What is account-based marketing?
Historically, marketers designed their efforts for a broad audience in order to generate as many leads as possible. ABM is a tailored marketing strategy that prioritizes targeting high-value, high-potential accounts that are more likely to purchase your product or service. By identifying high-priority accounts, marketers can customize their content marketing efforts to address the specific needs of their target accounts. From a procedural standpoint, ABM is an upper-funnel strategy that steers high-priority leads to sales organizations. On the other hand, sales enablement operates downstream and prepares sellers to engage these high-value accounts effectively.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement focuses on the buyer and the experience that sales teams provide to prospects at every engagement point. It is the process of uniting sales, marketing, and operations teams around the common goal of providing salespeople with the right resources, content, processes, and technology needed to engage with prospects and customers throughout the buyer's journey and sell effectively. When it's time to engage prospects, sales enablement tools help sellers customize content based on their target account's specific needs and use case.
How ABM and sales enablement are related
When we think about the marketing and sales funnels, ABM addresses middle-of-funnel content experiences, while sales enablement addresses bottom-of-funnel engagement. Sales enablement helps sellers strengthen buyer engagement with tools to personalize content. It also provides reps with just-in-time training to prepare them for deal-specific conversations.
Sales enablement adds value to ABM marketing by helping reps know what to say and when to say it, how to personalize content and messaging to their buyer, and how to use data and analytics to influence and move deals forward, faster.
In the next section, we'll share how the transition from ABM marketing to sales enablement creates a seamless, highly-personalized customer experience.
3 ways to combine ABM and sales enablement
Buyers expect personalized experiences throughout the entire sales cycle. From the time a prospect engages with content on your website to the assets they receive following a discovery call, the materials you share should always be highly-relevant. The simplest way to ensure a seamless transition from marketing to sales is to have a well-aligned plan. Combining ABM tactics with sales enablement typically starts with sales playbooks. Let's dig a little deeper.
Sales playbooks
Sales plays help marketing and sales teams tailor their engagement to targeted audiences. They ensure that the content marketers share with targeted accounts helps transition marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales teams. Sales enablement software helps GTM organizations manage all of the assets that are related to a sales play.
Sales playbooks are a single destination where customer-facing teams can access the resources they need to tell a consistent story about a specific campaign, product, or initiative. Playbooks capture everything a seller needs to know, say, and share with a targeted account. For example, if a sales play is designed to target high-value insurance accounts, a sales playbook will include industry background and competitive landscape, relevant training and coaching, talk tracks, pitch decks, and solutions briefs. Together, this collection of resources enables sellers to share content in context with their prospects.
Just-in-time learning and coaching
Sales training and sales coaching are some of the most impactful components of account-based strategies. Studies have shown that 70% of training material is forgotten by learners within the first 24 hours. Just-in-time training solves that challenge. Instead of long, broad training sessions, sellers can take advantage of targeted lessons that are most relevant to their existing deals. By including lessons in sales playbooks, sellers can develop the knowledge, awareness, and skills they need to manage the rigors of a specific deal cycle.
Content analytics and enablement intelligence
One of the most effective ways to continuously improve ABM and sales plays is to measure and learn. Sales content analytics helps GTM teams understand what content is most effective with a specific audience, and at what stage in the buyer journey. Having visibility into content analytics enables customer-facing teams to routinely test and improve content experiences based on what they know will be most relevant and effective with their target audience.
Predictive content depends on content analytics to help organizations share the right content with the right prospect, at the right time. Enablement intelligence capabilities leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to identify patterns and suggest the best content for an opportunity based on what has worked in similar sales cycles.
ABM and sales enablement: Better together
Sales and marketing alignment are the foundational elements of effective sales enablement. ABM provides marketers with a strategic framework to nurture the highest potential accounts and funnel high-quality leads to their sales teams. This approach allows sellers to shine when they take advantage of sales enablement in their sales cycles. Sales enablement helps sellers to pick up where marketers leave off by providing highly relevant, insights-driven content experiences that address their buyer's specific needs. When both solutions are deployed effectively, organizations are better positioned to make the most out of every buyer interaction.
If you'd like to learn more about how you can pair sales enablement software with your ABM strategy, get a demo today.
