It’s no secret that sales funnels and content marketing strategies are becoming more automated than ever. As they do, the potential for misalignment between sales and marketing grows as well, potentially costing your company time, morale, and, most important, revenue.
But using sales enablement solutions with the support of smart technology puts the power back in your hands, improving the effectiveness of your sales team and process, and positively affecting your bottom line. Sales enablement is all about empowering your sellers with the support, resources, and systems they need to find and compel the right buyers. Most companies, for good reason, turn to their CRM for this purpose.
However, this system is not scalable, and it doesn’t often allow for the analysis and analytics that would optimize your sales process. It frustrates salespeople, makes for siloed content, and often excludes the 60% of content created by those outside the sales team. So what is the solution?
What is sales enablement technology?
The term “sales enablement technology” refers to a software or system that allows the sales team to access content that is relevant to their target consumer and appropriate for the consumer’s position in the sales funnel. Furthermore, it ensures that content related to training, support, and analysis is accessible to salespeople and their managers so they can learn and improve over time.
Effective sales enablement technology is also incredibly smart. It uses AI-powered analysis to determine what content is the most relevant and most likely to compel the target consumer at any given point, not just what marketing says belongs at that point in the funnel. By putting the consumer first, it also makes the sales process more intuitive and effective for that consumer, building brand trust.
One of the most important roles of sales enablement technology is its ability to fill gaps in your sales and marketing content strategy. By using smart analysis, it can offer data-driven recommendations to help you make your content pool more comprehensive. It can also offer suggestions as to which pieces of content should be reevaluated based on performance so that the consumer experience becomes even more seamless and intuitive. This allows you to review labor and budget spend, allocating more resources to filling gaps and promoting effective content.
How can sales enablement technology improve the consumer experience?
If your audience is serious about a purchase, you’re unlikely to be the only brand vying for their attention. Whether they’re actively speaking to other sales teams or simply browsing on social media, they will have content in front of them telling them why a competitor’s product or service is superior.
The right technology can help give you a competitive edge by identifying the most relevant content available and recommending the optimal time to introduce it in order to move customers through the funnel as smoothly as possible and to make sure you’re not wasting any opportunity for additional content touch points. Ninety-five percent of customers buy from someone who gave them content at every stage of the sales process; sales enablement technology can help you identify if you are missing any of that crucial content.