The best kept secret of successful marketing teams
Why sales enablement is the easiest way to increase revenue instantly
Last week, my friend Abhinav Arora asked a question on Twitter: If ads weren’t an option, and B2B folks were given some budget to spend on new customers, what would they spend it on?
I answered it, predictably, leaning towards content marketing.
I thought it a good answer.
But it wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind. I had immediately thought of sales enablement.
I meant what I said, that we don’t talk about it enough.
But this is a mistake successful marketing teams don’t do: They understand what sales enablement can do for them, and concentrate time and resources to make it better.
Why inexperienced marketing teams don’t spend time on sales enablement can be understood, like most things, by understanding incentives. Founders and sales teams measure new MQLs and SQLs - and bring it up constantly in meetings. So marketing heads make sure this number increases every time there’s a meeting.
But is that the right number to measure?
Because revenue can be increased faster by converting the leads we already have than by spending money to get more leads.
And revenue is the number we are going after, right?
Sounds simple, but this isn’t always evident when we are in the fray, with marketing meetings every third day, and founders have fundraising and other innumerable organisational challenges to wade through.
The responsibility to make sales enablement a priority rests, therefore, with marketing and sales leaders.
One criticism of marketing teams I subscribe to as a marketer is that we don’t talk to sales teams. We are at times dismissive of them and ignorant of the craft and hard work it entails.
I was an offender of this sort too. Until my first leadership stint, as head of marketing for a Wingify product.
Before this stint, I was at a safe distance from anyone in sales by wont of being junior. So I could think highly of my ability to string three words together and make silly comments that got me laughs at marketing-heavy nights out.
But the minute I had a revenue goal, I know who I ran to: the sales team. I worked hard at forging a relationship with my counterpart in sales, and together we formed a partnership that took the product to nearly $3 million in ARR.
The bedrock of that relationship was the collateral we built for them. Conversations with the sales head, sometimes shouting at each other in a conference room, sometimes over chai and bun-maskas at the cafe opposite, made me understand what would help him and his team most. And we gave it to them.
We understood that buying decisions rested on the sales team’s ability to impress prospects. And that that ability rested immediately on the quality of the material they would see and share with their teams. In large-ticket deals, your product is inevitably being compared to three more, and the simplest, easiest way to get ahead is by making sure your material stands out in every way possible.
So we crafted everything they needed with great care.
This extended even to last-minute requests. Every couple of weeks, I would get a call from him or his team for a deck or a feature comparison sheet that they could take to a meeting. And they would want it in 2 days. This would immediately become priority for us. Most marketing teams would push back. That is silliness. Sales calls take time to set up and take to the finish line. If you can hold some slack in the marketing team for this, do so.
It’s simple: Helping convert that enterprise customer is a better use of the marketing team’s time than anything else you can imagine.
Understanding and prioritising this is one of the best kept secrets of great marketing teams.