Companies today operate in a buyers’ world, and selling is much more difficult than it was even 10 years ago. Markets have shifted from the time when B2B buyers had a smaller selection of products and fewer ways to learn about them. They relied on in-person meetings and a lengthy discovery process to evaluate and purchase.
In many industries, there were a few big, trusted players who dominated the space. Prospects didn’t have many alternatives, and sellers could pick and choose their leads.
But with the arrival of the internet, new companies disrupted markets and there is competition in industries that had been stable for decades. Today, buyers can discover and compare products without ever meeting with a sales representative. It’s more difficult to stand out or differentiate your product.
Buyers now are barraged with sales messages from companies promoting similar product lines. While more choice is great for customers, it means organizations have to put much more effort into making every sale.
They’re competing with dozens of other companies, if not more, and trying to reach customers whose bandwidth for new information is rapidly shrinking. When B2B buyers compare multiple suppliers, the amount of time they spend with any one sales rep may be only 5% or 6%, according to Gartner.
Thriving in an ultra-competitive space takes focus and discipline, driven by a modern revenue enablement approach. Here are four best practices to equip buyer-facing roles with the learning, coaching, and content they need to succeed.
1. Tailor Your Enablement to the Buyer’s Journey
Identify all of the ways that prospective buyers engage with your company as they move through the sales funnel from awareness to consideration to purchase to renewal.
Once you have mapped this journey from the top to the bottom of the funnel—how buyers engage with you at each stage—you can define the internal team that is responsible for each touchpoint and optimize that interaction.
Revenue enablement must support each team with the specific training, content, and tools that will allow them to be most effective and efficient.
2. Create Stage-Specific Content
From the look of your materials to the ease of getting questions answered, the customer must feel they are working with one coherent entity that is focused on their success.
Take a holistic look at each interaction with your company—from initial emails to event and webinar invitations to sales decks to customer success materials. At a minimum, ensure that brand standards for fonts, colors, and logos are being met every step of the way for every type of content.
Next, audit your materials. Identify missing assets, update those that are out of date, and create new training materials and external collateral that will nurture the customer along the journey and motivate them to move forward from one state to the next. This will allow you to create the most consistent customer experience from start to finish.
3. Align Teams
The third revenue enablement best practice is to facilitate communication and collaboration between teams and align every touchpoint with a department.
Successful enablement will depend on how well internal teams are aligned around processes, metrics, and goals. The point at which each buyer is “handed off” to the next team on the journey is a moment of risk. Each has potential for error, discontinuity, or miscommunication during which the buyer will not feel supported or engaged.
It’s at these “weak links” that a customer may opt out, choosing not purchase, renew, or refer. All the resources and efforts invested in that buyer up until that time will have been wasted.
4. Rely on Data, Not Instinct
The final revenue enablement best practice is defining methods for measuring outcomes and adoption. Revenue enablement metrics track all types of customer-focused activities that lead to revenue.
If this is a new approach for your organization, you must clearly identify how the organization will measure enablement efforts. Measurement across agreed-upon metrics will reveal areas of strength and weaknesses, allowing the organization to increase or decrease resources to achieve a high ROI.
For example, measure buyer engagement and sales effectiveness with analytics tied to business outcomes using quantitative and qualitative data from the point of sale. Or validate the effectiveness of content and messaging to understand the revenue impact of content with easy-to-understand analytics and dashboards.
When you understand prospect engagement patterns across each point of interaction, you can use that information to deliver holistic improvement, inform forecasts, and iterate your revenue enablement strategy and tactics to drive significant results.
