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Content Marketing and Sales Enablement Must Get Married
The raging waters of the sales and marketing alignment debate continues to make its’ way through the halls of corporate America. This is despite recent entrance of social technology enabled systems and processes all professing to be the cure that remedies this debate. This is definitely becoming like the $60m question we all hope to win with an answer no one has come up with yet. Having spent the last decade or more in the arena of buyer persona development and researching buyer behaviors within business cultures, I’ve come to a conclusion that there are no silver bullets and no specific technology that is going to be the one thing that magically gives us the Rodney King moment – “can’t we all get along?” What is apparent from a qualitative standpoint is that this is more of a business cultural issue.
What did this previous paragraph have to do with the title I’m sure some of you are asking right now? From a business culture perspective, we are seeing a recently introduced new domain of content marketing born out of changes in technology and buyer behaviors as well as the area of sales enablement attempting to make selling performance more efficient. Marketing becoming the home for content strategy and sales enablement finding its’ home in sales. Sometimes I wonder though if the two areas ever talk to each other. We all can admit that what the misalignment amounts to can be cultural differences related to how groups operate and what their specific agenda is for an organization. Although content marketing and sales enablement are relatively new concepts from a long-term view, I believe the long-term cultural differences are still in play.
Culturally, content marketing and sales enablement must go through a courting period and eventually get married. If we focus on two words, publish and tools, it helps to define a dynamic that is happening right now in corporate hallways. Devising content strategy and content marketing tactics is becoming predominantly about publishing content that meet buyer demand for knowledge in the early stages of the buying cycle. Sales enablement, particularly in a sales-driven culture, tends to focus on producing tools that enable sales to be more effective. Tools related to processes and having information available at their fingertips when prospecting and calling on buyers.
A recent meeting with a B2B organization illustrated this dynamic for me. I observed a sales group listen attentively at first to a team from marketing describe and present the content they had produced. They were told how this content was going to be made available in their existing sales enablement system. I could see the attention wander once they actually began to see the content. Afterwards, I began to do some wandering myself to have chats with some of the sales team members. What’s going on? Basically, if I could sum up the conversations, they believed that the content was good and can help buyers become interested however they saw that there was no means for them to personally use this content as well as to personally produce content specific for their engagements with buyers.
What I believe I am observing here in some organizations is that just like any new buzz word that comes along, it becomes a label for existing methods and little change can take place culturally. In this illustration, marketing labeled their production “content marketing” but from a cultural standpoint produced it much like it had before – without much input from sales. While sales may be getting better tools from a sales enablement standpoint – making them more efficient – they may still be left ill-equipped from a content perspective when they need to provide essential knowledge and insight to buyers. The reality, in this case, was marketing believed it was providing “content” for generating buyer interest however sales didn’t think it had much purpose afterwards. In other words, the content produced didn’t synch up well with the tools made available nor did the sales people believe it was customizable to use further downstream of the buying cycle. The corporate niceties followed true to form – everyone saying how great everything was and off they went back to their respective camps.
To be sure, the introduction of content marketing and sales enablement are moving sales and marketing closer in alignment than in past decades. It does seem though that in order to successfully achieve ideal alignment, organizations must commit to cultural change. Otherwise, new business concepts such as content marketing and sales enablement become new masks to wear at the sales and marketing masquerade ball held annually where everyone agrees to get along. A place to start is to look at how to marry content marketing and sales enablement into a new force that brings the two sides together under a common purpose. This common purpose centered around a common understanding and view of the organization's buyer personas. What to call this new force and how to integrate it structurally is the $60m question.
One approach is to organize around a dedicated buyer understanding. During the past year, I've sugeested a focus on buyer experience as well as buyer enablement. It seems to me at least, that having strategy and organizational structure built around the buyer - both in proactice as well as structurally as eBay has done - offers the best hope to serve as a catalyst to foster sales and marketing alignment.
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3 Comments
Thanks for that post, it's a very important topic that needs to be discussed.
Should content marketing and sales enablement get married or should the marriage perhaps be replaced by another kind of relationship? Following your thoughts on the scope and the organizational home of content marketing and sales enablement, a marriage is of course a logical consequence, which means equal rights for both partners based on a shared vision, right?
