You have a great product; you have outstanding services. Without effective marketing and sales functions, what you don’t have is a sustainable business. What you do and how you do it sets you apart from competitors; it’s up to you to convey that messaging to potential customers and clients. Grab them. Convince them. Convert them. This is the intent of marketing and sales enablement tools, but too many organizations aren’t getting the results they need. Why? And how can you course correct to get your business’s lifeblood flowing?
According to HubSpot, Haven’s sales enablement partner, the time is now to implement a dedicated sales enablement process for your team to drive revenue and growth.
Sales Enablement in a Nutshell
Marketing and sales enablement is a process that ensures your team has the resources they need to connect with customers. Instead of using a mishmash of sales tactics that may or may not work, you are focusing on giving the buyer what they want. Every time. And, instead of relying on a few superstar salespeople, your entire team has the capacity to achieve better, and more consistent, results. Sales enablement allows you to win more jobs, leverage time to get more done, and provide a better customer experience that results in happier clients and more referrals. Sounds simple enough. (If only it were!)
If You Have a Hammer…
Marketing and sales enablement encompasses tools that all businesses should use effectively and efficiently to achieve goals and maximize profits. But there is a big gap between “should” and “do” and an equally significant gap between “doing” and “seeing results.”
What do we mean? The CSO Insights’ 4th Annual Sales Enablement Study showed that 61% percent of organizations have a sales enablement function. That’s great – but it also means that 39% do not. Further, only 34.4% of those that do say that they are meeting the majority of their expectations. What’s behind these lackluster results?
You’ve heard the old saying: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When it comes to marketing and sales enablement, most companies resort to using a hammer to drive in screws. Brands often put marketing and sales enablement tools into play without ensuring they are strategically aligned with their business goals – and without ensuring that everyone has the right tools. In other words, different teams are hammering away when there’s a more effective method of getting the job done.
Again, according to the CSO Insights’ study, fewer than 10% of organizations establish a formal marketing and sales enablement “charter,” a detailed plan that clarifies their goals, outlines the processes they will use to achieve them, identifies benchmarks for success, and considers challenges and obstacles that they will encounter along the way. Nor do they consider how all of this will tie into – and facilitate – the customer’s journey.
Sales Enablement: Leveraging the Right Tools for the Job
Haven Media helps companies integrate the right marketing and sales tools to capture more leads and drive more profitable revenue. You need to showcase your brand and experience to generate more leads and win sales; you need to give your people the tools they need to accomplish this; and you need to stand out from the competition. Luckily, we’re outfitting you with a complete toolbox with real-life examples that drive revenue, save time, and provide a better customer experience.
Some excellent sales enablement tools:
- Customer Relationship Management Software. Your CRM is an incredibly beneficial tool, it allows you to track and manage your marketing and sales team’s activities and maintain key data on buyers and clients. It also enables you to automate tedious tasks (e.g. auto-contacting prospects and customers) that take your people from what you really want them to be doing: selling.
- Automated Lead Nurturing. How much time do your salespeople actually spend selling? Half? A quarter? Try again: 15%. Automated lead nurturing clears clutter from their schedule. Templated, pre-scheduled emails help cultivate your leads through the qualification process, and free up time for your sales team to close more deals. Ideally, this integrates with your CRM and other workflow tools for maximum efficiency. It’s also great for marketing folks: CRM and marketing automation can track lead’s behavior and create a seamless process of automated emails to deliver content to the right leads at the right time.
- Email Sequences. It’s critical that you send emails at predetermined stages in the sales journey: for example, after an initial action, such as joining your mailing list, you would send a welcome email. After a purchase, you send a thank you and provide additional resources. When someone abandons their cart (or suddenly disappears from the funnel), you can send a reactivation email. Email sequence tools do this automatically. And you guessed it: this gives your marketing and sales teams more time to do what they do best.
- Live Chat. Customers and clients expect 24/7/365 access to you. Winning customer service encompasses live chat; you can automatically reply to one-part answers by providing a standard answer or directing them to applicable webpages or resources. You can also kick the conversation to a team member for more complex issues. Live chat enhances the customer experience, facilitates customer acquisition and onboarding, and boosts productivity.
- Case studies. Case studies are little marketing and salespeople in their own right. They tell the story of your expertise and success. They allow prospects and leads learn how you solve challenges like theirs. In fact, 71% of B2B buyers in the awareness stage and 77% in the evaluation stage say that case studies are the most influential type of content. (B2C buyers love them too.)
- BrandFolio by Haven. This innovative marketing and sales enablement tool allows you to create a branded portfolio of your best projects, marketing, and education pieces. You can walk prospective clients through what you do and how you do it. More on this in a moment!
Sales Enablement in Action: ACo Case Study
Indiana’s own ACo promises homeowners a “worry-free kitchen, bath, or flooring renovation that allows them to love where they live.” How does this top remodeler use sales enablement? Short answer: in a lot of different ways.
“Sales enablement brings us clarity, maximized revenue, a huge time savings, the ability to forecast, and happier clients,” says Joe Evans, Director of Sales at ACo. “Within a couple clicks we can view our entire pipeline from first call to job completion, this provides the clear and concise information we need to manage our business and adapt to the ever-changing market.”
