It’s a familiar tale in the corporate world: the sales team and the marketing team, despite sharing the common goal of revenue generation, often find themselves at odds. This tension is particularly acute in companies with 20+ sales professionals, where marketing’s efforts to generate leads frequently result in a high volume of poorly qualified prospects landing on the sales team’s plate. This creates a significant drain on productivity and fosters resentment.
Salespeople, battling the elements and the clock, are left with a lose-lose situation: chase unqualified leads and waste precious time and effort, or ignore them and face scrutiny. This dynamic inevitably leads to a breakdown in inter-departmental trust and collaboration.
So, what’s the solution to this pervasive problem? The answer lies in a robust Sales Enablement strategy.
The Root of the Problem: Misaligned Expectations and Disconnected Processes
The core issue stems from a disconnect in understanding and expectations between the two departments. Marketing often focuses on generating a high volume of leads, measured by metrics like MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads). However, without a clear, shared definition of a “qualified lead” and a rigorous qualification process, these MQLs can be anything but ready for a sales conversation.
When a company lacks a dedicated pre-sales team to thoroughly qualify leads and set appointments, the burden falls directly on the sales team. They become responsible for the arduous task of sifting through raw leads, most of whom are not a good fit, lack immediate need, or are simply not ready to buy. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s demoralizing for a sales person, who has an innate need to achieve.
Sales Enablement: The Unifying Force
Sales enablement acts as the crucial bridge between marketing and sales, ensuring that both teams are aligned, equipped, and working towards the same, clearly defined objectives. Here’s how it provides a way out of this impasse:
1. Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas Together
The foundational step for effective sales enablement is the collaborative creation of an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and detailed buyer personas. This isn’t just a marketing exercise; sales must be heavily involved. Their firsthand experience with customers and understanding of sales cycles are invaluable. By jointly defining who the ideal customer is, what their pain points are, and how they make purchasing decisions, both teams gain a shared understanding. This ensures marketing targets the right audience, and sales knows exactly who they should be pursuing.
2. Establishing a Clear Lead Qualification Framework (and Sticking to It!)
Sales enablement facilitates the development of a comprehensive lead qualification framework. This framework should clearly define what constitutes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) versus an MQL. It includes criteria such as:
- BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline): A classic but still relevant framework, a bit hard to achieve though and many times self-defeating as this ensures some clients who might have converted with the sales effort fall out. Use this if you have a very robust communication cadence to convert cold prospects into sales ready leads.
- FIT (Fit, Interest, Timing): Evaluating if the prospect aligns with the ICP, shows genuine interest, and is in a purchasing window. This is something which can be achieved by a well trained Pre-Sales team. A great place to start any Sales-Marketing alignment
- Engagement Scores: Using marketing automation data to track how prospects interact with your marketing content. Needs significant investment in technology, but truly worth it of your average ticket sizes are large.
Crucially, sales enablement ensures that marketing qualifies leads against these agreed-upon criteria before passing them to sales. This might involve more rigorous nurturing from marketing or ensuring rigorous on-ground training for your pre-sales teams to qualify leads.
A key point to ponder- How many of your pre-sales people have been on sales calls? In my experience across a 100+ customers, its usually a number close to zero. How do we expect an untrained team to mirror the effort a trained sales person can make in qualifying leads?
3. Providing Sales with the Right Content, at the Right Time
Does your Sales team say the same thing to the prospects over and over again? One of the biggest sales efficiency drains I have seen is Sales team answering the same 5 questions for each client. These can be easily converted into smart content which ensures
- Consistent, Brand- aligned messaging for most important questions in your prospects mind.
- Saving the sales team time every day, which can be focused on actual sales meetings
- Your prospect has engaged with the content and now knows if he should really engage, leading to a self-qualification ( or even a self- disqualification, which also saves time).
Sales enablement addresses this by:
- Content Inventory and Gap Analysis: Identifying what content sales needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey and making it available.
- Centralized Content Repository: Making it easy for sales to find and use relevant case studies, product sheets, competitor comparisons, and testimonials. Your Sales people should be able to find these in less than 2 minutes and share with their prospects.
- Sales Playbooks: Providing structured guidance on how to approach different buyer personas, handle objections, and move deals forward. Do you have one in place? If not, you are missing on a hugely powerful tool.
A Great Trick in Sales – Focus on a few leads and give them everything you got, instead of wasting time on weak / raw leads.
This ensures that when a truly qualified lead comes through, the sales team is fully equipped to have meaningful conversations and demonstrate value.
4. Fostering Continuous Feedback Loops and Training
Sales enablement isn’t a one-time project; it’s an ongoing process. Regular, structured feedback sessions between sales and marketing are vital. Sales can provide insights into lead quality, common objections, and market trends, allowing marketing to refine its campaigns and lead generation strategies. Conversely, marketing can educate sales on new campaigns, product launches, and content resources.
Do remember, these should be done with a sense of objectivity and camaraderie. We are all working towards achieving the same revenue goals.
Point to ponder – Does your marketing team gets incentives if the company achieves sales targets? Are the comparable to the value they are delivering/
Furthermore, sales enablement provides ongoing training for the sales team, not just on product knowledge but also on effective qualification techniques, objection handling, and leveraging enablement tools.
5. Implementing Technology to Streamline the Process
Sales enablement leverages technology to automate and optimize processes. This includes:
- CRM Systems: Ensuring both sales and marketing have a unified view of customer data and lead progression.
- Marketing Automation Platforms: For nurturing leads and tracking engagement.
- Sales Enablement Platforms: Dedicated tools that centralize content, track content usage, provide sales playbooks, and offer insights into sales performance.
These technologies reduce the administrative burden on sales and provide valuable data for both teams to improve their effectiveness.
The Outcome: A Synergistic Partnership
When a company invests in a robust sales enablement strategy, the relationship between sales and marketing transforms from adversarial to synergistic. Sales gains confidence in the quality of leads they receive, leading to increased productivity and higher morale. Marketing, in turn, sees a better return on its investment as its leads convert into more closed deals.
Ultimately, sales enablement isn’t just about equipping sales with tools; it’s about fostering a culture of collaboration, shared understanding, and mutual respect between two departments that are intrinsically linked to the success of the business. It’s the essential ingredient for moving beyond the “us vs. them” mentality and creating a powerful, revenue-generating engine.
Are you missing this at your company?
No worries, write to me at vishal@trigitalsolutions.com and our Sales Enablement experts will help you create a stronger revenue generation engine.
