Once upon a time, Marketers marketed and Salespeople sold. Separated by different mandates, KPIs and personality types, the most cooperation we could expectfrom either group was that Sales would call a few Marketing-generated opportunities from campaigns and events before declaring the leads useless. The reality of the multi-channel, multi-touch buyer’s journey means that today’s line-of-business leaders live in a very different space: united by a common mission and intertwined performance metrics, Marketing and Sales need to collaborate in order to create and manage a steady revenue pipeline. Suddenly we have CMO’s compensated around closed deals, and sales staffers launching their own mini-marketing campaigns. Have the technology enablers necessary to support this tidal shift adapted accordingly? We can see from recent research that early adopters of this approach succeed more often:
Source: Aberdeen Group, April 2013
Aberdeen’s Q3 2013 research into Sales Enablement investigated how Best-in-Class enterprises re-invest in their people, processes and technologies to maximize the value of marketing-sales alignment, specifically around sales content and messaging. Rather than rely on an old-style, uni-directional flow of brochures and PDF’s, top-performing companies now have the ability enable their front-line sellers and account managers with dynamic assets and the tools to customize them for each buyer – while maintaining the integrity of the corporate brand – as well as a closed-loop conversation platform to collaboratively and continuously refine the most popular messaging.
In addition to content management, the Sales Enablement research addressed Best-in-Class deployments of channel marketing enablement, marketing operations and asset management, and the mobilization of all these technology enablers. Take a look at the research report for more details.
