Searches for sales enablement has grown almost 50% over the last two years. Aberdeen found that 74% of high-performing organisations have strong sales and marketing alignment; a key aspect of sales enablement.

Although impressive statistics, correlation does not always imply causation. Many sales directors have invested in training, technology, and content that’s supposed to help their sales team perform at higher levels. The benefits don’t materialise or are marginal at best.

Why are some companies reaping the rewards while others feel like they’re pouring money down the drain?

We take a look at what sales enablement isn’t and how to get started with sales enablement that’ll actually be worthwhile for your team.

Targets, pipelines, prospecting, closure rates, deal sizes, the list goes on. Your sales team has a lot of things to think about throughout the sales process. Sales enablement can feel like it’s adding to the overload of information, tactics and tools out there.

Fortunately, it’s very simple. It’s about making selling as easy as possible by providing salespeople with everything they need to move the sale forward.

Are customers frequently asking what similar projects you’ve worked on? Create a case studies section, by sector, on your website and now your sales team will now have a standardised document to share with customers.

According to The State of Sales Enablement, 90% of marketing content goes unused by sales. Reps are often unhappy with what marketing is producing and create 40% of all enterprise content themselves.

Not only does this leave less time for sales teams to sell but also its wasting time and resources (through duplicated or unused content) in often an over-strained marketing department.

This issue frequently goes undetected, according to the same report the perception is that marketing creates 80% of content whereas, in reality, that figure is more like 30%. The remaining 70% is created by sales (40%), engineering (10%), services (10%) and other (10%).

What if everybody on your sales team understood the needs of your customer, the problems they face and how your company solves them? Better yet, what if they loved your solution, shared your vision and immersed themselves within your sector?

How do you bridge the gap between this idealistic view and reality? You need to support your sales team with processes, you need content, training and technology. How do you get these things?

While getting inbound leads through your website might be the easy part, assessing whether they are ready for a sales conversation can be trickier.

Mastering this will help you waste less time with poor fit prospects or annoying those who are not yet sales ready.

Before beginning this process, it is important to recognise the stages of your customer journey. This will help with identifying prospects who are ready to buy and those who may need more help or nurturing.

Once you’ve identified a number of good fit leads, you can begin the sales qualification process by taking a look at your prospect’s level of engagement with your website and marketing content.

When it comes to re-designing your website, traditionally it’s a long process and it can be 6-12 months before results are delivered. Growth Driven Design is a methodology that takes a systematic approach to optimising your website in a much shorter time period.

It’s about learning what is working and what isn’t based on user data from the outset. In the GDD process you can then assess what changes will have the best impact on increasing visitors, leads and sales.

Growth Driven Design rethinks the traditional website design cycle of changing your site every 2-3 years. Instead, it focuses on learning and improving based on user feedback and behaviour in incremental design sprints.

According to research by HubSpot the top sales priorities in businesses are closing more deals, improving sales funnel efficiency and improving sales technology. In a study by LinkedIn, 82% of top sales people cite tools ‘critical’ to their ability to close deals.

With so many tools on offer, it can be difficult to decide on what is best for you and your team. We thought we’d tackle those top priorities by listing some of our favourite tools.

Include are tools for prospecting, sales intelligence, lead capture, video and more. Each are listed with a free trial so you can decide what works best for you. 

Hiring a marketing agency can help take your company to the next level. You get to work with top strategic and creative talent without the huge overhead, training and recruitment costs. There’s no shortage of digital marketing agencies, so how do you go about choosing an agency that best suits your needs?

There are plenty of good articles with questions to ask your prospective agency but rather than getting concerned with the small details, I want to give you the questions to:

PPC (Pay-per-click) is an advertising model that allows building product companies to have their company appear both above and below the organic search engine results. You’ll pay the search engine every time somebody clicks on your ad regardless of how many times its shown.

Rarely do we speak to a building product company that hasn’t tried paid advertising at some point in their marketing strategy. Do we blame them? Not at all, testing different marketing strategies to find out what works best for your company is part of growing a business. That said, there is a point at which too much paid advertising becomes a problem.

We want to help you get the data & facts to showcase the ROI of your construction marketing efforts. In this blog we talk about the problems marketers face and how they can be solved.

Next time it comes to asking for headcount or budget you’ll have the data and facts to showcase marketing as a direct driver to revenue.

Building product companies are putting a lot of time and effort into their marketing strategies to support brand awareness, customer satisfaction and their sales team.

How can you be sure your campaign collateral, social media posts and blogs are making an impact with specifiers, architects and contractors and growing your business?

An architect likes the look of your building product. In fact, it has the potential to offer the ideal solution for the architect’s project. They just need to check the product specifications on your website.

But these haven’t been included in the product information.

The architect has no way of knowing whether your building product is right after all. The architect could find your contact information and get in touch to clarify the details.

Or they could Google your competitor. The latter takes a fraction of the time.

Fear is one of the most common reasons people procrastinate on taking action towards their goals. Psychologists like to say that fear means False, Experiences, Appearing, Real. We want to provide you with actionable steps to help you in the process of overcoming your fear of cold calling. 

I jumped into 8 weeks of sales training with Mr Dan Tyre, HubSpot’s first sales executive of the now multi-billion-pound company, serial investor and co-author the ‘Inbound Organization’. If anyone was going to dispel the common preconception that top salespeople are born with certain personality traits and sales can’t be taught – this was the right person for the job.

Attracting over 26,000 visitors and 500 exhibitors, Futurebuild 2019 in London is a much-anticipated event for the construction industry.

Whether you’re a manager handling an exceptional sales team, an executive looking after a whole sales organisation or a sales rep looking to hit your numbers, 2019 is a fresh start. However, it may not be wise to leave 2018 completely behind you.