As a marketing consultant, I specialize in content development, sales enablement and lead generation. I often find that the managers and business owners that we work with are feeling as though they either don’t have the time to develop high level marketing strategies, or they don’t have the staff to execute them–or both. As their marketing agency partner, it’s our job to take that load off of their shoulders.

Sales Enablement and Lead Generation

We are fortunate enough to work with a nationally known services provider on an ongoing basis.  Their concern, like many of our clients, was how to enhance their lead generation and sales enablement strategies. Our ultimate goal was to enable sales by opening more doors for the sales team.  We wanted to not only get their name in front of the customer, but to do so in a meaningful way—with content that they would be interested in consuming. To do this, we created an e-nurture campaign with nine different streams of content that would bring qualified leads to their door, all based on their interest in various industry verticals and/or solution areas.

Since the goal was lead generation, it was important to open as many doors as possible in an organized, targeted way. We ended up creating a wide variety of content including whitepapers, Quick Tips articles, and Top 10 Things to Know listicles that would be distributed across a variety of platforms. In all cases, we targeted these prospective customers where they already were, or had a high probably of visiting.

In another situation, our client asked us to help them qualify their leads as they were getting many—but not the right level and organizational size.  This client delivers custom IT cloud solutions to businesses, so their target customers are Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers of companies with the buying power to make IT decisions.

Through a multi-touch digital campaign, we created and pointed people to an interactive quiz about cloud hosted by our client that showed that prospect how they rated amongst their peers. This delivered not only qualified leads right to their door but provided the salespeople with the answers from the questions (integrated right into their Salesforce CMS)—allowing for a far richer follow up conversation!

Make the Sale Possible

Sales enablement is the process of nurturing, introducing, and causing a sale to happen. It’s the process of logistically making it possible for the salespeople to do their jobs, by giving them access to leads and creating touchpoints for them to interact with their leads. A sales enablement tool could be a presentation, a PowerPoint deck, a landing page, or anything that’s going to give you the platform to make the sale.

A good sales enablement tool or strategy puts warm, qualified leads into your sales funnel. Ideally, it should meet the prospects where they are, such as seeking out our client’s target CTOs on tech blogs or industry publications or newswires. We posted this client’s content through third party publication sites, industry trade websites, and their own company websites—wherever we knew their prospects were hanging out and spending their time online.

At the end of the day, it’s marketing’s job to help generate leads for sales.  But often, sales does not understand what is working and what is not and how to fix what is broken.  Marketing systems and campaigns should help enhance the sales processes, not replace it.  I would submit that with a little bit of business analysis, smart content planning, and creativity—your lead gen and sales enablement strategies don’t have to be an all or nothing situation.