Sales Enablement

The overall goal of sales & marketing automation is to reduce the time it takes for an inside sales representative to suss out the vendor intent and build qualified leads for the business. Each sales rep needs the research skills and knowledge of sales processes to maximize buyer interactions.

Let's highlight some of the fundemental sales industry buzzwords:

• market intelligence collected from online surveys
• sales intelligence including AI and fresh data for contacts
• customer data platforms (CDP) & personalization
• B2B sales leads / account-based selling
• sales engagement platforms for productivity, efficiency
• customer relationship management (CRM) software
• sales analytics & sales performance management (SPM)
• features, advantages & benefits (FAB) analysis, objection handling

There is much overlap in the sales & marketing strategy for a company, however there are marketing tools specific to the marketing department in your company. Perhaps your sales reps will source their own B2B sales leads, or maybe they are loaded en-masse in the marketing department (with the help of IT). Depending on your toolset, there will be crossover but more often than not the marketing department will usually handle email marketing, A/B testing, web analytics, direct mail logistics and digital inbound marketing lead capture that will find its way into your sales CDP/ERP/CRM software and sales engagement plaforms to begin the sales outreach process.

Sales Process

• to identify a target buyer with segments and customer journeys
• predict buyer behaviors with market/sales intelligence
• connect to a lead generation source for B2B sales leads & prospects
• engage with future customers using outbound communications via direct mail, email, direct/robo dialers, social selling
• store customer data in a shared-online spreadsheet (for startups), CRM, ERP or CDP for multi-channel/omnichannel marketing
• manage inbound marketing with landing pages, lead capture forms
• improve sales funnels with optimization, analytics & A/B tests

Sales Management

It's up to Sales Managers to focus on getting the right people (sales reps) through the company's hiring process and recruitment officers. Build a list of candidates with soft skills in listening, voice tonality, friendliness, authenticity and closing. Hard skills such as which CRM software they are familiar and sales engagement platforms they've leveraged in prior sales deals. Sales managers need to be able to motivate the sales team, train systems, equip their sales reps with the proper tools and coach them through the internal sales processes. The executive team, VP/SVP/EVP's should be able to assess a winning formula to increase sales won, overall happiness of the team and decrease sales reps turnover. The management team might be evaluating an ERP suite, CRM software, HRMS for employee recruitment, CDP or comparing sales engagement platforms as well.

What are market researchers saying about B2B sales?

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