10 Ways for Marketing to Enable the Sales Team

Marketing and sales often don't enjoy the best of relationships. The great news is that this situation has an amazing opportunity to change. Marketing can, right now, provide their sales team with insights that can make a tremendous difference in their lives and drive bigger commission cheques for them. Nothing changes a relationship with your sales team faster than a larger commission cheque.


Here are 10 things you can do, with Eloqua and your CRM system that will quickly deliver a lot of value to your sales team:

For Their Territories:

1) Territory Traffic Light Dashboard - For each sales person's territory, configure them a "traffic light" dashboard that gives them an instant view of which of their accounts are showing buying interest.


Here's how to build a Territory Traffic Light Dashboard



2) Territory-Based Email Alerts - configure for each rep, automatic email alerts for the accounts they own. This will give them a real-time indicator of buying interest, and let them manage the accounts proactively based on buyer interest.


Here's how to set up Territory-Based Email Alerts




3) Unknown Company Visitors - Show them which companies are on the website doing research who may not currently be known to your organization, give you a great opportunity to initiate a conversation as a buying process starts at that organization.


Here's how to configure a report on Unknown Company Visitors




For Their Accounts:


4) Account Insights and Key Players - Give each sales person a roll-up view that shows, for each of their accounts who the people are who are showing interest and what they are interested in. Armed with this insight, your sales team can quickly determine what the key conversations they need to have are.

Here's how to show sales a report that provides Account Insights and Key Players


5) Configure Your Social Media GPS - Identify social media activities and pass those through to your CRM system so that your sales team can understand which accounts, and which individuals are engaged in social media conversations. By presenting the prospect's social media activity within your CRM system, you enable your sales team to understand new context to the prospect interaction without leaving an environment they are comfortable with.


Here's how to Configure Your Social Media GPS

6) Find Sales the Right Contacts - Integration into role-based discovery services to drive real insight into who can make a purchase decision, not just a raw list of quasi-targeted and out of date names. Often, the person doing the bulk of the research is not the ultimate buyer, so discovering the names of the inviduals in the right role can be very beneficial to your sales team.

Here's how to Find Sales the Right Contacts

For Their Contacts or Leads:

7) Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights - enable Prospect Profiler in order to provide a rich, interactive, graphical view of each individual's interest. This allows your sales team to guide conversations and know who is showing the right level of buying interest.

Here's information on Eloqua's Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights

8) Show Areas of Prospect Interest - Configure your CRM integration to identify areas of your website that a person is showing interest in and highlight those within their concact or lead record in your CRM system. This enables sales to immediately know which topic of conversation will be most warmly received. Be sure to also use graphical imagery to more clearly highlight interest.

Here's how to Show Areas of Prospect Interest to sales in your CRM system

For Your Communications

9) Send-on-behalf-of-Sales - Have your marketing team send outbound email campaigns on behalf of your sales team. Not only does this drive a much higher response rate to the email campaigns, but it also builds upon the salesperson's relationship with the prospect and provides a great opportunity to start dialogs.

Here's how to set up your marketing campaigns to be Sent-on-behalf-of-Sales

10) Provide Sales with Content - provide marketing-created content to your sales teams in their Outlook desktop email environment so they can find great content, personalize it, and send it in a trackable way to their prospects quickly and easily.

Here's how to Provide Sales with Content within their Outlook environment

There are many ways that your marketing team can enable your sales team, and the 10 ideas above are great ones to get started with. In today's environment, it is possible for marketing and sales to have a much stronger relationship than they ever have had before, and it all starts with sales enablement.