Did you know that buyers complete 50% to 80% of the purchasing decision before engaging a sales rep?
Armed with research and resources at their fingertips, modern buyers demand more of sellers, expecting them to provide added value and unique insights.
This is where marketing teams have an opportunity to shine.
When sellers have marketing content that maps to each stage of the journey, their odds of securing buyer progression increase substantially. But how can marketers know what content is most effective when it comes to winning over buyers? How can they ensure the sales team knows where to find the right content when they need it? And finally, how can they measure how their efforts are impacting business success?
You guessed it — sales enablement is the key to unlocking the answers to these questions. This is just one reason why Highspot was named a Top Marketing Tool of 2018 by Smart Selling Tools.
Let’s take a look at what life looks like for marketers empowered by sales enablement:
You Create Game-Changing Content
If you’ve ever spent hours toiling over perfecting a piece of content only to see it collect dust, you’re not alone. SiriusDecisions reports that 60% to 70% of the content that marketing develops goes unused by sales. This is usually due to two reasons, both of which sales enablement solves.
First, sellers may not be able to find your content when it’s buried in multiple drives and folders. It’s impossible to use something when they don’t know it exists. Highspot’s award-winning approach to content management provides a singular source for reps to easily search, browse, and receive intelligent recommendations on content to use based on what has performed well in similar scenarios.
Second, sellers may not be using your content because it’s not relevant to their unique selling situation. Just because an infographic looks nice doesn’t mean it will effectively close a deal. With Highspot’s end-to-end analytics, marketers gain insights into the content sales is using, how sellers are customizing that content over time, and how effective each piece is in the field. With this data, teams can focus energy and budget on creating content that not only gets used, but that drives results.
Alignment Should be the New Normal
Remember the days when sales and marketing were siloed, miscommunication happened on the regular, and time and resources were wasted? With a sales enablement platform, those times are becoming a distant memory.
Highspot customer InsideView’s CMO Tracy Eiler shared that research by analysts shows that alignment helps companies increase win rates by 38%, customer retention by 36%, profit growth by 27%, and business growth by 36%. Sales enablement bridges the gap between sales and marketing by providing access to shared insights, a single place to collaborate, and a streamlined way to communicate. And it doesn’t stop there — Highspot offers the ability to provide guidance alongside every asset, allowing marketers to indicate best practices for each piece of content.
For InsideView, Highspot enabled their teams to manage a wide assortment of content, resulting in unified sales and marketing efforts, a 98% platform adoption rate within its first quarter of use, and a 78% breadth usage rate (30 day usage/90 day usage). In the words of Product Marketing Manager Jyothsna Durgadoss, “Highspot has helped us solve our content mess, showcase the right content to our reps, and provide analytics on usage. It also helped create a behavioral change in our reps, as now they engage more with prospects and customers through sharing content. This is reflected by the high adoption and engagement metrics we see on Highspot.”
Powerful Analytics Prove Marketing’s Value
It’s a tale as old as time — without metrics to demonstrate the value of content and activities, the marketing team often goes undervalued and under-funded. This story can be rewritten, however, with the power of sales enablement.
Highspot’s advanced analytics, powered by artificial intelligence, show the impact content has on buyer engagement and sales. Marketers can see content usage in every sales stage and identify which has the biggest impact on buyers — and, most importantly, revenue. With this knowledge, marketing can spend their time creating valuable content that maps to each stage of the buyer’s journey and quantify their contribution to the bottom line.
Once your organization invests in a sales enablement platform, you won’t ever look back. Between seeing an average 300% improvement in marketing content used by sales, proving ROI with hard data, and making optimizations based on insights, marketers at companies of all sizes spanning different industries will agree on one thing — sales enablement matters.
Ready to see how Highspot makes a difference? Request a demo today.
