Transcript: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

Video 1: The Importance of Technology in a Sales Enablement Strategy

Ali Saffari: When I got this task, I started and went to all the different organizations that would be touched by
such a solution. And basically we figured out that it's not a matter of technology, it's not a matter of which kind
of product you use for that, it's a matter of which type of organization, and which type of sales and marketing
processes you have in place, if you really want to get some value out of such a product. Basically the whole
project that I was involved in went from doing a product evaluation into an organizational design that is able to
leverage the best that comes with such a product.

Hey, it’s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. Sales enablement is the processes, content, and technology that empower sales
teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. Once you have the processes figured out, including a process for creating
and using content, the final piece of the puzzle is to implement the technology that will support those processes.

Before we talk about how to assemble a technology stack that will help your sales-enablement efforts, let’s make one
thing clear: HubSpot is a technology company, and many of the tools in our platform are designed to help with sales
enablement. But this class is not a sales pitch. If you’re already a HubSpot user, great. If you’re interested in learning
about the HubSpot technology platform, check out our website. The purpose of this class is to discuss the role of
technology in a sales-enablement strategy without recommending any particular toolset.

There are three reasons why you need technology to complete your sales enablement efforts:

First, with the appropriate technology in place, you’ll be able to measure the results of your efforts. Are sales and
marketing both meeting the terms of their SLA? Is sales using the content marketing is creating? Is the content getting
your prospects and customers to take action? The right technology will provide reports that answer all of these
questions and help you make improvements when the metrics aren’t where you want them to be. Here's Bertrand
Hazard, Vice President of Marketing at TrustRadius:

Bertrand Hazard: Now, what's interesting is, there is more and more technology that allows you to not just
measure what you're doing, because if you can't manage, if you don't measure, but you can also have some very
complex systems and ways to measure marketing attribution. So, there's no excuse to not measure and try to
understand the contribution.

Second, with the appropriate technology in place, you’ll be able to provide visibility into the results you’re driving. There
are two parts to visibility. First, the reports you generate can easily be shared with the leadership team and anyone else
interested in seeing the results of your sales enablement strategy. This will demonstrate the value of what you’re doing,
and it will also increase the motivation for marketing and sales to deliver their deliverables. The other part of visibility is
having all of your customer-facing teams — marketing, sales, customer support, and anyone else who works with your
customers and prospects — sharing the same system of record. They should all be seeing the same data and the same
information anytime they look at a customer record. This will enable your teams to provide a seamless experience to
people as they go from being a prospect to a lead to a customer.

In their book, Aligned to Achieve, Andrea Austin and Tracy Eiler write:
 Transcript: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

You need a single source of truth. [...] Sales can more effectively engage when they see what marketing has learned, and
marketing can better target by using what sales has learned to hone messaging [...]. When sales and marketing are in
alignment, when your data is in alignment, there is a single source of truth on which both teams can agree. Using data as
the common language fosters collaboration and improves communication.

The final reason you need technology is that it’ll allow you to automate parts of the process. After you get your
processes fully designed and implemented, you’ll be able to accelerate them by pulling in appropriate technologies. And
given the ever-increasing size of the modern technology landscape, it’s a safe bet that you’ll be able to find technologies
well suited to the jobs you need to get done.

But again, you have to get your processes figured out first. If you try to automate things before your process is fully
defined, you’re going to run into trouble. John McTigue, Marketing Technology Consultant at The MarTech Whisperer,
has written:

A simple example of a process gone wrong is a lead that converts on a mid-funnel offer but also triggers a defined "sales-
ready" behavior the same day, like filling out a Contact Us form. Marketing automatically sends out a thank you and
adds the lead to a new lead nurturing campaign that sends them more marketing emails over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, the sales team receives the SQL notice and immediately calls the lead and starts the sales process. If Larry
Lead is receiving both marketing and sales messages, and they aren't in sync, the risk of losing that lead skyrockets.

Yikes. So start by implementing a sales enablement process, and once you get that in place, look for technology. And
then you’ll be able to accelerate your sales enablement strategy with measured results, deep visibility, and smart
automation.

Video 2: Choosing the Right Technology

First, start with the core and then move to the edges. The core is your foundational systems — your CRM, marketing
automation platform, content management system, and so on. Take your time selecting your core because it’s going to
be where you centralize all of the data on your content, contacts, and customers. You want to choose a system that will
work well for you and invest in keeping it long-term. This isn’t to say you can’t change your core system — we help
people do that all the time — but it’s hard, and it certainly isn’t something you’ll want to do frequently.

Once you have your core in place, you can start building on top of it with all of the specific tools you need to implement
your processes and strategy — and that’s the edges. On the edges, you can be much more aggressive in experimenting
with new innovations. Try things out, trade things in and out, mix and match until you get all of the functionality you
need to fully implement your strategy.

But there is a caveat, and that’s the second piece of advice: Connect the core and edges as seamlessly as possible. If you
cobble together a dozen different point solutions, the maintenance on your tech stack might be high. Worse, you might
run into inconsistencies. Here’s another quote from Aligned to Achieve:
 Transcript: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

What frequently happens in B2B companies is that marketing relies on marketing automation as their single source of
truth and sales does the same with CRM. Sometimes the data doesn't agree and that causes problems.

