Sales enablement technologies like Seismic, Outreach, Salesloft and Salesforce’s Sales Engagement evolved to automate outbound selling. These tools help sales teams stay on track with their pipeline, timing outreach and using pre-built email templates or phone scripts to engage more prospects efficiently.
Many of these platforms include content libraries for marketing materials like flysheets or thought leadership pieces, but marketing’s involvement often stops there. While sales teams primarily use these tools, here’s how integrating marketing into their execution unlocks even greater impact.
It’s a fair question, and the answer is both yes and no. While the sales team is the primary user of these tools, connecting marketing to how they’re used, tracked and optimized can lead to even better outcomes.
Marketers might view sales enablement technologies as hyper-personalized, one-to-one email marketing tools, where many of the same principles of a marketing automation platform apply.
- Should this tool connect to your CRM? Yes.
- Should you use personalization in the selling journey? Yes.
- Should recipients have some familiarity with your brand? Also yes.
When marketing takes ownership — or is at least heavily involved — these tools become even more powerful. Marketing can maximize opportunities, track engagement, nurture leads when needed and apply data to improve the sales process. As a bonus, marketing can help bridge the gap between sales and IT, ensuring data and integrations from other technologies enhance personalization within the sales enablement platform.
Dig deeper: How to optimize sales and marketing processes for efficient customer acquisition
Why marketing should be involved in sales enablement technology execution
Here’s how marketing can add value to sales enablement technology.
Aligning lead source to sales messaging
Since marketing sources leads for sales, it can ensure outbound cadences align with:
- Where buyers are in their journey.
- The content they’ve engaged with.
- Upcoming events or thought leadership that match their interests.
This tailors the selling experience to what the buyer is ready to hear.
More opportunities to nurture the sale
By incorporating marketing content — such as webinar invitations or thought leadership — into sales cadences, marketing can use tracking links to connect prospects back to other martech tools. This allows marketing to nurture interested buyers who aren’t ready to book a meeting yet and add them to targeted email or ad campaigns based on their engagement.
Ensuring emails reach the inbox
Struggling to determine if emails sent through your sales enablement technology are reaching inboxes — or being read at all? Marketing can provide expertise on best practices for email deliverability, authentication, and engagement tracking.
Having a reason to reach out
Martech offers valuable insights into buyer behavior, from website visits and email clicks to ad interactions, intent signals and event registrations. By integrating this data into your CRM, marketing can create a feedback loop that helps sales personalize outreach and prioritize the most engaged prospects — those most likely to convert.
Tracking success and improving performance
Marketers are eager to understand which leads are effective and which aren’t. By using data from sales enablement technologies, marketing can track engagement, identify prospects who need further nurturing and assess which lead sources drive high-value opportunities.
Most importantly, marketing can take on the heavy lifting of building sales cadences and outreach journeys that work across multiple teams — allowing sales to focus on what they do best: selling.
Dig deeper: How to align sales and marketing for revenue growth
When marketing should not be involved in sales enablement technology
Marketing can be a valuable partner in sales enablement execution, but some aspects of the strategy should remain with sales. In these cases, sales should take the lead:
Defining what’s being sold
While this is a business decision that should be shared with marketing, it’s ultimately marketing’s role to showcase which accounts align with the buyer profile— not to define the profile itself.
Coaching on sales enablement metrics
Marketers aren’t sales experts. While marketing can provide insights into sales trends — such as follow-up outcomes that highlight coaching opportunities — sales training and process improvements should stay with the sales team.
Building cadence timelines and content
Sales emails are entirely different from marketing automation emails. Writing for sales requires a different approach, where brevity is key. Sales also knows best which outreach actions to prioritize (i.e., call, email, LinkedIn request), how often to reach out and the ideal number of touchpoints in a cadence.
Personalization
Marketing can suggest relevant content for a prospect, but it shouldn’t replace the personal connection needed for a successful sale. Leaving space in email templates for personal touches — like a prospect’s location, favorite team or shared interests — helps sales build stronger relationships beyond the template.
Bringing marketing into sales enablement technology can drive better prospects into the funnel — perhaps it’s time to start viewing these tools as marketing assets, too.
Dig deeper: 7 ways to end the sales and marketing Catch-22
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
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