Matt Cohen is Seismic’s Sales Enablement Manager. He is responsible for ensuring that we follow sales enablement best practices and both our Sales and Marketing teams operate efficiently. We spoke with Matt for our Marketing Enablement blog series.
What does marketing enablement mean to you?
It’s difficult to define marketing enablement without connecting it to sales enablement because the two are inextricably linked. Sales enablement is leveraging marketing efficiencies to increase sales productivity, and marketing enablement is creating those marketing efficiencies in the first place. This is accomplished by having a comprehensive approach to content administration and governance, which results in content consolidation and automation.
Why is marketing enablement important?
Marketing enablement is a crucial piece of the marketing puzzle because content is king, and that has been the case for quite some time. Without extensive marketing libraries, it is difficult for organizations to sufficiently personalize their content for an increasingly segmented customer base.
What are the benefits of marketing enablement in terms of the way it affects Sales?
As I mentioned, marketing enablement makes sales enablement possible. You have accomplished sales enablement when reps have the right content, at the right time, in the right context. By this, I mean the content is relevant to the industry, company, and even role they are working with in a given account. When sales can efficiently leverage targeted marketing campaigns, this closes deals faster and everyone loves that.
What are some of the typical content pitfalls you see when it comes to marketing teams?
Many organizations create plenty of content, but they don’t spend a great deal of time managing its organization, which leads to redundancy and makes it nearly impossible for sales to locate the right piece at the right time. If sales can’t find what they need, they’ll try to create something on their own, which can lead to inconsistency in messaging and wastes time they should be spending managing their accounts.
Even if sales finds the right piece and closes the deal, very few marketing departments have visibility into what that piece of content was. Later, when prioritizing collateral updates and ordering, the most objective approach they can utilize is looking at what pieces are most requested by the sales team. If you’re thinking that popularity is a direct result of the content’s perceived efficacy in closing deals, that may be the case. However, are you willing to bet your entire approach to content production on that perception?
How should organizations set themselves on a path of marketing enablement?
Apart from improving content creation and organization, marketing departments need to make sure they have an open line of communication at all times with the sales teams they serve. No longer can the two functions operate in silos and pretend their missions are separate. If your sales org isn’t continuously informed about new content, product updates, and industry news, they will fall behind given the hyper-competitive environment in which we all operate. As technology and the efficiencies it enables progress, that competition will only increase.
In addition, as you improve your campaigns, you need to be able to base your decisions on data. We’re all familiar with the saying, “What gets measured gets managed” because we’ve known this in marketing for a long time now, but there tends to be so much data available that managing it becomes the challenge. Therefore, you need to make sure you are looking at the right metrics, including what content is being viewed, how much your enablement solution has been adopted by sales, and how they are using it (i.e. content delivery).
