INBOUND 2016: Rosalia Cefalu "You're Starting a Sales Enablement Team: Now What?"

I always feel super awkward when I'm up here for a little bit and you guys are right there. We're just standing here in silence for, like, 10 minutes. So thanks for bearing with me through that and thanks for coming early. I know that there's a lot going on last night, and hopefully you guys all had a great time and have been having a good time at Inbound. Thank you for getting up early, coming to spend some time with me to talk about sales enablement. Now, before I actually get started, I'd love to just get a sense of who's in the room today. Will you show a hand? Raise your hand if you're in the marketing department at your company. Ooh. Okay. And anybody from sales? Okay, a couple of you. All right, awesome. So there's definitely going to be content for both groups in here. I will definitely be sure to keep in mind we're a little heavy on the marketing side here. So I'm going to start with a story first. This is a photo of me and my coworker just about four years ago when I just started at HubSpot. What you see on the back of the whiteboard is a bunch of scramblings on our first project together, which was to redesign our product pages for the whole website. And at the time, we were on the product marketing team, and one of the things that we did was we kind of surveyed sales a bit on, like, how do you use the product pages? What should we start to implement in terms of positioning, things like that? And we found that once we kind of opened up this line of communication between product marketing and sales in a really nice way, that we started to just get more and more requests from sales all the time. And in fact, we were growing at such a rapid rate, and our sales team was getting so much bigger that we found that the product marketing team was just not able to actually have the bandwidth or the capacity to do everything that sales needed. So my boss said, hey, I'm going to start a new team. It's called sales enablement. Do you want to do it with me? I was like, yeah, man, definitely. However, I was very afraid of salespeople and had never done a role like this before. And he said, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to train everybody on the products, so you're going to have to get up in front of the room and stare all the mean salespeople in the face and teach them about HubSpot. And I was like, man, nobody's going to think that I can do this job at all. Nobody's going to take me seriously. So I went to Warby Parker and I bought a pair of fake glasses so that it would look like I had some authority at the front of the room. They told me at the store that they help when you're looking at a computer screen or something, so I'd say use them for that. But it was just so I looked smart and so people would take me seriously. What I ended up finding was that sales enablement was so much more than just feeling confident at the front of the room and getting salespeople to believe you. The amount of work that comes along with it has a lot to do with even just changing your point of view about how sales and marketing work together. What are the open lines of communication you should have? What are the things that you work on? So that first year was really tough. I kind of felt like this all the time. Like as soon as I got my feet on the ground, I was getting knocked over again. And so now, three years later, after we've seen a wild amount of success with sales enablement at HubSpot and with our sales team in general, I am happy to talk you guys through today. Kind of six steps that we've learned. If you're just starting your sales enablement team. So what is sales enablement? It's a strategic, ongoing process that equips sales teams to have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer's journey. It's a whole lot of words and maybe a little bit of jargon in there. So hopefully I can dissect this out for you guys today. I'm going to start first with just four kind of key components of sales enablement, the first being tools. So these could be quite literally tools that a team builds within your company, or even just things like a document repository that you kind of set up and optimize for your team. Next is content, which on the marketing side, we all know and love, of course, as we use it as a way to generate leads. We're going to talk a bit about how we use content, both internal and external, to help sales folks throughout their sales process. Communications. That's ongoing communications between key stakeholders in your company and your sales team, as well as an ongoing feedback loop. And then last is training and education, which you need to wear glasses for, apparently, if you're gonna be part of that team. All right, so let's talk a little bit about what sales enablement is and what it isn't. So if we look at our funnel which you guys have all probably seen before. Hopefully, if you're here at Inbound, what we know is that somewhere to the top, the middle of the funnel, we're really leaning on our core marketing team, who's running campaigns to kind of work on that part of the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel. Things like our sales process, our CRM implementation. This is usually handled by something like a sales ops team. But sales enablement actually doesn't belong to one part of the funnel. It actually spans across the entire funnel. So there are different activities that a sales enablement team could work on both at the top, middle and the bottom of the funnel. At the top, we are educating and qualifying leads, we're trying to accelerate high quality leads to the sales team and we're trying to help out our core marketing team as well by using some of the sales enablement content and expertise that we have to help them run their core marketing campaigns. At the bottom of the funnel, there's a whole bunch of stuff that sales enablement works on, specifically doing things like product knowledge or product education, positioning, creating case studies, making sure that our teams are all up to snuff on our competitive landscape