Sales Enablement vs. Content Marketing – The difference

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Alongside content marketing, sales enablement is gaining steam in the B2B sector. In many circumstances, both content marketing and sales enablement can achieve a similar effect: nurturing potential consumers toward a buying decision or commitment. While both content marketing and sales enablement complement each other, they represent two very distinct, very different practices.

To best deploy both content marketing and sales enablement for your organization, you’ll first need to clearly understand what makes one distinct from the other.

Let’s first examine what both sales enablement and content marketing can offer an organization:

Sales enablement is an iterative process of providing your sales force with the tools and resources they need to enhance their efficiency and close more sales. These resources may include information, data and content that help your salesforce add value to customer interactions and effectively sell products and services.

By contrast, content marketing means the creation and distribution of written material that provides value for consumers as they consider your products and services. Content distributed to consumers can include one-pagers, whitepapers, blogs, long-form articles, playbooks, product guides, etc. Sometimes, content marketing also includes the materials used by sales reps during interactions with potential customers — slide decks, webinar presentations, even recorded video content.

In simple words, content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to your target audience. Sales enablement equips sales reps with that same content, to make their interactions with consumers more meaningful.

How do content marketing and sales enablement work together?

Often, there’s some confusion surrounding how sales enablement and content marketing should work together. Is sales enablement a part of content marketing? Is content marketing a part of sales enablement?

For simplicity’s sake, it’s easier to say that content marketing is a part — a very important part — of sales enablement.

The best approach to sales enablement depends on a steady dose of content. After all, content can help usher consumers through the business acquisition funnel better than perhaps anything else. Whether your target customers are looking to learn more information, familiarize themselves with product details, compare your services with competitors’  or dialogue directly with sales reps, it’s your job to feed them the right content at the right time. In fact, your approach to sales enablement should include a major focus on providing each member of your sales team with the content they need to address customers, no matter the questions they have or the challenges they face.

The right content better prepares your sales team to solve customer concerns, and help them overcome barriers to a purchase or commitment.

Even though content marketing represents only one facet of sales enablement, it’s not limited to written materials. Content marketing includes any content that captures the voice of your business, in ways that provide accurate, useful information to their prospects.

Today, customers expect sales reps to have answers ready for any questions they might have. The traditional sales profile, which only required sales reps to close the deal, is rapidly being replaced by a model where sales reps are involved at nearly every stage. To help sales reps handle this workload, many companies are increasing their reliance on the right sales enablement tool — one that help automate processes and streamline communications.

What are the other parts of sales enablement?

Though content marketing represents a large portion of sales enablement, there’s more to sales enablement than its content. In fact, sales enablement is characterized by a rich variety of tools, each of which helps a sales team, or an individual sales representative, operate more efficiently and effectively.

In addition to content marketing, here are some of the major features that the best sales enablement platforms offer:

  • Advanced analytics — Insights from the analytics you gather can help sales representatives take action to further improve their operations. In particular, information on consumer trends, buying preferences, website activity, average order values and common questions can provide sales teams with data they can then act on.
  • Onboarding management — Sales onboarding can be a challenge. Without the right approach, sales onboarding can compromise your productivity and sap your bandwidth from critical sales activities. That’s why many sales enablement tools help streamline onboarding management. Onboarding management can help your company scale faster, keep sales staff engaged and provide marketing materials.
  • Automated workflows — Every sales team can benefit from saved time and fewer daily tasks. That’s exactly what automation can help your sales department accomplish. Through a sales enablement solution, automated workflows encourage action and motivate team members to work hard and depend on machine learning.
  • Gamification — With the right approach, gamification can help enhance your sales team’s productivity and engage representatives. In addition, gamification allows sales leaders to offer prizes and awards when processes are completed above expectations.
  • Program management — Through program management, sales representatives help their teams, and their customers, achieve their goals through optimized workflows. This means tying together major projects in ways that improve communication, prioritize the most pressing projects and ultimately manage active programs.
  • Platform integrations — With sales team and organizational growth comes more responsibility and less bandwidth. The best way to tackle this strain is by integrating current sales platforms with your sales enablement tool, to reduce project turnaround times and consolidate all information under one roof.
  • Governance — The “role filter” feature that governance allows can help your sales team control permissions, and assign specific roles to specific team members.

These and other major facets to sales enablement help sales teams focus on the most pressing issues at hand, while organizing tasks and minimizing busywork. When you pair an already high-performing sales team with a highly capable sales enablement solution, the results can easily help you outpace traditional figures. You’ll find that your team has increased bandwidth to interface directly with potential customers, without worrying about creating content, logging time or performing tasks that could otherwise be automated.

If you’re ready to leverage a difference-making sales enablement approach for your sales team, EnableU is ready to help. Connect with our Solutions team today for more information on everything you could accomplish with a sales enablement platform that woks as hard as you do.

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