Enablement is often thought of as a sales activity.  However, the shift to a modern, content-led buyer journey means marketing needs to lead a lot more enablement.

Why?

The new buyer journey is 70% to 80% digital and content-driven. Buyers are engaging in problem and solution education on their own before joining a sales call.

That means they show up to sales calls highly educated on your company and your product.  

That means sales teams need to be ready for upcoming calls to position value for that buyer.

Enablement is more about positioning value for buyers based on their goals, roles, and market segments than it is about sales tactics.

There are three keys to effective marketing-led enablement.

Buyer personalization

Marketing needs to continually educate sales teams about all the buying personas on your buying committee

Gartner has shown that there are 6-10 buyers in the average B2B purchase. Some care about product value, some care about business value, and others care about enterprise or technical value.

73% of B2B buyers say most sales interactions feel transactional and not connected to their needs, according to Salesforce Research.

A main reason for that is that buyer personas are high-level marketing concepts.  

Personas need to be made actionable with simple enablement tools that outline: 

• What does each persona value?  
• What questions draw them out?  
• How do they connect value as a buying committee?

Segment personalization

All markets are micro-segmented. Buyers do not want to hear about all great customer stories; they want to hear about your great stories with customers “just like them.”

The Content Marketing Institute and McKinsey and Company have shown that more than two-thirds of buyers want content that is segment-specific.

For each ideal customer segment, marketing needs to make it simple for sales to understand:

• The top challenges faced by buyers in the segment
• The connection between top challenges and use case variation
• A top list of customer stories and name drops

One Team Enablement

Marketing needs to lead with one-team enablement, which means that focus on testing content and positioning in a cross-functional way that draws on field team learnings.

Most marketing-generated content and positioning materials never get used by sales or accounts teams; estimates of unused content vary between 60 and 90 percent.

The reason is simple: many marketing teams do not have a marketing enablement strategy to connect their brand positioning to their field team execution or to regularly iterate positioning and content with field team learnings.

Marketing can lead on positioning around buyer personas, buying committees, and ICP segments, and they need to continually refine their positioning frames with field input.