and have competitive content that they can use throughout the process. So you might be thinking, I'm starting a sales enablement team. How do I actually set it up? Is it one person? How do I match it up to my sales teams? What's the ratio? This is just one example of a sort of team hierarchy. This is one that we actually adopted internally within our own sales enablement team at HubSpot. So it could work that you have one sales enablement leader, somebody that runs competitive, that understands exactly what's going on in the market. Where we fit somebody that's in charge of content, it doesn't mean they create it all themselves. They can be leveraging other resources from around the company. Reference and advocacy manager. This type of person usually manages a set of customer advocates who can help along in the sales process, either through reference calls or through social evangelism. And then process and automation, which is actually one that is kind of just starting to heat up now where we've talked so long about automation from the marketing department, now we're starting to see more and more automation happening from the sales side. What's cool about that is it takes an existing skill set from people like marketing automation managers and allows us to implement it in the sales process. And so I'll show you a bit about that in a few slides. There's a whole lot of different ways that you could organize a team. Some others may find that it's more efficient if within your actual funnel, if you're broken into something like territories or maybe segments or verticals, that you have a sales enablement marketer who kind of looks over that part of the funnel, as well as the lead gen marketer who looks over the other parts. And so you may be thinking, how do I know which structure is right for me or not? And it really comes down to truly understanding what's important to your business. There's obviously a number of factors up here. I won't read them all out loud, but depending on whether you're B2B or B2C or if you have a complex specific vertical or complex sales cycle, you may find that it's more beneficial to have a sales enablement marketer for each vertical or for each each industry. It's really going to depend on how in tune does that sales enablement marketer need to be with the intricacies of that particular sales team or sales department. Okay, so now that we've covered a little bit of the foundations, let's get to the actual six steps to implementing a new sales enablement team. We're going to talk a bit about how sales enablement works to educate and qualify leads, to get the right leads to sales, to use content throughout the sales process, to act as an ongoing lifeline and support and service to the sales team, ongoing communications and feedback, and then last but not least, training and education. So let's kick it off with talking about how sales enablement can work to educate and qualify leads. This is a stat that you've probably seen before. It's been tossed around at 67, 75, debunked and then more research done on. Some people believe it, some people don't. But the truth of the matter is, and you probably know this from just your own buying behaviors, folks are doing a lot more of the research in their buying process before they ever get on the phone with a sales rep. That makes a lot of sense. Google is our best friend. We're looking for instant information. We don't necessarily always want to get on the phone with sales right away. So what does that mean for sales enablement? It means that whether somebody is talking to a sales rep or not, we want to be there with enablement content and be there to enable that sales process in general. What's key to doing this is actually understanding the buyer's journey fully, deeply and completely, so that at each stage of the buyer's journey, we know what are the questions that folks are asking. But more importantly, we know where they're going to get answers. So for example, somebody who is in the decision making phase of their buyer's journey, who's deciding how am I going to fix this problem? Maybe they're evaluating actual softwares or tools or services they might ask around in their social network. Other folks might go to things like product review sites. Some may just read case studies or content that's on your actual website. So you want to understand your particular buyer and what are those places that they go to get information to make decisions so that we can then be there as a resource to answer those questions in the places that they live. So what are some of the things that we can do to better understand the buyer's journey? This one I can't emphasize enough is conducting win and loss interviews. Whether somebody ended up buying your product or service or not, there is something valuable to learn from them. Both where they go to get the information to make a decision. But also if they end up not buying your product or your service, you'll want to understand why. Is there feedback that you can take back to your sales team about how they ran their process or not? Obviously shadowing sales is an obvious one, but for a lot of marketers it doesn't come naturally to us to, to roll with the punches with sales like that. I've learned more, I think in my entire career sitting on sales calls than anything else. If you don't do it, do it. If your marketers don't do it, have them do it. It does worlds for alignment, of course, social network outreach. So actually going out to LinkedIn and seeing if there are people within your network that you can talk to, interview, understand how they make buying decisions. And then a last one here is if you're using a tool like HubSpot or something that will give you tracking data on kind of where your referral traffic's kind of coming from. And if those people that come from certain websites end up closing, you can start to get more information about where those places that people live to get information before they end up talking to our sales reps. So some of those non sales sales enablement activities we can do or things that we can work on that don't necessarily involve