Good morning Marketer, how much of sales enablement falls to your marketing team? 

Last fall, Forrester predicted 50% of B2B organizations would transition their sales enablement functions to marketing. According to Caroline Robertson, Forrester VP and research director, organizations that have an upper hand with sales enablement have something in common in that their salespeople are working with modern toolsets. In other words, organizations need sales tools that drive better efficiencies and better experiences for their buyers.

But how can marketers integrate a comprehensive sales toolset on top of the martech foundation already in place? Darryl Praill, CMO for the sales engagement platform VanillaSoft, provided an example of a client during a Discover MarTech virtual presentation in April. Praill explained that when Carrie Griffin joined The SALT Group as VP of business development, her objective was to triple the company’s revenue in three to five years time, but she lacked the necessary sales enablement infrastructure to meet such audacious goals. 

To select the right sales enablement platform, Griffin’s criteria required that it was user-friendly, customizable, affordable and it had to include analytics to track individual sales rep performance. Griffin decided to go with a two-prong approach, implementing VanillaSoft’s sales platform atop Salesforce.com. Once in place, Griffin could onboard her sales reps dramatically faster, said Praill. The platform’s data and analytics tools also made it possible to quickly identify her high performers — and then leverage their skills to cross-train the reps who were not hitting the same goals. 

This cross-section between sales and marketing is nothing new. According to Gartner, an effective customer experience depends on tighter alignments between the marketing and sales organizations, especially in a post-pandemic world. “Process maps detailing how different functions interact with one another will be crucial to deliver the ‘right’ content at the ‘right’ time to customers,” Gartner wrote. 

There’s more below, including a case study on how a major e-commerce platform found success with TikTok advertising. 

Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor