Jeff Day VP of Marketing, Highspot

How to Align Sales and Marketing Through Effective Sales Enablement

Alignment Drives Growth

Increased Revenue Higher Quota Attainment Higher ASPs

Faster Sales Cycles

Higher Quality Content

Increased ability to sell Less wasted time

Increased Conversion Rates

More relevant content

Higher lead acceptance rate

Marketing contribution to pipeline

“Cross-functional alignment among sales, marketing and product organizations can help companies achieve up to 19 percent faster revenue growth – and 15 percent higher profitability.”

– SiriusDecisions

Agenda •  Where does misalignment come from?

•  Cost of misalignment

•  Quantified benefits of alignment

•  7 Steps for implementing Sales Enablement

•  A closed-loop Sales Enablement solution

We Used to Fight About Leads

“These leads suck!”

“I get all my

business from my own rolodex!”

“Why can’t we

give away a Harley at a Seahawks game?!”

“Sales isn’t following up on

the leads”

“The good reps are crushing it on

Mrktg leads.”

“You couldn’t sell beef to a dog!”

Marketing Automation Fixed That

A Closed-Loop System to Measure Performance

Mea

sure/An

alyze Plan/Adjust

Execute

Awareness

Consideration

Evaluation

Purchase

Mea

sure

per

form

ance

of l

eads

Modify strategy based on data

Now We Fight About Content

“The content sucks!”

“We need more”

“It’s outdated”

“I can’t find it!”

“My content is a work of art!”

“All we do is

publish content”

“Marketing knows better than sales”

“Don’t change

the content”

Poor Alignment Hurts Sales

“B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more in revenue per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company.”

– IDC

Most Content is Wasted

Used 35%

Not Found

28%

Not Relevant

37%

Best in class companies measure and optimize content performance

SiriusDecisions 2014 study, “Cost of Content”

65% of content is wasted

Eliminate waste in sales content by:

1.  Ensuring Sales can find content

2.  Creating relevant, effective content

This requires closed-loop analytics

Cost of Content

<$100M <$1B >$1B

Size of Company

$17.5M

$9.3M

$8.2M

$5M

$10M

$15M

$20M

$6.8M

$4M

$10.8M

$0.9M $175k $0.7M

Overall Spend on Content

Creation

Internal Costs

Agency Costs

“So What’s the Solution?”

Key Elements of Alignment

1.  Common Goals

2.  Agreement on Strategy & Plan

3.  Regular & Constructive Communication

4.  Objective Performance Metrics

Sales Enablement

Sales Needs a Closed-Loop Process for Content

Closed-Loop Sales Enablement

End-to-End and Closed-Loop

Optimize the Pipeline

Knowledge Transfer Pipeline

Performance Analytics

Marketing Sales Customer

Better Alignment Drives Growth

“Cross-functional alignment among sales, marketing and product organizations can help companies achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth – and 15% higher profitability.”

–SiriusDecisions

Aberdeen Study on Sales Enablement

Best in Class companies that have Sales Enablement practices in place and good alignment between Sales and Marketing see: •  50% greater Quota attainment

•  50% more reps achieving quota

•  3x annual revenue growth

•  8x improvement in Average Sales Cycle

Drives Sales Growth Metrics Best in Class Average Laggards

120%

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

99%

61%

46%

75%

50%

27%

Overall team quota attainment

Reps achieving

quota

Revenue growth

y/y

Sales cycle time

15%

10%

5%

-5%

-10%

-15%

13.1%

4.3%

-.5%

-3.3%

-.4%

3.8%

7 Steps to Implementing Sales Enablement

Leadership 1

Sponsor: •  Has credentials to drive change •  Can work cross functionally •  Has Sales success in mind

Driver: •  Dedicate a team to Sales Enablement

Stakeholders: •  VP Marketing – Often holds the purse strings •  VP Sales – Always has a veto vote

Put the Right Leader in Charge

Kick-off a very overt communication that “mis-alignment” is not acceptable

Requires public support from Marketing and Sales leadership

Be very clear what tactical steps are being taken to align, and what behavior is not ok.

Back it up. Follow through.

Build a Culture of Alignment

2 Culture

Define Roles and Responsibilities

Write down what is expected of all parties; Marketing, Sales and Sales Enablement

Identify new processes

Encourage flexibility and innovation as groups figure out best practices

New Roles 3

Align on Incentives

Establish common ‘SMART’ Goals

Set metrics for each goal

Align sales and marketing with real incentives on common goals

If goals or incentives are off, teams will not be motivated in the same way.

Incentives 4

Regular – set up weekly or monthly meetings

Open – Meetings should be meaningful, constructive, based on data, and working towards the common goals

Topics

•  Content quality •  Content coverage •  Mapping to buyer’s journey and needs •  Content usage by sales teams •  Content impact on stage conversion, sales

Take a phased approach. Be realistic. Don’t try to boil the ocean on Day 1.

Institute Reviews & Communication

Open Communication

5

A Closed-loop Sales Enablement platform provides the system to plan, execute, measure and optimize

Requires Sales Enablement analytics

Content Mgmt and Customer Engagement

•  Quick access to all sales collateral

•  Efficient and effective pitching and email

•  Predictive Analytics and engagement alerts

Implement a Closed-Loop Platform Technology 6

Content Performance •  Coverage & freshness

•  Usage

•  Impact on Sales stage conversions

•  Impact on Revenue

Customer Engagement •  Opens, downloads, shares

•  Content by engagement

Sales Enablement •  % Content Used vs Wasted

•  Increase in Content Performance over time

•  Increase Sales over time

•  ROI on Sales Content

Establish Performance Metrics

Measure 7 “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Highspot’s Sales Enablement Platform

Highspot Sales Enablement Platform

Sales Content Management

Semantic Search

Intelligent Recommendations

Browsing and Filtering

Sales Pitches

Email Pitches

Live Pitches

Real-Time Alerts

Marketing and Sales Analytics

Content Performance

Business Performance

Pitch Performance

Platform of Machine Learning with Content Genomics

Mea

sure/An

alyze Plan/Adjust

Execute

The Highspot Difference

Reps love us Flexible Organization

Analytics Intelligence Matters

Design Matters. If sales reps don’t use the platform, nothing else matters. Highspot has >90% monthly return usage rates across all customers. Reps love Highspot.

Highspot re-architected content organization to break the failures of file-folder and tagging. Highspot is both flexible and scalable for global sales teams.

Not just reports, but a full suite of deep-dive analytics to help you understand what works and root-cause what doesn’t.

Machine learning, predictive analytics, and data science means search is better, content recommendations are accurate, and systems scale intelligently.

More Resources

About Sales Enablement “The Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement” www.highspot.com/sales-enablement

Best Practices and Getting Started Best Practices resources page www.highspot.com/articles/sales-enablement-best-practices

About Highspot Resource Library www.highspot.com/library Live Demo www.highspot.com/request-demo

Thank You