the sales rep just yet, are making sure that we are on those product review sites or those yelps of the world, whatever may be specific to your industry, make sure that we have customer advocates who are on there who are talking about our brand, who are giving us positive reviews if there are particular pages or news sources that people tend to go to, who close seeing if we can do some co marketing or have placed blog posts there. Definitely having some information about the competitive landscape about you versus your competitors on the web. My pro tip here is to not trash talk your competitors. Buyers pick up on that stuff often and leaves a bad taste in folks mouths a lot of the time. As you've probably experienced yourself, we try to focus more on our company, our service, how we're differentiated, and not necessarily how the other tools are worse or bad or whatever it may be. Then of course, customer reference webinars. This is something we've seen a lot of success with internally too, because it's something that you record once, interviewing some of your most successful customers and you're able to distribute widely after that. It also takes some of the onus off of sales of setting up customer reference calls if they can kind of refer to one piece of content. And then last is social monitoring and social evangelism. So if you have a large enough brand that people are on Twitter, on Facebook, or on LinkedIn and they're talking about you or talking about your competitors, being able to monitor those conversations, pipe in where necessary, be able to answer questions that people have in real time online. Let's not forget that a lot of the reason that so much research happens before someone talks to a sales rep is we have this natural need for instant gratification. When we go to Google, we want an answer right now. So to be able to get that kind of instant gratification off of a social network is only natural that when we turn to the web, we kind of expect that as humans. So a few tools that we can do to enable this part of the process. The first is that if you're looking to conduct win loss interviews, a really great way to do this in an easy, streamlined, quick way is if you're using something like the HubSpot CRM. When a deal is marked as close lost or fits within certain criteria, we can have those folks get added to a list, enrolled into a workflow that then sends them an email that says, hey, we saw that you didn't end up purchasing or that you did purchase. We just wanted to ask a few questions to hear about that experience, how it went, and what were the decision making factors for you when you were evaluating our solution through SurveyMonkey and HubSpot integration, then we can actually have that data inside of HubSpot that we can go on to use potentially to nurture those folks. Six months down the line, if there was a product feature that was lacking and they didn't buy for that reason, if we end up releasing that feature, we can specifically target those folks, reach out, let them know that that thing was released. The next is two other really cool integrations that we have as well, which are through Wistia and gotowebinar. So on the webinar front, if you are hosting things like those customer reference webinars, when people attend them or don't attend them, all that information gets logged into HubSpot. So reps can utilize that to understand, did this person already go through a customer reference webinar, go through some type of webinar that I either don't need to have that conversation, or potentially they registered for a customer reference webinar, they never showed up. I should probably attempt to set up a customer reference call or take whatever action from there on out. The second part of this is through a Wistia integration, we actually end up posting a lot of our videos, webinars, things like that on Wistia after the fact, after they've already occurred. And through Wistia integration, we can go ahead and see who has actually viewed these videos and how much of the video they viewed. So this helps reps to also understand once they get these leads, were they kind of bullshitting when they said that they were going to sit and listen to this thing and watch this video? And how educated are they actually, before they land in my hands, cool. Number two is actually getting the right leads to sales. This is key, key, key part of the whole process. And when people say that sales and marketing alignment is broken, a lot of the time it's because this part of the process is broken. So when you're doing this lead handoff really well, you've kind of seen these two benefits or two things that are happening. First is you're enabling that buyer's journey, that really smooth buyer's journey, by actually talking to the right folks to begin with and then passing the right folks on to sales, having them start that conversation aligned in terms of what the expectations are, why you're having that conversation, why they'd be a good fit for your product or service. And then the second is that we can improve the efficiency of the sales team by either just obviously giving them the highest quality leads or doing this in a smooth enough way that they have all the information they need or all the resources that they need to then go ahead and take that person through a sales process. So there are kind of three steps to really Efficient lead handoff that I'm going to go through quickly. The first is likely the most important and it's just coming to an agreement with your sales team on what is a good fit lead or what are the triggers that would say that somebody is ready to talk to sales or that we should even just start to nurture them through sales automation. Which brings me to the next point to actually automate things. So we want to be able to automate both the prioritization of leads that we're not just handing our sales team any old lead. We want them to be automated in a way that they're handed off at the right time when a certain trigger event happens. And then third, we want to enable our sales team with content, tools and resources that they may need