A successful business strategy is a mixture of both an effective demand generation strategy and an excellent sales enablement approach.
Demand generation is based on creating awareness of the products and services to invite qualified leads. And, on the other hand, the sales enablement process is all about equipping your sales and marketing teams with the right tools, collaterals, and data support.
Now, you may ask, why sales enablement for demand gen?
Well, the answer is simple. It’s proven that aligning your demand generation efforts with sales enablement can significantly increase conversion rates. So, if you want to positively impact your business’s overall revenue, creating sales enablement for demand generation is a must!
Let’s get into details: Why sales enablement for demand gen?
Sales enablement bridges the gap between the sales and the marketing team. It makes the demand generation process smoother and quicker by providing excellent support to the sales teams. As a result, prospect understanding and engagement sounds as easy as a piece of cake.
Here are some stats showing how sales enablement strategies fuel growth:
Did you know 84% of sales reps achieve their quotas when their businesses choose the right sales enablement strategies?
Businesses that have invested in sales enablement strategies are now enjoying a 49% win rate on forecasted deals.
How does sales enablement help in effective demand generation?
Implementing the sales enablement strategy will help your sales and marketing teams with an organized sales process, which creates quality lead generation and conversion rates. Here are some of the reasons why a sales enablement strategy is best for pulling off the demand generation efforts.
Prospect education
When the organization aligns sales enablement for demand generation, it helps the sales professionals with improved knowledge and understanding of the prospects. Sales reps are offered quality content materials that help them learn more about the prospects before they engage with them. It helps with understanding the buyer personas, thereby improving the overall sales process.
Improving buyer experience
Sales enablement equips your team with required content information about the buyer that helps improve the overall buying experience. Relevant content helps the sales reps understand the buyer’s expectations, thereby making the buyer’s journey a smooth one.
Continuous training
Every day, new tools and strategies are introduced to the sales and marketing teams. Having a sales enablement approach helps the team with continuous training and development.
Tech-upgradation
Sales enablement provides the right set of tools to your sales and marketing team, thereby increasing the efficiency of goal planning, execution, and analytics. Not only that but your team gets upgraded with the latest tech tools, which further helps your sales team map the gap between user expectations and delivery.
Aligning marketing and sales content materials
The strategy here is to align the marketing and sales teams by distributing or sharing the right set of content materials. By that, we mean creating meaningful content that helps both the demand generation and sales enablement teams.
Both sales enablement and demand generation involve aligning marketing and sales, but they do so in slightly different ways. For example, to ensure startups can effectively scale their operations, implementing targeted demand generation strategies is essential for aligning marketing efforts with sales goals and driving sustainable growth.
Sales enablement strategies can be adapted across different industries since tailored content can meet unique challenges and goals. For instance, if you’re in the nonprofit sector, you can incorporate content examples for nonprofits, fostering better engagement and conversions in this sector.
Wondering how?
- The marketing team should collaborate with the sales team to understand the buyer persona so that they can produce highly effective and relevant content.
- Content created by the demand gen team after keeping in mind the ICP’s needs and expectations will make it easy for the sales teams to convert and retain.
- The sales team must share the data that they have gathered or retained after tackling the 1:1 buyer expectations and issues during their cold outreach. This data serves as high-quality content material for demand generation.
- Also, the feedback and other important issues of the customers must be shared regularly with the marketing team to improve the overall efficiency of the marketing efforts.
Sales enablement content examples for effective demand gen
The sales enablement content examples help the demand generation team convert leads faster. Here are some of the data analysis and content marketing materials that can be prepared for an effective sales enablement strategy.
1: Customer case studies
Sales enablement for demand gen must include real examples and case studies showcasing how we acquired the customer, helped the customer resolve the challenges or pain points, and what solution we delivered. Case studies help build trust and credibility among new prospects, thereby increasing the chances of conversion.
2: Product demos
Why shouldn’t we try to impress customers or prospects by showing or sharing interactive demos? It’s one of the must-have sales enablement initiatives that help the demand gen team get the required engagement from the prospects or buyers.
3: Ebooks
When we talk about ebooks, we generally talk about long-form content written with a strong motive. The same can be a part of your sales enablement initiatives for pitching the challenges or pain points of your industry and it can also be helpful to provide the solutions or guidance. ebooks as your sales enablement collateral can help the demand gen or marketing team with effective brand positioning.
4: Whitepapers
Whitepapers can be a strong strategic approach for demand generation. You can design informative and analytical whitepapers and distribute them as sales enablement content with your marketing team. It helps improve their knowledge of business insights, which in turn boosts their confidence as well.
5: Sales conversations
No one talks about this, but raw sales conversations are the best sales enablement content examples that help the marketing and sales teams understand basic buyer personas and expectations.
6: Cold email templates
How about designing cold email templates keeping in mind the buyer’s pain points and challenges and having variants ready to determine the effectiveness of the templates? This can prove highly effective for the demand generation and sales team targeting high-quality leads.
