Your sales need to close bigger, better, juicier accounts. How do you enable them? By asking your digital marketing team to work up some magic. Here’s how our team is helping our clients in sales enablement using account-based marketing services.
Account Profiling
If you have a list of named accounts you want to focus on, it is not enough to simply to assign it various sales people on your CRM. Yes, they know what they are selling, and who they are selling to. But let’s save them some time, in fact a lot of time and give them a comprehensive document on the account. With the document, they get an overview of the account they have to approach, key people in the decision making and influencing team, news about the account and their competitors, and their investments related to your offerings, and so on. You can define what you want to capture and assign it to a team like ours to create the document. That’s some great sales enablement!
The benefit: Your sales team doesn’t have to waste time figuring out anything about the account, and can get started on the account right away. So they have more time to work on more accounts.
Persona Profiling
Your marketing team is doing this anyway. They have buyer personas identified from your ideal customer profile. They have content created to engage those personas. And they use a marketing automation tool to tag leads you generate with your various online and offline activities.
Now take that a few steps further. Get the persona mapped down to their job KPIs, goals and challenges, the objections they might have. Maybe your team has already done it. But if it’s not done, it is very helpful to do that.
How does this help the sales team? They get to understand their personas from the point of view of official positions they hold; what their decision making challenges are, and so on.
Now, for each of these personas, what could be the talking points? Those can be put together in the persona document.
The sales team is always in need of good content to shore up their pitch, but often doesn’t know where to find them. Maybe all the brochures, case studies and whitepapers are made available at someplace central, but if there is a blog post written a few months ago, the sales person might not be aware of it, and hence not able to use it. All relevant content can be presented as support material within the document as well.
The benefit: Your sales team always knows what could be said to a specific persona, and have the right content to corroborate their points.
New Accounts
You have a list of key accounts to target. How about finding more accounts in the same league? Your digital marketing team can create a fabulous lead magnet based on the unique knowledge you have. And run targeted campaigns on LinkedIn. You will end up with a new set of accounts that fit your ideal customer profile.
The benefit: You are adding more accounts to your pipeline, and that should keep your sales team happy!
Nurture Accounts
Accounts that are not ready to buy yet need to be nurtured. They mustn’t fall through the cracks. So the digital marketing team can come up with various strategies to nurture an account. This can be through workflows that share relevant content from time to time, or by creating account specific content, and running ad campaigns to push engagement and views. You can use a host of tools to make this happen, and drive sales enablement, but the centerpiece of this will be your content.
The benefit: Your sales team gets their hands on an account that is highly engaged with your brand. That makes things significantly easier for them, and shortens the sales cycle as well.