throughout the sales process. But the best way to do this at the lead handoff stage is when we are handing leads over. We want to be really clear with our sales team about why this lead is getting passed to you. What kind of trigger event or hand raising did they do that indicates they're a good fit? And then finally, here is the positioning that you should use, knowing what we already know about this buyer. Or here's the content that you should send or you should use throughout your sales process if you work in a business that has high volume sales. A good pro tip here or something that I'm going to walk you through in a second through our tools is to actually do the automation for them. So automating communications that look like they come from sales reps, but your marketing team has actually made and is executing on. So first thing I'll show you in terms of how to enable this with tools. This is actually enabled through the HubSpot marketing platform, but it's actual automatic lead follow up. So this is what I'm talking about when I say some sales automation. So for some leads who maybe have visited a really high value page like our pricing page, but who maybe don't necessarily have a high lead score or we don't feel like are qualified enough to send to sales, what we can do instead is have that lead get followed up with either by either with a picture of that sales rep looks like it's coming from their sales rep, or maybe your CMO or your CEO or whoever it may be, letting them know that they can reach out with more information, potentially sending them some more content to qualify them further so that we can actually say to sales, okay, we nurtured this person for a while, now they're ready to talk to you next is actual lead notifications. So this is when somebody comes to your site, fills out a form, whether it's to contact sales or it's downloading a high value piece of content. What we'll do is we'll send a lead notification out to our internal sales team, to the rep that owns that person. We do that through our workflows tool, this email that they get. What we've done is we've customized it really nicely so that first it pulls in a photo of the person from their social network, gives a little bit of information that we've been collecting with them throughout their buyer's journey and throughout their whole life cycle with our company. We'll put in their lead score. And then kind of the pro tip part here that is something that you would do if you had a sales enablement team versus if you didn't, is to actually give them those follow up resources they should use, depending on the trigger action this person took. Or give them those positioning statements right within here. Or if you can tell that it's a competitive conversation because somebody landed on a website page that we're hosting against one of our competitors, make sure you give them those follow up resources that have to do with that specific competitor. So there's a number of different ways to do this. Of course it's going to depend on what your sales process looks like and what kind of content you have. But given the amount of data and information we have about folks that lives inside the HubSpot platform, the possibilities are really endless in terms of how you can personalize this for your sales team. Next is a feature of our sales platform. It's actually a paid sales tool that you can get through Sales Pro and it's called Messages. And actually yesterday if you were at the Product Spotlight, we announced kind of a new release of messages that enables live chat functionality from within your website. So it's no secret to the sales folks in the room that customers Conversations close deals. The whole reason that we want to keep our activity high so we can have more conversations, so that we can close more deals, have more revenue for the company. So what messages allows us to do is to have more conversations quicker and have them in exactly the place where people want to have conversations with us. So these are really high value, high intent people when they reach out to us through a chat module that lives on our website. So these are already inherently higher value than somebody who say downloads a piece of content or downloads an ebook. All of this happens in real time, obviously, and then gets stored onto the HubSpot contact record what's nice about this is it ends up becoming a natural part of your sales process and then also in your services and onboarding when all of these conversations can be logged in one place. So even taking it a step beyond sales enablement, if your services folks are just about to onboard someone, it's a really nice opportunity for them to be able to have those kind of moments of delight for the customer when they can look onto the contact record, see what those past chats have looked like. Been able to have kind of a jumping off point for conversation or reference, something that the prospect or new customer may not have necessarily thought that this person would know. Also helpful if you're in sales, I imagine you hate doing admin work and inputting data into your CRM. And if you work in marketing, you probably hate that your salespeople never do it. This is a great way to not add any more time to data input in the CRM, but to still get this really rich context about a person that both sales marketing and your services team can use after that. Next is Embedded Meetings, which is my personal favorite tool out of our sales platform meetings. If you're not using it today, you should definitely go ahead and give a shot. It's great for anybody in your company who doesn't want to do the admin work of back and forth scheduling meetings. Yesterday we announced a new version of meetings called Embedded meetings. So what this is is essentially what you're looking at here. Instead of having like a simple contact us or contact sales form on your website, instead we're actually seeing our sales reps calendar right there and I can choose a time and a day that they're available in and get a meeting on the books immediately. This is huge because usually what happens is somebody