For the everyday marketer, prospects and clients are primarily their target audiences. Their marketing initiatives and efforts typically revolve around these two audiences and their needs. Their campaigns, content, and goals are closely aligned to these audiences in an effort to increase sales and brand awareness. As marketing has become more sophisticated with technology, it has shifted and created, what some may call the new customer for the marketing team. The sales team. With new tools at their disposal and an evolving Sales funnel that now features marketing as a significant contributor, the sales team can sometimes be considered a customer to marketing. Or we can refer to this type of service as Sales Enablement.

Marketers are now being tasked with teaming up with their internal sales teams to help them have more valuable interactions and touchpoints with their clients and prospects. Whether it is in person, or through a personalized digital experience, marketers need to be able to supply sales with the tools and tech to be able to:

1. Reach New Prospects
2. Close Deals Faster
3. Stand-out Against Competition

Marketers can leverage their CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, such as Sales Cloud and Pardot, to help sales teams deliver these Sales Enablement results. There are other Sales Enablement tools offered by Salesforce, such as Salesforce Engage which isn’t covered in this article.

Sales Enablement – Reaching New Prospects

Social Media & Digital Marketing
When you’re using a tool like Pardot, you’ll be able to schedule and send your social media through Pardot as well as your Digital Marketing with Pardot connectors such as Google Adwords. With the connectors and integrations to these platforms, you’ll be able to capture the engagement data inside of Pardot for automation and sales follow-up. Additionally, you’re able to push this information into Salesforce, so your Sales Team can quickly and easily view this information right from the lead and contact records. Offering timely insights so they can engage with their leads and contacts timely and relevantly. This embedded component is called Engagement History, and looks like the below:

Only 13% of B2B marketers describe their lead generation efforts as successful. They need to be able to find leads that resemble their customers. With Pardot and Sales Cloud can leverage your CRM data to find look-alike audiences that resemble your top customers, then send target prospects relevant content and campaigns in order to engage with them, in hopes of reaching new prospects.

With Pardot Lead Scoring & Grading you’re able to assign point values to your prospect’s activity, to see how interested they are in you, and grade them to determine how interested you are in them. With the combination of lead scoring and grading, you can determine which prospects are ready to talk to sales. So you can dig into that enormous prospect database and elevate interested and qualified leads to your sales team.

Sales Enablement – Closing Deals Faster

Marketing tools have changed what the traditional sales funnel looks like. Now both the marketers and sales teams are together filling the funnel and working hand-in-hand on optimizing that process. Marketers can help sales improve the follow-up process with automation and relevant content. So Sales can reduce time spent on manual tasks so sales can focus on closing deals.

Some great tactics with Sales Cloud & Pardot include:

• Create marketing email templates that sales can leverage and send right from the lead and contact records. Sales can personalize and send them right to their prospects and clients. This saves time because the content and links to helpful information are already created.
• Use Engagement studio to help create nurture programs to follow up with leads. According to the Annuitas Group Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Create a lead nurturing process for leads, customers, and sales.
• Since sales are now your new customer, you can create an onboarding program for new salespeople to help them learn all of the tools they have at their disposal, with helpful reminders and tips.
• Use tasks to remind sales when to follow up with their leads. You can even schedule tasks from Pardots Engagement Studio.

Sales Enablement – Stand-out Against Competition

According to Google, 60% of B2B buyers are researching for peer-reviews and testimonials while conducting research during their buyer’s journey. Creating compelling customer success stories that present real-world tactics that showcase your solutions, with a customer testimonial can help differentiate your solutions from your competition. Take a real-world problem, and present a strong solution that will help the buyer move to the next stage of the funnel.

Using Pardot and Sales Cloud you can store Sales Enablement content for your reps to easily access and share with customers. You can even create email templates that link documentation for an even quicker share from your reps. If your files are hosted in Pardot, you can create notifications when they are viewed, so your sales team can even receive an email when one of their prospects or customers views a file. According to the CMO Council, 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions.

Consider creating a content library with the following tools for your sales team:

1. First call deck
2. Powerpoint templates for products
3. Events
4. eBooks
5. Content Calendar
6. Product Sheets, Documentation, Technical Documents

Be Where Your Prospects Are
93% of B2B buying processes begin with an online search and 75% of buyers use social media to help make a buying decision. Prospects need to be able to explore your brand across many channels. They’re educating themselves about your brand and are exploring all of your digital channels, which make it so important to be where they are. Using Pardot you can deliver a consistent brand and messaging across many channels. You can leverage Pardot and Sales Cloud to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales, by providing tools, information, and content for your sales team to use. Pardot can help provide branded templates, nurtures, and experiences that your sales team can use when they need it, without relying on marketing to have to create new assets each time.

If you’re a B2C organization and are evaluating ways and tactics to use Pardot for B2C, feel free to check out this article on tactics you can use. If you’ve just gone live with your Salesforce/Pardot implementation, there’s a helpful post on what you need to do after implementing Salesforce. If you still have some questions feel free to reach out to us.

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.