This is something you need to be mindful of. If your core and edges are composed of disparate systems, you probably
will have some inconsistencies. So you’re faced with a trade-off: You can find the top-performing tool for each aspect of
your business and deal with inconsistencies, or you can find one system that does everything as well as possible. If you
go with the first option, be sure to choose one system as the one source of truth for all of your teams. If you want to go
with the all-in-one option, you’re inside a HubSpot portal right now. Feel free to poke around and see what you think.

Video 3: What Does a Technology Strategy Look Like?

Ali Saffari: My name is Ali Saffari. I am executive director sales and marketing at Trusted Shops.

Ali was originally hired as a consultant at Trusted Shops. They brought him on to evaluate whether a marketing
automation tool would be of value to them. And he went from being a consultant to be an executive director. Here’s
how it happened:

Ali Saffari: It was a very interesting ride. First of all, I think the best thing to do is we start a three step process.
First of all we said, “What is the goals we want to achieve?” And the goals basically was the guiding star, but
what we wanted to do, and the goal was indeed to be able with this organization, to generate most of the
revenue from inbound leads instead of outbound cold calling. So once we had that in place, we went through
the organization. But at one point we stopped that. We said, "Let's not focus on what we have, but basically
what we need to achieve that goal." It was a very clean greenfield approach. We said, "Okay. What would be the
best organization to achieve that goal?" Once we had the organization on each role, we tried to define, okay,
which type of skills and capabilities we need in each parts of this organization. And once we had that and we
agreed on that this is the thing we need to achieve our goal, then we started to say, "Okay, where we are now
with our organization, with our people, and how we can transfer them from where we are right now to this
target organization which we have, which we are aiming to achieve?" And that's where we started a very
significant change process within the organization. Yeah, that's the basic approach we use, and I was very lucky
to be in an organization that embraced this change, that saw the opportunities with it, and from all the way
from top down to individual levels we ... I was fortunate enough to be with a team that really help me achieve
this goal in a very short period of time.

Ali is quick to point out this this approach requires support from the highest levels of leadership:

Ali Saffari: I think the important part is it started at the CEO level. It was initiated by him. And it was the basic
idea and the vision and the goal we want to achieve, was done by me as a consultant at that point in time and
him with his vision in mind, where he wants his organization to develop to. And then we basically set up a team
that could help us to get where we are right now. It involved our HR director, because a lot of changes were
needed, it involved all the relevant team and unit heads that needed to go through that change. And we started
 Transcript: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

with a small team that created the basic ideas and the basic values, and we moved on with a communication the
more mature these ideas and these concepts got. At that point we had two separate organizations, marketing
and sales. And marketing was in all marketing relevant tasks and activities in that organization, and that included
everything from branding, PR, to based all the way down to performance marketing for example. Or a
newsletter et cetera. What we did is we said, "Okay. What are the most crucial parts of that that are relevant to
the inbound marketing approach?" Because we said, "Okay. It doesn't make sense to put everything together in
one organization," since some parts are actually better when they are isolated for example, branding or PR, for
example. But everything that was related to performance marketing, it was related to how we communicate
with our individual leads, that was put into one single organization. We created basically a new organization out
of nothing. And it was a new name called inbound demand generation team. And we have that team basically
for each market individually. And each of these teams is solely responsible for providing marketing core values.
We took out everything that was related to, for example, creating better reach or create better branding and
mentions, and all these sort of KPIs we usually find in marketing organizations out of that organization, and just
slowly focus on provide the best possible leads for the least amount of effort basically. And each marketing
manager, or inbound demand generation manager for each market is responsible for that. And they have a team
of content editors, designers, and performance marketeers that help them achieve this goal. So right now we
are in a very fortunate situation that from the sales revenue targets backwards, every of these goals are
intertwined to each other. So for example, the guys and girls doing Facebook ads or inbound marketing, their
goals are intertwined to the marketing qualified leads that needs to come out of that. And that goes into the
sales targets and so on. So it is one single funnel that we are working on. And I guess, this is ... No matter how
you look at it and the more I think about it, this is one of the keys to the success, if you are going this route is to
have one funnel, and every part of this organization is contributing to that funnel.

The results from this transformation were stunning:

Ali Saffari: We had 200% increase in the leads we got from our online marketing activities. We could reduce our
cost per leads in some areas up to a factor of 20. This year we are aiming to achieve one third of our customers
from inbound demand generation team. And we are pretty good on track to achieve that.

If you’re looking to undergo a similar transformation, Ali has some advice for you:

Ali Saffari: If I would be in the same situation again, it's very likely I would go with the same route of first of all,
start with the goals. What do you want to achieve? Because when I started, a lot of people had this
understanding that, "Yeah, we need to do marketing and we need to do automation, then we need to buy a
tool, and everything's gonna be great." But that was not the goal, because you don't do that because you want
to do marketing automation, you want to achieve something. So that was the first thing. And it is very easily
said, "Let's have a goal." But when you talk to five or six different people in the organization and say what would
be a good goal for this project? You might end up with more than one answer. And once you have that, it is very
important to have an organization that can achieve that. So starting with the organization, it is very important. It
is, in my point of view, very unlikely that you would find an organization that is perfectly suited to achieve an
inbound marketing approach. Because everything that has been developed in the past is more or less, especially
in the B to B sector, ending up in two different units with different targets and different also ways to tackle
things. So that would be the first thing you need to do.
 Transcript: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology

So remember, start by defining your goals and your customer and your content strategy, the move to implementing
processes like SLAs and smarketing meetings, and then, after you’ve done all that, you’ll be ready to accelerate those
things with the appropriate technology. Best of luck.