fills out a contact sales form, it goes through to the company, it gets routed to a sales rep. A sales rep decides if they want to follow up with it or not. Me who filled out the form, I get a kickback email that says somebody will follow up with you soon. If that person does decide to follow up, then they reach out to me. Then we go back and forth for a while trying to get something out of the books. All this wasted time that sales reps are spending when they should be spending time selling and having conversations on the phone. This wipes out that whole middleman part. It's also a really cool feeling as a marketer to be able to get commitment from prospects for your sales team, to be able to say more than we generated. X Number of leads, but to be able to say there's literally a meeting that's on the books right now because of something marketing did. So if marketing is focused on optimizing the website for lead gen, this is a great way to optimize your site for more than just lead gen, for actual commitment from prospects. Last feature of this that's pretty cool as well is that we can use smart content to actually personalize these calendars. So maybe we only want to show a calendar to somebody of a certain lead score so we don't have tire kickers taking up all the time in our calendars. All right, step three is to actually enable the sales process with content. So this does two really nice things for us. The first is that it ends up giving a really good prospect experience because they're getting educated along the way because it's really helpful, which is one of the foundations of inbound sales, obviously. And then it ends up being a great experience for our sales rep when we can save them time by giving them content in an easy to find place and then we can give them consistent messaging that they can use that we've already used across our website, we've already done go to market research on, and that now they can use both an email on the phone kind of all set up nicely for them. So there are four steps here that I'm going to go through. The first is to actually audit your content, what you have today, figure out what you have, what you don't have, so we can figure out what we need to make. We need to map our content to the sales process. It's itself just in the same way that we map content to our marketing funnel that we have top of the funnel content, middle of the funnel content. There's also certain pieces of content that we'll want to map out to our sales process as well. Then we'll want to enable content creation. We're not going to do it all ourselves. We're going to ask people from around the company for a lot of help. And the last is we're going to want to use some sort of content management system or tool to actually manage our sales content, make it easy for reps to to find it, make it easy for us as marketers to update it and to be able to pull some analytics on what content works and what doesn't in the sales process. So what kind of content should you have or should you create? There's obviously a lot of different roads to go down here, but these are kind of like five core pillars. That we want to make sure that we've at least covered our bases on. So obviously content about your company, your culture, your history, your growth. We want to obviously remember that a lot of buyers will have certain tool requirements. A lot of buyers buy on brand, buy on feeling, buy on emotion. So being able to kind of accurately tell your company story, then there's obviously educational info. So when people are going to make a buying decision and are looking for kind of that baseline information about how the solution works in this particular industry requirements. So these are obviously things that are deal breakers that you must have that you need to figure out in your buying process. Does this company offer this or not? Things like spec sheets, Obviously this is kind of baseline. Buyers will expect it. You have to have it budget. So that's going to be a concern for anyone buying anything ever, just by human nature. And so it's not just about having a pricing page that's really easy to use and understand and a transparent pricing page at that, but being able to communicate why your product costs, what it does, what the ROI of your product is. Cost of ownership studies are always really, really powerful, especially if they're done by third parties, maybe by a customer of yours or a partner of yours. And then lastly, of course is positioning. So positioning content doesn't have to be something external on your website, though it could and it should be. Your positioning should be consistent. But also it can be internal cheat sheets or internal docs, battle cards that give reps a really good sense of how to position your company differently from the competition, how to talk about your company to your prospects. Cool. So now that we know a little bit about what types of content we should have, the first thing you're going to want to do is take just inventory of what you have and what you don't, and also to be able to really assess the quality of what you have. Next, we want to map this all to our sales process. So if you don't have a sales process documented out, you should, after my session, go sit down and do that immediately. This is essential to sales enablement. It makes it so marketing can't even communicate with sales about how they're supposed to help if there's no documented sales process to point to. And also, by the way, this is a free download from HubSpot. If you just search HubSpot sales process, there's like a free download that you could use here if you don't have one yet. So in the same way that we ask ourselves, what are the questions that need to get answered or hurdles we need to overcome to get from one sales stage to the next. We also want to have listed out what are the pieces of content that are required within a certain deal stage to get us to the next deal stage. So if one of them is getting decision maker buy in based around budget, then that piece of content might be an ROI study that can help us to overcome that objection and to