ACo provides a better customer journey and manages customer expectations by delivering a winning experience through sales enablement. With Hubspot solutions, they have a streamlined and integrated process all in one platform. ACo leverages Hubspot and a variety of sales enablement tools every day to improve efficiency, create a better client experience, and drive revenue growth. Here’s how:
BRANDFOLIO
BrandFolio is a key component of ACo’s marketing and sales enablement strategy. With this tool, they created a powerful and compelling asset, The ACo Way: A Complete Guide to Kitchens, Bathrooms & Flooring. It is a branded portfolio that leads and prospects can easily download, pick up in the showroom, or request a copy by mail. In it, ACo highlights their unique value proposition, goals and vision, key service offerings, team, and case studies from homeowners who have fallen in love with where they live.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANGEMENT:
ACo can easily track customers, vendors, and subcontractors through Hubspot’s database manager and CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). They can also track each project from prospect through design to project completion within the CRM.
In the example above, you can see that this lead found ACo through an organic internet search and viewed several past projects from their gallery as well as remodeling budget tools. The next day she returned to view additional resources on cabinetry. This shows she was looking for both inspiration and information. Eventually, she subscribed to the monthly newsletter and submitted a contact form indicating she was interested in starting a remodeling project. All of this information provides insight into how ACo can best help this prospect.
ACo’s CRM is a useful way to bring together other sales enablement tools and provide a bigger pictures. Within their CRM, ACo can promote and track downloads of the ACo Way Magazine (a BrandFolio project) and other marketing tools to help nurture leads and provide additional targeted content.
EMAIL TRACKING:
ACo sends relevant, informative newsletters that add value to their clients’ and prospects’ lives. They use open rates and other data to make more sales based on that information.
Below you can see the results of this newsletter ACo sent out. Not only can they track who opened the newsletter, but who is most engaged, and what they found most valuable. Top engaged subscribers are more likely to turn into sales opportunities.
SALES MANAGEMENT:
- Use sales enablement and complementary marketing tools to facilitate lead generation.
- Manage your sales pipeline – You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and a snapshot of your sales pipeline shows you what’s going on at all times.
- ACo uses a sales pipeline to track deals from new opportunities, through the different phases of the sales and design process, all the way to the end of the job.
AUTOMATIONS:
- Win more jobs through automations.
- ACo receives flooring sales leads through the Costco/Shaw partner program. These leads are sent through an automated sequence of emails to help schedule appointments with a dedicated sales rep. Automations allow you to more quickly connect with clients, schedule appointments, and give your sales rep more time to close deals.
“The automations not only save us time, but they provide a better experience for our clients and drive revenue,” says Evans. “We are able to automate internal tasks so our people can focus on the bigger pictures. With our pre- and post-sale client automations we can ensure a consistent client experience in which communication is the number one priority.”
- Sales enablement helps you streamline workflows and automations (i.e. specific actions automatically trigger tasks, notifications, and even form emails to save time, resources, and team energy). This can be both internal to your team, such as sending a design request from the sales person to the design department, or external communication to a client for things like scheduling meetings or confirming project start dates. ACo has even created a process map to provide their team with an overview.
Sales Automations:
Here are some of the real-world results ACo sees using these automations for sales through Hubspot.
“Most of our clients come from marketing or referrals (not outside sales),” says Evans. “Our Design and Sales consultants are very busy. When they receive a new prospect lead they follow up with the lead an average of 2-3 times before moving on to another lead.”
Data tells us the average sale takes 5 follow up attempts to close. This leaves quite a bit of potential revenue on the table.
ACo’s solution was to automate follow-up for their Costco Flooring Program:
- Their closing % for Costco Flooring is 30.77%
- The average sale for Costco Flooring is $7411.21
- Over the last 14 months they have enrolled 1586 prospects into their Costco Sequence. Currently they have one Design and Sales Consultant managing the entire Costco program by himself. Imagine getting 25-60 leads per week and how you would go about scheduling and managing the prospects experience! These automations allow for ACo’s sales rep to handle the lead volume.
- The sequence is a 5-step series that includes 4 emails and one phone call, the emails are automatically sent at set intervals and the rep is sent a reminder for the call. If the prospect replies to the email or schedules an appointment they are automatically taken out of the sequence, so you don’t have to worry about miscommunicating. The series is designed to take 14 days to complete.
- Results of the Costco Sequence
- Of the 1586 contacts enrolled in the sequence, 61% of them set up an appointment through the calendar link in the first email, 12% reply directly to the email. That takes a ton of the work off the Design and Sales Consultant’s plate!
- Check out the reply rate and meeting rate for the 4th and 5th email. Remember, without this automation the prospect would be considered lost by the Design and Sales Consultant. To save you the math, there were a total of 673 prospects that received the 4th and 5th email sequence. 127 of them replied or scheduled an appointment.
- With a closing percentage of 30.77%, that means 127 prospects x 30.77% close rate = 39 of those prospects will become clients.
- Again, the average sale is $7411.21. 39 clients x $7411.21 = $289,037 in revenue that might have been lost without the 4th and 5th follow-up!
Post-Sale Automations:
In order for ACo to provide the best client experience and win more referrals they have created a post-sale automation. When a job is complete the following email workflow goes out automatically:
- Thank You Email
- Provides care packet and warranty info
- Links to survey to review experience
- Lets the client know ACo will send them a follow up in 8 months to make sure they are still loving where they live (before their warranty expires).
- Warranty Follow-Up
- Email that goes out 270 days from job completion to check in for any warranty repairs needed and to ensure the client still loves where they live.
- Ask for referrals
REPORTING:
Reporting helps you gain clarity across multiple departments from marketing to sales to production.
“The reporting provides us data on how we are doing – we call this our report card,” Evans explains. “The reporting also provides us leading indicators and financials that help us determine upcoming workload and identify areas within our business that are going well or are of potential concern.”
