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It’s no secret that buyer personas are an integral component of business communication planning, and though the idea of a persona is conceptually straightforward, few are actually familiar with the practice. At the very least, many struggle to understand the best practices with respect to personas and how they can positively affect certain business goals.

The importance of mapping and understanding buyer personas is crucial, as it can make or break your company’s sales operations and communications. Through sales enablement software, creating playbooks tied to personas enables a number of strong benefits such as more tailored communications, a more conversational sales call approach, and overall improved sales and marketing alignment through streamlined efforts.

But what is a buyer persona, and how is it impacted by sales operations? This week we examine these factors and provide some enticing insights on the subject.

This week we take an introductory look into sales and marketing alignment. Starting from the 101 of exactly what sellers and marketers do in 2015, and leading up to 5 best-practice recommendations to make sales and marketing alignment happen more easily at your organization. Technology solutions that many marketers use today will be examined, and some suggestions for making the 5 best-practices more attainable will be explained. 

Today we take a light and fun look at what happened earlier in August with Donald Trump, and the comments that got him uninvited from a republican event that weekend. We’ll take a lesson from Trump in content management, and look at some tools that sales reps have in their arsenal for understanding a buyer’s reaction before the worst possible outcome occurs. In Trumps case, the uninvite, for a sales rep, it could be a lost sale.

Read on to learn about the one tool Trump didn’t have that every sales rep can take advantage of.  

What is sales enablement? It’s almost impossible to put your finger on an exact sales enablement definition. This is largely because of two reasons, one: the market is relatively new, and each player tends to define sales enablement in their own way, and, two: enablement isn’t actually a real word (yet), as I’ve come to realize through composing my written content on Microsoft Word.

This week we take a stab at defining sales enablement by combining and analyzing a number of external definitions. We also examine why we need sales enablement as it relates to current trends, and whether the current model is mitigating challenges, or chasing symptoms.

Motivation is a tricky subject, everyone has a different level of motivation, things motivate people differently, and motivation can even fluctuate several times in a single day. This reality makes it difficult to accurately pinpoint the root of motivation. Thankfully, the science of motivation, that is, the various components that influence motivation, is well documented. This week we take a light hearted, scientific look into how motivation works for the Sales Rep, and how you can maximize the motivation of your sales team.

Content marketing, or, inbound marketing (whichever you prefer) is a growing challenge for many vendor marketers, and as the amount being spent on content continues to rise, it is imperative that content be used correctly at each stage of the decision journey. This week we examine 15 of the top content marketing types, how they apply to the stages of the decision journey, and how you can optimize the entire digital content sales and marketing process from end to end.

Sales training is big business. Every company participates in it, and many new and intuitive ways of training Reps have popped up over the last decade or two, but something isn’t working. The state of the Sales Rep is in a continued decline, the humble sales presentation is losing effectiveness, and buyers are starting to find Sales Reps less and less meaningful to the sales process.

Today we examine where and why Sales training is and is not effective, and how to rebalance the scales of buyer-seller relationships in the face of declining motivation, and greater investment in training.

How to choose the right metrics?

In today’s world, hundreds of metrics are available to gauge the performance of a company, and the main focus of management should always be on sales and marketing alignment, as they are responsible for driving the business. Therefore, using the right metrics to measure their performance is imperative.

But the main question is “Which metrics should I look at?”

Today’s customers are more engaged than ever and are spending a majority of their time researching products and brands online before making a purchase decision. What’s more is that even after the accumulation of so much knowledge, they are still likely to abandon the decision-making process.

A customer’s decision is comprised of two elements. The first is their perception of your company, and the second is their perception of your product. With the billions of brand conversions happening daily, it becomes crucial to ensure that customers are hearing and saying good things about your company in an effort to differentiate yourself from the competition.