get us to the next sales stage next. We want to enable content creation so we've taken inventory of what we have, we've put it into our sales process and now we see some holes and now I see that I have so much work to do that there's no way I could do it myself. So key to sales enablement is the ability to collaborate with lots of different folks from around your company to be able to help have them help you create this content or in many cases have them create the content content for you. Marketers can pick up some sales skills on how to get people to do stuff for you through this too, which is a nice little added bonus. So if we think about it, we can enable or we can ask our blogging team to help us by when we sit in shadow sales, we can hear some of the questions that prospects ask over and over. We can bring those questions and solutions to the blogging team and we can ask them this would be a great piece of content that you could make that would answer all these questions at the top of the funnel that people are asking anyways. But then it also ends up being a piece of content that we can use throughout the sales process too. So it's kind of a win win there for both of our teams. If we're doing buyer Persona research, if we're trying to understand the buyer's journey, that's obviously something that a product marketing team or somebody who's working on go to market strategy has probably already done some work on. When it comes to those close one close loss interviews, any type of analysis there definitely falls within kind of a separate sales ops category and would be beneficial for sales ops to understand who are the types of people who buy, who don't. And then lastly, when it comes to competitive research, competitive content, when we're creating this, our product and engineering teams or the folks who build our services, maybe even our founders, they understand best why we built this thing or why we make this thing, or why did we bring this new feature into our platform. Those folks can help you tell the best story possible when you are developing competitive content. Because like I said, it definitely is Helpful to understand what's the difference between one competitor and the next. But it's even more powerful when a buyer can truly understand why it is that you made what you made, how it's going to change their life for the better. And there's no better people than product folks or engineering folks who, who really understand that stuff. They're just really terrible at communicating it. And that's kind of where the marketing part comes in. Cool. So a few tools that can help us throughout this. The first is a tool called Documents. This is also within our sales platform. It's a content repository where we can put all of our sales content in that then our sales team can use throughout the sales process. This is huge because if you have ever sat around on the sales floor, you'll know that something that often happens is a sales rep will say, hey man, do you have that pitch deck from that meeting last week? I want to use it for this thing. And then someone's going to say, yeah, I think it's in my email. Hold on, let me find it. And then when a marketer comes and walks by and sees that they're using this pitch deck that we created three years ago and it doesn't have any of their accurate information, I'm like, why do you guys pay me to do my job? This is not even a great piece of content anymore. So instead by using this content repository, we can keep all of our documents up to date when we upload our pitch deck, let's say it changes again in three months after our earnings call, I can re upload over that file, push an update to it and then sales reps are always using the most up to date stuff. Search functionality and folders obviously also really help in terms of reps being able to go to one place to find exactly what it is that they need. There's a Gmail integration as well. So it's easy for reps to stay within the environment they're working in. So if they're sending an email, quite literally there's a little drop down tab where I can see all of my documents, insert it right there into the email. And then probably best is there's a set of analytics that is really beneficial for both sales and for marketing teams. So on the sales side I can see when my prospects open my document or my piece of content, I can see how much time they actually spent on it and I can even drill down by page. So if I see that somebody spent a particularly long time on the product pricing slide of my pitch deck, that would be a great place for me to poke and prod when we're on the phone. Looked like you spent a lot of time on this. Did you have some questions about how our pricing model works? Is there anything we can talk through here? It also helps in terms of holding your prospects accountable. Again, were they BSing me when they said they were going to open and read this thing? And then on the marketing side, it helps us to see what are the pieces of content that actually get used or not. Sometimes there's kind of like the squeaky wheel syndrome where one rep will say, like, we really, really need content about topic X, like, we can't close any deals without it. Then you create it and you see that it never actually gets used. This actually gives marketers a place to point to, to say, you know, this content's not getting used. Is there something that we need to improve about it? Or let's try to reevaluate where we actually put our resources. Next is templates. So email templates that the functionality of it you've probably seen and heard of before. It's quite literally a template that sales can use that's either made by sales or made by marketing. In our case here, we're talking about something sales enablement makes something that's great about. This is again, we're keeping the messaging really consistent so sales doesn't have to rewrite any of these positioning statements. Personalization throughout these emails is really helpful, both in terms of just little things like not having to write your name at the end or the person's name in the beginning of the email, but