unfortunately, for many organizations this is usually the exception, rather than the rule.

To set the stage for a solution, here are two basic definitions, which also help illustrate the root cause of the problem:

  • Marketing – According to the American Marketing Association marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. 
  • Sales – A sale is a transaction between two or more parties, typically a buyer and a seller, in which goods or services are exchanged for money or other assets.

Once you read these definitions it is easy to see they really are not that far apart. So why the divide?

We do not have to go too far back in history to find a clue. In the late 1940’s post-war growth economy, business strategists and educators began to describe marketing as owning the creation and promotion of a brand – focused on what is commonly called the 4 P’s (product, price, place, and promotion).

And sales? Well, sales was about making the sale to those prospects who responded to marketing’s outreach efforts. The wall began to form because marketing and sales were classically viewed as two completely separate functions, despite both being aligned around wanting to make sales happen.

You can thank technology for helping to bridge the gap. Over the years, as we have layered in more tech-enabled tools like email, websites, CRM, marketing automation, and social media we have begun to break down the wall that separated the marketing and sales functions.

We have removed much of the “friction” around commerce. Knowledge is free. Communication is cheap. The lines are blurred. The connection points between buyers and sellers exponentially multiplied. The pace accelerated.

Transactions can take place without face-to-face contact. At the touch of a button, we can blast messages to thousands or millions of prospects and in many cases they can buy directly without going to a store, or even talking to a human.

In today’s hyper-connected business world we can safely reach one conclusion: everyone is in marketing, and everyone is in sales.

This all makes perfect sense, except for one small problem – nobody told marketing or sales! In many organizations, they are still living in their separate silos.

A Solution to Bridge the Divide

Is there a proven solution to bridge the divide between marketing and sales?

Yes, there is. Many modern go-to-market organizations ensure alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales through a defined sales enablement strategy and approach.

  • Sales Enablement – The process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools to help sales people sell more effectively. The foundation of sales enablement is to provide sales people with what they need to successfully identify and engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

As its name implies, sales enablement is a way to make sure marketing enables sales. One simple way to think about sales enablement is helping buyers to buy, and sellers to sell. Sounds pretty smart and intuitive, doesn’t it?!

How does it work? It begins with enlightened company leaders who understand, and fundamentally believe, marketing enables sales.

Without this executive buy-in and support, sales enablement is doomed to fail, and marketing and sales will continue to live separately.

Next, the marketing and sales leaders of the organization must collaborate to build out their definition and required capability. This will look different for each unique organization since sales enablement consists of a diverse set of tactics and activities.

It often includes an expanded role for marketing to rate, score, and qualify leads. Moreover, in some organizations it can include an outbound lead generation function (sales development representatives) who work to identify and engage targeted prospects in order to develop them into marketing qualified leads (MQL).

It is very common to see sales enablement jointly owned by marketing and sales. In smaller organizations, it may be the same person overseeing both functions. In larger organizations it might roll up under a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Chief Revenue Officer.

The sales enablement stakeholders then build out a strategy. They will need to define the approach to provide sales with the resources they need to sell. This strategy is always tailored to each specific sales team’s needs so they can best target their audience and close more deals. It should also include a thorough analysis of the resources, tools, content, and information to provide sales with to ensure it is helping them convert more leads into customers.

Sales Enablement ROI

Does sales enablement work?

My experience is that it does, and research backs it up! The Aberdeen Group found that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment realized 20% better annual revenue growth than peers without alignment.

Furthermore, a study from Marketingprofs found that sales and marketing teams with high alignment saw a 36 percent increase in win rates compared to less aligned organizations.

Conclusion – Go Forth Together

Sales and marketing alignment is a critical component for company growth.

The role of marketing is to identify who the “best” prospects are for a given brand, in terms of both purchasing power and the potential to become a brand ambassador. Then, marketing creates content that can engage the buyer with that brand and helps progress them on their buyer journey.

Salespeople and marketers close the deal together. It has always been a team effort, and it will always stay that way.

As social selling evangelist, Jill Rowley said, “The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.”

Creating sales and marketing alignment is one of the most important ways organizations can improve the effectiveness of both teams. Forging this alignment can also help to lower customer acquisition cost, while also providing a better sales experience for prospective customers.

In a follow-up article, we will explore specific tactics to help drive alignment between marketing and sales.

-Onward