Today we’re expanding on our 'bad habits' topic by putting marketing under the microscope and analyzing 3 bad habits of the marketing department and how sales enablement can help to break them.
Earlier this week we discussed 5 bad habits of sales teams, in case you missed it you can find it here.
1. Resisting Change
‘If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’
This is exactly the mentality that forms one of the worst habits in your marketing department. Resisting change can do a lot of damage to your efforts. As technology is constantly changing, marketing teams should be adding new tools to their toolbox. Instead, many marketers choose to stick to the same old tools, stifling their company’s innovation (Source: Hubspot, 2015). Otherwise known as complacency, traditional marketers devolve when they resist any sign of change or resist the possibility of new ideas (Source: Chron, 2015). With the growth of social media communications, multichannel strategy, and inbound marketing, it can be difficult to recognize competitive movements. This is especially true for a market leader, as areas for concern include any or all of your competitors across any or all channels (Source: Inc., 2014). Regardless of your position, staying ahead means staying current, or even ahead of technology innovation.
New to sales enablement? Learn all about these tools in our post, “What is Sales Enablement: A Sales Enablement Definition for 2015”.
Out With the Old, In with the New
Playing the ‘wait-and-see’ game with technology adoption does make sense if you’re struggling to interpret how it may contribute to your objectives, but don’t wait until it’s too late! Technology investments, especially automation technology (like marketing automation, or sales enablement), have a learning curve that varies by industry and additional investments of time. Lagging behindr with this adoption means a more aggressive implementation to catch up with your competitors.
Knowing what to use starts with an internal analysis of current technology. New investments may be road blocked by an upper management officer fed up with added costs. Furthermore, current technology that may appear highly valuable, could actually be inefficient and costly. Llet’s look at an example:
Your company may use a signature capturing tool, a price quoting tool, a CRM look-up app, a cloud-based storage solution, and an internal collaboration platform that are all independent programs with individual subscription costs. They may all be useful to some extent, but did you know all of those could be replaced by one robust sales enablement software application?
That’s just one example and keeping a watchful eye on technology innovation means reduced costs, increased benefits and more streamlined operations.
Because these programs don’t appear broken, you wouldn’t have known to look for them. Play with some product demos, and invest some time seeing what else is out there. Technology complacency could be a leach on your ROI.
Interested in investing in sales enablement? With so many sales enablement tools out on the market, choosing the right one for your company can be difficult. We take a look into how to choose the best tools in our post, “How to Determine the Right Sales Enablement Software”.
2. Only Looking at Vanity Metrics
Many B2B marketers fall into the habit of only looking at metrics that don’t give them the full picture or don’t really give them an indication of their efforts. Looking at superficial metrics such as page views and shares isn’t going to give you any insight into your buyer’s decision journey (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
To truly measure your efforts, you must be looking for data that supports how your content and prospect experiences are influencing their decision to purchase (Source: Hubspot, 2015). Sometimes, a marketer’s tendency to be complacent can stand in the way of adapting new metrics (Source: Chron, 2015).
Take your measurements on the road! Find out how mobile sales applications can take your metrics to the next level in our post, “Mobile Sales Enablement: How Will Tablets Enhance Your Marketing?”.
Sales Analytic Software
Sales enablement tools come integrated with sales analytic software, and these may help your marketing department escape their measurement funk. Using sales analytic software, marketing can access data they’ve never had access to in the past.
Tracking information from sales calls, in real time, gives marketing a better idea of what content is being used, how long a sales rep spends on which content, who is viewing that content, and which content contributed to a decision journey progression. By tracking all of your marketing campaigns with a sales enablement solution, marketing teams can better analyze the effectiveness of each, and optimize for maximum performance.
Finally, we talk a lot about integration at Skura, and making use of the right metrics involves integrating automation platforms from end to end - marketing to sales. This creates strong sales and marketing alignment because it automates the comparison of metrics, rather than making it a manual administrative detour. By pushing this data to the other department, you force behaviours that accommodate the other team and their operations.
3. Giving Sales Unqualified Leads
If you asked your sales team what they thought was marketing’s biggest flaw, they would probably tell you that they tend to pass on more unqualified leads than qualified ones. For many marketers, this is simply due to the fact that they are too eager when it comes to new prospects. Instead of nurturing the lead, they rush to contact them right away (Source: Marketing Profs, 2014). Salespeople often don’t have the time to follow up with unqualified marketing leads and as a result, many of these leads get pushed aside and never get used even when they could have lead to new business.
Marketing also tends to not pay attention to fine details when it comes to passing on leads to the sales department. When it comes to collecting leads, many B2B marketers tend to focus on big picture details like total leads, page views, conversion rates on content, and etc. As a result, they tend to miss the nuances of lead-to-close conversion, and which content creates what quality of lead.
Marketers believe that when they hand off a lead to sales, their work is done. Wrong. Handing off a lead without filling the sales department in on key information, like where that lead came from, what they are looking for, or what information they have already been exposed to, means that the lead will most likely suffer duplication of communication, and a frictional sales process (Source: Marketing Profs, 2014). Your sales reps are busy people, they don’t have time to do detective work to try to figure out where marketing left off with a lead.
Create Sales and Marketing Alignment with Sales Enablement
Using sales enablement as a means to grow your pipeline will help your marketing team create better-qualified leads. With sales enablement tools, your sales and marketing teams don’t have to focus on tedious and repetitive tasks.
When marketers have to spend less time worrying about administrative detours, they have more time to spend qualifying leads and following up with sales. This means that fewer leads will get lost in translation or forgotten about, moving your customers through your pipeline at a faster rate and allowing you to shorten your sales cycle while reducing friction in the process.
Getting sales and marketing departments to interact more closely can be a daunting task. We analyze how to ease the tension between these two departments in our post, “4 Ways to Create Sales and Marketing Alignment”.
Breaking bad habits can be a struggle, especially if your marketing team is complacent to change. Sales enablement can help to diminish your marketing team’s bad habits and create a stronger sales strategy.
These bad habits do nothing but contribute to downward trends in sales and marketing overall. We recognized four major trends impacting all sellers and marketers, and provide proven best practices for any team in Chapter 1 of our “Sales Enablement Success” series. Click the link below for a FREE download.
