Being a marketer isn’t easy. The profession carries its own unique challenges and problems. While Sales always has hard targets in mind, Marketing’s focus is a little more ethereal. There is a constant shift from focusing on the minutia to thinking about the larger picture. Sales and Marketing both require different skill sets, ways of thinking, and planning. But both teams are inextricably linked and, ultimately, have the same goal: win more deals, faster.
As we’ve entered the Information Age, the ability to access tons of data has raised some thorny questions for Marketing. Namely, what is the direct impact that Marketing has on revenue? If Sales can track everything down to the last cent, why can’t we see exactly how much money Marketing is driving? But according to Forrester, 94% of marketers say they can’t prove a direct correlation to their work and overall success of the organization.
That statistic doesn’t reveal some great weakness in marketers; there is no underlying laziness or shiftiness that explains the lack of insight. Rather, it reveals that organizations suffer from a lack of alignment and visibility.
Sales and marketing misalignment is a huge problem that afflicts many organizations. What does this lack of alignment look like? It means that Marketing has no visibility into what happens when they hand off a lead to Sales. Without knowing how the rest of the process plays out it becomes incredibly difficult to 1) measure how Marketing’s efforts impacted the bottom line, and 2) use real data points to inform decisions about future activities.
On the Sales side, the lack of insight leads to redundant and halting conversations. Without access to information about how Marketing engaged a buyer, they almost have to begin anew to uncover pain points and needs. This disrupts the flow of the buyer’s journey and leads to wasted time and resources. Solving the issue of alignment between sellers and marketers is imperative, and it’s one of the tenets of sales enablement. What’s really needed is better enterprise intelligence and insight.
CSO Insight’s recently conducted a 4th annual study that found 61% of organizations have invested in sales enablement, however only 34.4% of those are said to be effective. When an organization can have a highly effective sales enablement initiative, then Marketing can begin directly correlating their efforts to revenue, and misalignment falls by the wayside.
Seismic partnered with CSO Insights to host a webinar titled “The Secret to Highly Effective Sales Enablement” with speakers Tamara Schenk, Research Director at CSO Insights and David Kriss, Vice President, Sales Enablement Strategy at Seismic.
On the webinar, Tamara and David highlight CSO’s Clarity Model. This is a framework to engage, equip, and empower a world-class sales force. The model provides an actionable way for an organization to improve your sales enablement efforts. Additional topics discussed include putting the customer as your primary focus, formalizing collaboration with clear accountability, utilizing tactical content management, and leveraging state-of-the-art enablement.
