5 Takeaways from Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Team Around Modern Data

At The Juice, we’ve had the opportunity to surround ourselves and learn from some of the best B2B Sales and Marketing professionals in the world. Last week, we were joined by two of them to discuss How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Team Around Modern Data. 

Brett, our VP of Marketing, was joined by two enablement experts. Chad Trabucco, Director of Revenue Enablement at Guru, and Alex Zikakis, VP of Enablement at Sales Assembly, shared their learnings and recommendations for ensuring that sales and marketing are speaking the same language using intent data. 

Nuggets of wisdom (and actionable advice) were shared throughout the entire presentation. But there were a few lessons and recommendations that stood out to me as I listened and learned from these experts. 

Simply prioritizing Sales Enablement is a confidence boost for your team. 

This sounds so simple but I’ve been at organizations without Sales Enablement and it ends up being everybody’s fourth or fifth (at best) priority. In corporate-speak this translates to … it’s not a priority. 

During the conversation, Chad and Alex discussed how having a true owner, even part-time owner, in an organization is a huge boost of confidence for your sales team. There’s a single place for your team to go with questions, ask for advice, and learn from. Who on your team owns Sales Enablement? 

Sales Reps are artists. Create space for them to practice their art. 

Hey marketers, that carefully crafted sales journey you’ve helped build? 

LOL

Listen, I love process. Truly. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy the startup stage so much—you experiment, iterate, and try to build process as fast as possible. 

While building a sales process is a great exercise to align the team around that’s just simply not how it plays out in reality. So, enable your team but then give them space to practice their art. They were hired to be the sales experts. Make it easier for them to practice their expertise. 

Remote work lends itself to getting out of the way. 

This is great perspective for sales enablement…and everybody in an organization. For me, I’ve said that launching The Juice has been an exercise of, “hire smart people and get out of the way.” 

The same goes for sales and marketing. This point is related to letting your artists practice their craft.

While many things have been made more difficult by remote work, this is not one of them. I like thinking of enablement as tent posts. Teach your team, let them run on their own, come back with feedback, iterate, and teach again. It’s ever evolving but you won’t ever learn and improve if you don’t get out of the way. 

People learn differently than ever before. 

Related to remote work, your team now learns differently than ever before. The enablement tactics that worked pre-pandemic likely won’t be as effective post-pandemic. 

Take the time to ask your team how they learn. At The Juice, we’ve leaned heavily into asynchronous communication and training. For a B2B Dinosaur like myself, this was difficult at first but I’ve learned to love it. We use tools like Loom and Miro to collaborate and learn from each other. 

The Lunch-and-Learn featuring deli sandwiches we use to all cram in a room for? That’s a relic of the past. 

Work with your team and your leaders to be sure you’re adjusting to their new schedules and new remote work preferences. 

Sales Enablement is different from company to company but the goal should always be efficiency. 

Yes! I loved the simplicity in the goal for enablement that Alex and Chad shared—efficiency! 

Sales Enablement is so different from company to company. I read a debate earlier this week about whether or not the sales enablement role should report into marketing or sales. If there’s not even agreement in where the role sits in an organization, you know there’s going to be debate about how to define success. 

For two of the best enablement professionals we know, the answer was surprising simple. Efficiency. 

To me, that starts with data. Data is the shared language that sales, marketing, and enablement can all share. 

That’s why we’ve prioritized building buyer intent data dashboards that can be easily shared by everyone at your company. Marketing creates great content, understands how the content performs, and who it resonates with. 

They can then use this data to improve their own advertising efforts, support account-based marketing programs, and…share with their sales team. That’s efficiency. 

If you want to learn more about how we can help make your marketing, sales, and enablement efforts more efficient, reach out to us. 

Until then, be sure to follow Sales Assembly and Guru on The Juice for more advice on all things enablement. Start Juicing!