Six-step framework to design sales enablement for demand gen
We have listed a strategic approach that helps design an effective sales enablement strategy for demand generation. This can also be understood as a six-step framework:
1: Creating awareness
The first step before designing the sales enablement for demand gen is to build brand awareness. Whether your business is a B2B or B2C, it is important to have a strong brand identity services presence to implement your expected sales and marketing efforts.
2: Research & planning
Designing an excellent sales enablement strategy starts with ground-level research and planning. To prepare a thorough sales enablement strategy, it is important to examine the buyer’s journey process. The buyer’s journey, as well as its detailed stages, will empower the sales reps to devise an excellent sales enablement approach for the demand gen team.
To empower the marketing and sales team with the right set of sales enablement planning, the following strategies need to be executed:
- Designing the ICPs in case of B2B or B2C
- Building buyer personas
- Analyzing feedback from customers
- Understanding buyer or user behavior
Also, using the right tools is important to identify the buyer’s behavior correctly. For example, using Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar can help understand the buyer’s purchase or bounce journey right from the number of scrolls to clicks.
3: Content development
The next big step is creating the most accurate and distribution-worthy content for the sales enablement strategy. To keep the demand generation and sales team on the same page, it becomes important to note the specifics and generate the content. This includes learning about the various marketing channels, such as inbound, outbound, events, social media, and more. The total length of the marketing campaign, the overall campaign budget, and the KPIs to track the campaign’s effectiveness must be decided before the content creation strategy.
Keeping the above specifics in mind, the team must prepare user-centric and relevant content to get the most out of the campaign. Create all sorts of helpful content during the various stages of demand gen such as landing pages, case studies, demos, brochures, sales scripts, cold calling scripts, cold email templates, and more.
4: Leveraging technology
There are startup tools for every technique one wishes to leverage for an effective lead generation process. For example, cold emailing software can generate leads via cold outreach, CRM can be used for lead nurturing, QR codes can be used to share discount codes, and more. Your demand generation and sales team must effectively leverage the power of technology to stay ahead of competitors. With technological advancement, it is also important to keep the internal teams updated.
5: Proper execution
Without execution, even perfect planning would fail! Let’s talk about the sales reps; if they’re not utilizing the sales scripts and objection handling content while pitching the clients, it can be difficult for them to get conversions. Only generating content isn’t enough when we say sales enablement for demand gen—the execution matters the most!
The demand generation and sales team must have a proper framework ready for effectively using the content and information to close the deals. Remember, execution makes a complete win!
6: Nurturing leads
A great lead nurturing strategy is missing in most organizations, making them fail to convert their leads into high-paying clients.
The last and vital focus is educating your sales team with a perfect lead-nurturing strategy that helps convert potential leads into customers. Also, there should be a close connection between the sales and the demand gen team to understand the difficulties they face while converting the leads; it helps redefine the demand gen strategy.
How to measure the impact of sales enablement for demand gen
When an organization invests a lot of effort and money into a sales enablement strategy for effective demand generation, it becomes crucial to track its impact and influence on the return on investment (ROI).
Here are a few ways to measure the overall impact of sales enablement on demand generation:
1: Sales cycle length
Sales cycle length refers to the time it takes for the prospect to become a customer from day 1 of the contact to the final deal closure. For B2B companies, the average sales cycle length from lead to opportunity is 84 days, and from opportunity to deal closure is 18 days, for a total of 102 days.
Keeping a close eye on the sales cycle length is quite important for tracking the impact of the sales enablement strategies. Increased sales cycle length must be considered as a trigger point to improve the sales success content strategy.
Shorter sales cycle = Effective sales enablement initiatives
2: Conversion rates
A good conversion rate for the B2B industry is 2-5%, which can be tracked and analyzed to determine the performance of the sales enablement strategy. If the conversion rates fall below 2%, it’s time to revise the strategy or step inside the details with the sales and marketing team.
Poor lead generation can impact your business’s overall ROI, triggering valuable insights and improvements based on it (from time to time).
3: ROI growth
Smart and modern organizations have a quarterly revenue check sheet that helps them keep a bird’s eye on ROI growth. If the revenue remains stable and leads to no improvement despite having a sales enablement strategy, it is time to improvise the sales materials and processes.
Increased revenue = successful impact of the sales enablement strategy for demand generation
4: 1:1 with sales teams
Most organizations start working on the above three measures without having a proper 1:1 with the sales success team. Having a regular 1:1 with your sales and support team is important to understand the lead quality, conversion ratios, and other KPIs that ultimately help determine the success of the sales strategies.
Don’t just target for more revenue; target more with the right customers!
Final summary
Sales enablement for demand generation is not a one-time process. It needs timely optimization based on market trends and technological advancements. If you have read this blog in detail, you must know how to keep your sales processes intact and flowing with quality content, insightful sales discussions, and advanced marketing automation.
Generating quality content for effective demand generation is made easy and simple with Omniscient Digital, your organic growth partner. Relying on content growth experts is one of the best ways to create relevant content material for your sales enablement process.
Don’t wait! Get your sales enablement process into action and convert high-quality leads in your current marketing campaign.
Contact us today to discuss how we can support your content marketing needs, or download our free resources to get started on building a successful strategy.