From my point of view, sales enablement is much more than “make selling performance more efficient”. My understanding and the way we are running our sales enablement initiative is based on the Forrester definition: “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”
That has a few implications:
First, I think, there are different possibilities to give sales enablement a home within an organization. What I'm experiencing all over the place: sales enablement is allocated from an organizational point of view where the initiative was started initially and that's where the biggest pain points were perceived initially (I'm writing “perceived” because a lot of initiatives are working on symptoms, not on the root cause!). If the biggest pain points were content related, sales enablement is mostly allocated in marketing, product management or portfolio groups. If the biggest perceived pain points were sales related, e.g. sales mode, sales coverage model, sales performance, sales efficiency, sales behavior, pipeline challenges, sales enablement started in sales, often in sales and business operations. The way how to run sales enablement in an organization is another challenging question. Who ever is interested in that topic - more insights here:
The sales enablement role and function – where should it be considering different sales enablement maturity levels?
http://community.forrester.com/message/12790#12790
Second, buyer understanding, I totally agree! Do we need buyer enablement to achieve sales enablement results? However, our design point of everything we do in terms of sales enablement or content marketing has to be designed from a customer's point of view. That means to understand and to adapt the customer's buying cycle respectively the buyer's problem-solving cycle, the different messaging levels at the customer, that have to be addressed differently etc. It's about orchestrating the whole sales support supply chain in an end2end way backwards from the customer. Defining that design point makes it much easier to navigate successfully between sales and marketing.
I'd like to add one more: we need to focus not only on the customer as design point, we need to focus on the customer's business outcomes! Considering a variety of research on what buyers perceive as a valuable sales conversation and what buyers expect from strategic partners, we will see, that buyers want vendors to drive their business results, they appreciate vendors as strategic partners if they have the ability to adapt their relevant capabilities to the buyer's business challenges in order to drive their business outcomes. So, the buyer's most important criteria are not focused on products, solutions and services, a vendor offers...it's about how vendors can map their product and service portfolios and capabilities in order to drive customer's business results, and often, there is much more required than currently covered in technology product and service portfolios. Often, that will require a complete redesign of a vendor's portfolio towards business outcomes. That's the real cultural change, the change from an inside-out to an outside-in view, and the change to a common purpose, derived by the customer as design point – not competing internally on which group is more important...
This whole process of orchestrating along the sales support supply chain is a change challenge, a collaboration challenge, a cultural challenge which will be mission critical for strategic vendors to remain competitive. And it starts in sales. Sales enablement teams need to design frameworks that enable account teams to navigate complexity – from broad go-to-market views to more specific go-to-customer views. It's about balancing between the different lens, sales and marketing look at these challenges. So, it's about making go-to-market models sales relevant – translate them into a go-to-customer model. Having defined that – we can derive engagement models addressing different patterns mapping to different buyers within the accounts and then, we can derive sales content needs, ideally covered in dynamic content or dynamic playbook structures.
More on that here:
Strategic Account – why we need to connect go-to-market models with to-to-customer models
http://blog.tamaraschenk.com/?p=36
Finally, what about the relationship between content marketing and sales enablement? If that is a marriage, a common purpose derived by the customer is mandatory - assuming that the two groups have consistent business objectives derived backwards from the customer. Based on a broader view of sales enablement as discussed here - including the focus on an outcome based approach - I'd like to suggest a family relationship between sales enablement on a parent level and content marketing amongst other relevant sales enablement topics on a children level.
Hi Tamara,
Thanks for the brilliant analysis here. Sales enablement is truly hindered by inherent problems stemming from its origins and perhaps the agenda for sales. The world of the buyer has changed drastically and this issue is symptomatic of the root cause - marketing and selling organizations have not caught up nor adapted very well.
Wired into the DNA of organizations has been decades of pushing out and rigid lines drawn about which functions does what kind of pushing. I like Forrester's definition for the use of the word "equip", however, I don't think it goes far enough. What exactly is a "valuable" conversation today?
This is where the dilemma is: Marketing believing that content is the new conversation and sales believing that human interaction is still a major necessity. Again - more problems: it doesn't matter what marketing or sales thinks - the only thing that matters is what existing customers and prospective buyers think. And that's what all businesses should be finding out.
Thanks!
Tony
Tony, thanks for your valuable feedback.
What do I mean by a "valuable conversation"? First of all, the customer decides what's a valuable conversation. Regarding a variety of research on that topic, a conversation is perceived as valuable, if it's about the customer, tailored to the customer's specific industry, role and challenges. It's a conversation which is relevant to the customer (what and how), in context (who and why) and also timely, which means to consider the current stage along the customer's problem solving process.
I agree to your description of the "DNA of organizations" and also that it "doesn't matter what marketing and sales think". It's all about the customer - that matters! That's why the design point of everything we design to enable and equip sales is so important - it has to be the customer, always.
So, what makes conversations valuable for customers today, is no longer push - it's pull.
And that's a big transformation.
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