any piece of data, any contact property that we store inside of HubSpot, we can inject into this email template as well. So something as simple as referring to the last page that they were at, the last thing that they downloaded, maybe the last time that we had a conversation together. To make this feel like more than just an email blast that's going out. And then the last is that this is also integrated with the meetings and the documents apps that I had already shown you guys. So very quickly, from. From within this email, I can insert my meeting link so that folks can book me immediately. Even better is I can put a meeting link inside of this template. So if I make one template and I have a sales team of 12 people use it, it'll always reflect their meeting calendar. It just saves a ton of work both on the marketing and the sales side. Last here is sequences. So sequences is essentially just a way to take all those great templates that we've already created, put them together in quite literally a sequence where I can send it off to a prospect and that prospect continues to receive these emails with a certain delay that I've set in between, which helps to nurture them through that sales process. As soon as they reply to that email or if they clicked on my meetings link and go ahead and book a meeting with me, they stop receiving these emails. So it's not super persistent or annoying for them. This helps reps save time, helps them be more efficient. Too often we see that a rep will call, leave the voicemail, send the follow up email and not be really diligent about following up on the next steps. From there, reaching out again, doing those seven touches or whatever it may be to make sure that you're keeping top of mind. So this is kind of a set it and forget it way to do that. And then lastly, if you have marketing, create these again, a really great opportunity for marketing and sales to work together. For marketing to kind of inject that content into into these sequences. So we're doing more than just checking in with prospects, but actually educating them along the way. With content, no matter what, sales people are always going to send these types of emails. So if marketing can help at all by having the right positioning and the right content in there, it's going to be a great prospect experience. Cool. Next is ongoing lifelines and support. So one of the things about sales enablement that's super important is that these people are tied into the whole company, that they have visibility over the whole company and are connected to lots of people, different departments. I talked about collaboration earlier. This is another kind of form of collaboration where sales enablement doesn't have to do all the work, but kind of just connect the pieces or act as a conduit to other teams. So a good example of this, and these are some things we do internally as well, is we have a directory of allies throughout the company. Some are executives, some are marketers, people who are experts in certain industries that sales can call on for their calls for questions for things like that. We have quick response expert groups around certain topics. So when we're facing a current issue in sales that we kind of have a SWAT team that's there to attack it. And then also that we have some really easy and transparent project management so that when we're collaborating with multiple teams and sales is wondering, hey, where's that piece of content that we had requested that we're able to actually show and deliver it to them. So one way we can enable this with tools is I've talked a little bit about the meetings app. We have two cool features of it, both group and round robin meetings. So one thing that we do here is we assemble our kind of lifeline experts. So we have a group of marketers who are really great at marketing automation. We're able to create a meeting link that does round robin availability with them. So anytime a rep needs a marketing automation expert on a call, they can just insert this meeting link in. Whoever's available in that specified time will get booked for the call group availability again. So you're cutting out that admin work of setting up those meetings, but you're getting a call on the books sooner with all the people that need to be there in the meeting. Next is Google Groups. So we've created a Google group that's just for answering sales questions. What's really cool about this is we invite in experts from around the company. So if our team doesn't have the answer, somebody does. We advertise it as a really easy way for somebody to get a quick answer. And then again because it's all in a Google group, it's searchable. So when reps have a question, they can go in here, see if the question questions already been asked first and then get an answer quickly that way. Last is that we've actually also created this pretty cool thing where using the HubSpot CRM because you can have multiple pipelines, we actually created almost like a project board through the CRM so that we have a request form where reps can ask us for things. When that happens, it creates a new deal. And so we almost use our CRM as a project board to move it. If you can imagine like a Trello from like a request backlog to an in progress to a next step as we're working on it across the board. And then we can use workflows to either trigger notifications about where we are or give visibility to sales about how we're progressing on those projects. Okay, feedback and communications. This one's pretty quick. And I've talked a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but it should be known how important this is. That companies with strong alignment have a 20% increase in annual growth rate where companies with poor sales marketing alignment have a 4% revenue decline year over year. What does that actually mean for us? It means that alignment isn't just about lead handoff. It's about having open lines of communication and lifeline and support for sales teams to be able to call on. So three kind of things that we've done that's really important here is, I can't stress this one enough. Sales, marketing, and