The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Recently, I sat on a panel about sales and marketing, and during the presentation, another fellow panelist said, 'Email is dead! Social media is where to reach your people!' Well... I laughed (internally, of course)... but was he right?

Surely not. 

In Season 2 of Improving Sales Performance Series, we’ve focused on the data and analysis of the 2020 Media Sales Report.

In this episode, Dani Buckley, Isha Bell, and Emily Hartzell of LeadG2 join Matt Sunshine as they discuss the data from the Media Sales Report surrounding the analysis of the sales enablement information.

You can stream it now to hear their insight, advice, and initial thoughts after analyzing the data that was just published. Or keep reading for a brief overview.

Marketing content isn’t just for branding and lead generation anymore. Today’s buyers aren’t interested in being sold. Instead, they want to be educated and informed.

Consequently, it’s more important than ever that sales teams have access to content relevant to their prospect’s business problems and positions the seller and the organization as thought leaders and subject matter experts. The content that Marketing creates to support the go-to-market objectives (blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, etc.) is often repurposed to support the buying journey  and sales process as well.

To better support the sales team, marketers are not only creating and repurposing content, they’re also building specific sales plays (that include items like customizable email templates, voice mail scripts, and corresponding cadence schedule) that prescribe how and when the content should be leveraged to support the sales process.

Before we get into the how to use a Sales Playbook, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to answering what is a Sales Playbook.

In its simplest terms, a Sales Playbook is a key piece to a winning sales enablement strategy that outlines your sales process and aligns it with the buyer’s journey. It provides salespeople with a collection of resources like best practices, insights into their buyers, how to approach specific sales scenarios, talk tracks, email templates, ways to handle objections, competitive intel, and more.

As sales professionals, one of the biggest challenges we face is trying to connect with a new prospect. With so many different touchpoints, it’s easy for a prospect to avoid or ignore your voicemails, emails, texts, or LinkedIn request.

If you want your message to stand out, it’s critical that you have a solid valid business reason (VBR) that establishes you as trusted and valued. However, it’s equally important to ensure you have a strong email subject line. You can have the best valid business reason on the planet, but if the email is never opened by the intended recipient, what good is it?

Is your sales team running the same plays as it did ten years ago? Even five years ago? If so, there’s a good chance you need to update your sales playbook.

The way businesses buy and sell has forever changed—and to stay competitive, you need to change too. Yes, certain things are still essential such as:

• Finding needs and pain points
• Presenting solutions
• Getting results

But how you interact with prospects and clients is different.

Sales enablement is a broad and powerful term that covers a lot of sales functions under one large umbrella. We define sales enablement as the strategy, content, technology, and training that empowers sales teams to sell smarter and faster. 

Sales enablement tools put the right resources and content in the salesperson's hands right when they need it. Businesses that are properly utilizing sales enablement tools quickly:

• Improve sales productivity
• Drive revenue
• Increase customer alignment

Providing sales teams with the proper tools, knowledge, and processes to maximize every sales opportunity is invaluable. Effective sales enablement tools can significantly benefit your company – here’s how.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on the LeadG2 blog.

Most managers and sellers have experienced this:

• A seller is moving a new business prospect through the sales process.
• All signs are positive.
• The prospect goes silent, and will not respond to email, phone calls, letters, or stop-ins.
• The seller goes to his/her manager and asks for advice.
• The manager spends time listening to the seller, conducting diagnostic work, and providing advice to the seller (what to do to restart the stalled sale).

On the surface, this sounds like a good system, but in reality, it is not. Here’s why:

• Managers work with multiple sellers—doing this for many sellers takes up a great deal of time and is often redundant (same problem… same solution).
• Sellers might not have easy or timely access to their managers—this delays the sales process and allows the sale to get further off track.

I recently attended a session at a conference that centered around incorporating authenticity into account-based marketing, also known as ABM. If you are not familiar with ABM, it’s simply a strategic approach to focus an organization's B2B sales and marketing efforts on a defined group of high-potential targets instead of everyone, in an effort to create more personalized messaging and content to increase engagement. 

We hope you've had a great week! It's Friday, and today we're sharing what we've been reading online this week! Here are our "best" from around the web.