Inbound Marketing Blog

Having the right tools and resources to convert leads and close customers is vital to any business, including small business. Converting leads into customers drives revenue and ultimately, it helps continue to grow your business. But how do you make sure your sales process has the right tools and resources to convert leads and move consumers through the buyer’s journey? The answer is sales enablement, and sales enablement should be part of your marketing strategy no matter how small your business is. In this article, you will learn what sales enablement is, and how you can include it in your marketing strategy to do more than just generate leads, but also assist the sales process to boost conversions, increase revenue, and grow your business. 

What do we mean by the ‘future of sales’ and what exactly does it look like?  Last Tuesday I attended the first SalesTribe meet up in Sydney, hosted at HubSpot (also known as SydSpot) As you may have guessed from the title of this article, it was all about “The Future of Sales”.

According to HubSpot’s 2016 State of Inbound report, one of the key priorities for sales in 2017 is improving the efficiency of the sales funnel. Whether you’re reviewing an existing sales process or developing one for the first time, successful outcomes depend on having access to the right technology.

Sales Enablement has emerged as one of the most pressing priorities for the modern marketer. According to HubSpot’s 2016 State of Inbound report, 32% of marketers rate it as a major focus for 2017. Overall it’s the fifth highest priority for the sector, the first time Sales Enablement has ever appeared in the survey results.

In the same report, only 2% of Inbound Marketers and 3% of Outbound Marketers said sales enablement was overrated.

From relative obscurity Sales Enablement now occupies a large space on the Inbound Marketing radar. 

What is Sales Enablement? 

What if I told you that successful Sales Enablement came down to just one thing? One tiny, two-syllable word that can reshape the whole way your business engages with new and existing customers?

Last week we introduced the idea of Sales Enablement. While a relatively new and evolving concept, Sales Enablement is closely linked to Inbound Marketing, with an important distinction. As we know, Inbound Marketing uses great content to generate high quality leads. Sales Enablement is the next step in the process, designed to close the leads your brilliant content has worked so hard to create. To use a dessert analogy, if Inbound Marketing were the bowl of ice-cream, Sales Enablement is the sprinkles on top.

There was a time when the sales process was clear-cut. Tools and tactics were largely commonplace, and everyone knew the rules. Then everything moved online, and sales has been in a state of flux ever since.