ops, the leaders of those groups need to have regular meetings all the time. Sales wants to move really fast. Marketing wants to be really strategic. In ops, a ton of people just don't know how it all works. We in the past have run into a ton of hurdles by not having clear communication here. And it's really essential to be able to align all of our initiatives to the current pipeline that we're seeing. We assembled an A team as well. So these are like kind of the best reps that we have. We use them as a sounding board to do focus groups to pilot new initiatives. We incentivize them not with money, but with cool swag. It's kind of like they're part of this exclusive club. And then when they are closing really awesome big deals or doing a great job of positioning something, we kind of evangelize their best practices to the rest of the sales. Org. And then lastly is making sure that you have really strong comms with your team. I'll go through it in a second, but we highly recommend having sales and marketing meetings monthly. And then as well, I'll hop right into it here. Running a sales digest. So we work with our ops and enablement teams to send out a weekly Digest using the HubSpot marketing platform to our sales team. We use the email tool and we use smart content so that we're personalizing it so that if you work on the agency team that you're seeing the agency announcements that you need to see, and if you work on the nonprofit team, you're seeing the nonprofit announcements you need to see. And then us as marketers, we can actually go in and look at the analytics to see how these are performing. Are our reps actually consuming the content or not? Are those people that are always coming to our desk asking questions also the ones not opening our emails, then we kind of have something to point to and let their managers know. You should have them open the emails that we're sending. We also started a sales announcement. Slack group highly recommend Slack if you're not on it. But here we actually ask our Slack admin to only allow two or three of us on the team to post to it. Nobody can kind of have it chat. It's literally just to post announcements. And this kind of helps reps stay up to date on stuff where we don't want to clog your inbox. But you should know about this product update that came out the last is I mentioned that sales and marketing meeting. We have these templates available online, but they're essentially like there's a prezi and a PowerPoint that kind of give you the framework of what are the types of things that sales and marketing need to get on the same page about every month, how can we align them every month? So definitely recommend hosting those types of meetings. And then lastly, here is training and education. There are kind of three types of training that a sales enablement team should and can focus on. One is ongoing training. So no more of this once a quarter training and that's it and then we're done. Markets change and buyers behavior changes too quickly for us to be only educating people once a quarter. If we release a new product or a new service, we obviously want to educate folks on that. And one thing that we can do also is we can kind of leverage virtual training for those types of releases that that may not be as big or require everybody in a room. And then lastly, can't emphasize this one enough. Understanding the competitive landscape is huge. Even if you never talk about a competitor, they are probably talking to your prospects already. So being able to position ahead of them and really have somebody dedicated on your team to the competitive landscape, you might be thinking, what about sales skills? Where does that fall in enablement? And to be totally honest with you, we found internally and from a lot of the folks that we talked to that sales skills is kind of separate from the enablement team. So much of the value of the enablement team comes from them being connected to marketing, to ops, to product and being able to communicate with all these people. Our core value is not necessarily sales skills. It doesn't mean you can't have a sales skill trainer on your sales enablement team, but it doesn't act as kind of the core function of bringing sales and marketing alignment together. Last pro tips I have for you today. When creating training, use your A team so that a team of kind of best reps that you've assembled, record their calls, use them in your trainings, evangelize their best practices. People will listen to them more than they'll listen to you if they're their fellow sales reps. And then lastly is use your content. Use that content creation skills. Don't leave anybody in a training without a follow up cheat sheet, without a follow up video, whatever it may be. Sales reps are sitting in the room waiting to get on their next call and close the next deal, not fully paying attention to you in a training, having the follow up resources is huge and super essential. Okay, and just to recap here at the end, kind of the most important things from each of these sections. To educate and qualify leads, we really need to understand the buyer's journey fully. To get the right leads to sales. It's all about efficiency. Where are those places that we can make handoffs smoother, faster or automate it for them? Enable the sales process with content. Audit what you have. Collaborate with experts on your team. Don't do all the work yourself. Ongoing lifelines and services. Again, you don't have to do everything yourself. Act as a conduit between other teams. See where you can pull in allies to be part of enablement efforts, communications and feedback. Setting up that a team, it's going to make your reps feel better. It's going to help the rest of the reps learn from the best reps. And then lastly on training and education, using your content and your A team to help evangelize those best practices and to help get all of your reps to become your A reps. That's it for me. I had a pretty jam packed session. I hope I didn't run over. Thank you guys so much for joining. Really appreciate it. Have an awesome rest of inbound.