Have you heard about Marketing Enablement?
Have you heard about Marketing Enablement?
We talk quite a bit about sales enablement on this blog. We love sharing ways that marketing and sales operations teams can help sales organizations improve their processes and sell more effectively. But if marketing isn’t working efficiently, they are going to have a lot of trouble helping sales succeed. This is where marketing enablement comes in.
Marketing enablement is the process through which marketing-owned activities such as content creation, content storage, sales communication, and content analytics are made more efficient, improving overall Sales and Marketing alignment.
This radically alters the way content is stored, created, refined and delivered. A true marketing enablement initiative will give marketers the freedom to create better personalized content that speaks directly to their buyers and their needs. That content then can be stored in a more efficient manner by reducing the amount of ineffective and unused content while also service the content up to more targeted audiences through content profiles. Content analytics is arguably the biggest benefit of a marketing enablement strategy. If you’re a marketer think about what you’d give to have insights into how content performs, how it’s engaged with, who uses it the moth, and finally, the actual effect on revenue your content has.
There’s a big hole in most B-to-B marketing organizations created by constant changes within the marketing profession. These changes include the transformation from marketing as a cost center to a revenue center, the rise and use of digital technology to enable that transformation and the pivot to customer-centricity. Marketers are scrambling to respond to these changes. The glue to make all of this work that’s missing is marketing enablement.
“Marketing enablement is the process through which marketing-owned activities such as content creation, content storage, sales communication, and content analytics are made more efficient, improving overall Sales and Marketing alignment.”
Solving problems isn't the same as creating value
Data is the lifeblood of nearly any marketing initiative. Social media, customer outreach platforms, emails and web chats contain enough information to render near-complete portraits of customer personas. Motivations that were once impossibly opaque can now be understood and catered to. But it would be a mistake to assume marketing tools are guaranteed to help marketers pipe warm lead after warm lead to sales. A strong marketing stack can speed up tasks, which is a victory, but that's not marketing enablement.
For example, marketing email automation will let you push email content to certain leads based on input values from a marketer, which is great. But what if you wanted those emails to be triggered automatically when a prospect likes something on Facebook that is loosely related to a recent drip campaign? Your email automation platform isn’t necessarily designed to automatically funnel leads into certain drips based on that lead’s recent activity on Facebook or Twitter. But it could be.
The point is, when marketers work within the confines of their tools, they slot themselves into user stories determined by the developers of those resources. They can solve some problems, but they are not entirely free to identify new opportunities for value that exist independently of those tools as workflows. They're effectively operating inside boxes.
To create value is to build processes that can drive all of your data to action. In marketing, the same applies. Getting the timing of lead nurturing campaigns just right, isolating the ideal audience, and knowing what actions to take to drive engagement and accelerate buying behavior requires free-flowing data between applications. That's because marketing enablement, in its truest form, is the ability of marketing staff to operate within the confines of their imaginations, as opposed to the confines of existing user stories. Case in point, Aberdeen Group's research found that best-in-class marketers are 74 percent more likely to have "a strongly integrated system of marketing technology solutions." In other words, unified marketing is not a pipe dream, and according to the numbers, it works.
“Solving problems isn’t the same as creating value. To create value is to build processes that can drive all of your data to action. In marketing, the same applies.”
Marketing enablement is a not new idea. We’ve been tossing around this term for years. In the past, it never caught on as a buzzword for marketers, but now the need for a dedicated marketing enablement function is critical. Marketing will not successfully respond to current and future challenges without a dedicated marketing enablement effort.
Just look at the results so far:
Less than one-third of B-to-B marketing organizations report credible financial results.
The average marketing team is juggling more than 20 different technologies.
Less than 25% of marketers feel they have an optimized martech stack.
And fewer than 50% of B-to-B marketing organizations have an actionable customer journey map.
As marketing has struggled to keep up with massive market changes, we’ve never given a name to the idea that marketing must be enabled in a new way. The new way is one that is overarching, deliberate and orchestrated. The new way is to operationalize a marketing enablement capability.
First, we need to recognize that marketing enablement is an organizational capability. This means if one person or several people leave the marketing team, this capability can successfully persist. An organizational capability is derived from a strategy and consists of a bundle of people, processes and technology that drives a business result.
Another key element to marketing enablement is the identification and use of technologies that enable marketing results.
“Another key element to marketing enablement is the identification and use of technologies that enable marketing results.”
What is a martech?
A marketing technology (martech) stack is the collection of technologies that marketers use to optimize and augment their marketing processes throughout the customer lifecycle. Marketing technologies are used to streamline internal collaboration, analyze the performance of marketing campaigns, and conduct personalized and proactive communication with customers.
“Marketing technologies are used to streamline internal collaboration, analyze the performance of marketing campaigns, and conduct personalized and proactive communication with customers.”
How to implement Marketing enablement?
We have to start with a marketing strategy and how it supports, enables and drives company strategy. For example, if the company strategy is fast growth through new account acquisition, this becomes the strategy for marketing. If the company strategy involves pivoting from being product-focused to customer-centric, this becomes the strategy for marketing.
Whatever the company strategy , marketing needs to create a parallel strategy that, once defined, must then be operationalized. Part of operationalizing the strategy includes marketing enablement.
We have to follow with holistic Marketing Training. Companies spend millions of dollars on sales training and sales enablement programs, yet they spend practically nothing on formal and consistent training for marketing. Sales garners investment because it is a revenue- and growth-driver in the organization — a hard job. I see this in 99% of the companies I work with. I have yet to find one company with a training program for the marketing organization that is similar to sales. However, as the role of marketing changes from being the creative department to a driver of revenue and growth, much more effort needs to be invested into training marketing through marketing enablement. In this case, the role of marketing enablement is to determine the skills required and to develop and deliver consistent training on them. In addition, all training should exist within a holistic knowledge acquisition structure. Just imagine the difference in marketing performance if training for marketing was as standardized and supported as training for sales.
“We have to follow with holistic Marketing Training. Companies spend millions of dollars on sales training and sales enablement programs, yet they spend practically nothing on formal and consistent training for marketing.”
Third step is to implement a proper organizational process. Marketing operations has been successful at identifying and execution of cross-functional processes. An example is the lead management process. I’ve seen MO teams have great success working with sales to implement a cohesive and cross-functional lead management process. Reasons include their data-driven approach, higher level view of core processes and the lack of negative history working with sales. Their work in cross-functional processes is certainly anchored in using technology to enable new processes, but operationalizing new processes is about more than just technology and data. In today’s customer engagement economy, as marketing’s role continues to morph into a revenue growth-driver, working in a cross-functional environment is becoming the new norm for any B-to-B marketing team. Given the new norm is here to stay, the marketing enablement function should be looking at what is required in cross-functional processes and determine how to operationalize these processes. This might require working with the marketing operations function to determine the tech needs and with marketing to determine content, campaigns or SEO fit. Sales can reset expectations and the customer success team can inform customer needs.
Marketing enablement is critical for any marketing organization that wants to be more than the creative department. Transforming marketing from a cost center to a revenue center, optimizing technology for results and leading the pivot away from product-centricity and to customer-centricity will not happen by accident. B-to-B marketing organizations need a strong marketing enablement function that will carry them boldly into the future.
“B-to-B marketing organizations need a strong marketing enablement function that will carry them boldly into the future.”
