Sales Enablement, er, Engagement, er Empowerment is the Key to Marketing Success
Marketers! You are me. And I am you.
We fight the same fight for relevance and acceptance in a corporate setting by trying to blend the right message or narrative with the right piece of “engaging” content, wrapping it in a creative execution that entices people to act. An overly complex (by design?) cadre of strategies powered by tactics, bolstered by words and images and measured — for better or worse — by how our actions correlate to revenue.
At the end of the day, we will succeed or fail based on our answers to two simple questions: “Does what you do every day help sales teams close deals?” and “Can you prove it?”
AN ENABLER BY ANY OTHER NAME
Perhaps, in an effort to not be judged so harshly or more directly tie our roles to $, someone, presumably in marketing, coined the term “sales enablement.” This term, by the way, used to make me feel a little like a bespeckled dweeb (see inset photo) on the playground who writes the quarterback’s term paper to avoid getting beat up.
I come from a land and time that was no friend to enablers. The enablers I know rewarded laziness or just plain bad behavior. This may come across like I’m picking a fight over a word. Maybe I am. But from where I sit as a marketer, words are everything.
Maybe Geoffrey Moore’s power words like Engagement and/or Empowerment are more palatable to me personally, but regardless of the sheen we put on it as marketers, we all need to deliver something that can be directly tied to someone else’s ability to sell something. Or else.
SALES ENABLEMENT/EMPOWERMENT/ENGAGEMENT = PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE
In the digital age of ubiquitous personal publishing and sharing — as well as the rapid proliferation of devices to consume and distribute this fire hose of knowledge that is always on — my view on enabling, or more specifically, sales enablement has softened a bit. Now it’s less an indictment of a person’s bad habits and more of a realization that helping people find what they need, streamlined by proven processes and fine-tuned by purpose-led technology may be our saving grace.
Whether you are in competitive intelligence, marketing communications, public relations, product or solution marketing or are responsible for driving the global marketing strategy for your company, you need to be a curator and distributor of actionable knowledge. Those who take the role lightly by sending sales reps one-size-fits-all newsletters or alerts, and content not aligned with the buyer’s journey are at risk of being viewed as expendable instead of indispensable.
With modern software applications it is now possible to arm sales and account people with the critical information they need at the point of prospect or customer engagement. Regardless of the type of information or where it lives, be it product information, external web news, customer orders, help desk activity and more can be personalized and delivered in the the context of a prospect or customer record. Welcome to the age of automating the monotonous and error-prone manual tasks of hunter, gather and filterer to deliver personally relevant knowledge that contributes to revenue.
HOW ATTENSA CAN HELP
A brief commercial, yet completely factual, interlude: For me personally, the Attensa StreamServer simplifies and speeds up my most time-consuming tasks by finding, filtering and delivering immediately valuable information to me that gets more targeted to my preferences, and therefore more immediately actionable, with every use.
For you, the sales enabling marketer, the Attensa StreamServer can do the same by making your marketing department the knowledge epicenter for your organization responsible for connecting people in your own department, in sales and throughout the company with the knowledge that drives business results and better relationships. What’s more, you’ll have the data to prove it.
To see how all of this works, take a look at the Attensa Solution Overview, or download our latest white paper Reducing Information Overload in the Enterprise. Reach out to me directly if you want to learn more.
Until I interrupt you again, Viva La Enablement!
Mark
