The traditional sales funnel bears little resemblance to the buyer’s journey in a digital world. B2B buyers now take a winding path to purchase across countless touchpoints. They conduct substantial research before ever contacting a sales rep.

This new self-education mentality demands sales and marketing evolve beyond funnel thinking. Instead, buyers now expect helpful partnerships and content tailored to their nonlinear journey.

As a result, sales and marketing teams need to collaborate and focus on sales enablement content. Transforming enablement requires structure and insight sharing in equal measures between the teams. Operating in silos only undermines results. Without sales’ insights, marketing is in danger of producing generalised content and assets. And without marketing’s expertise, sales can no longer rely solely on their closing prowess.

United, they can guide customers seamlessly throughout consideration and decision cycles. They can curate an intelligent journey versus a linear funnel. The result is a strategy centered around the customer, not internal processes.

The payoff? Deeper buyer relationships, improved conversion rates, and sustainable growth. 

The first step is aligning around the buyer’s actual needs and mapping their nonlinear journey. This framework will allow teams to engage audiences with the right content at the right time.

Decoding the B2B Buyer's Journey

The buyer's journey is both a map and a compass. It outlines the path customers take and provides direction for tailored content strategies.

Understanding the B2B buyer's journey is fundamental to the success of any sales or marketing strategy. This journey describes the phases a buyer navigates en route to a purchase decision. It also helps us to understand their specific needs and behaviours at critical points in the customer relationship.

Those needs, if not addressed adequately by suppliers, can become barriers to closing the sale. But by delving into each stage, we can understand the specific actions and pieces of content that empower sales teams to meet and guide the buyer effectively.

Understanding a Need 

The start of the journey is marked by the buyer recognising they have a challenge or an opportunity, but lack a clear path to a solution.

Content here focuses on helping the buyer to understand their problem and the potential solutions. The aim is to position the company as an advisor, not just a supplier, and to generate a steady stream of high-quality leads.

This involves:

• Educational Content: Creating articles and guides that help buyers understand their issues in the context of broader industry trends. Think blog posts and more in-depth reports and whitepapers that articulate common industry challenges and introduce potential solutions.

• SEO and Social Media Strategy: Leverage SEO keyword research to ensure that potential buyers find this content during their research phase. Use social media platforms to amplify reach and engagement. Experiment with different types of social media posts and video content. 

• Lead Scoring and Segmentation: Implementing lead scoring systems to identify and segment prospects based on their engagement, and tailoring subsequent communications to their specific awareness level.

Investigating Options 

Once the need is acknowledged, the buyer explores solutions. They evaluate available solutions, comparing offerings, and delving into the technicalities and benefits of various products or services.

Content at this stage must provide comprehensive resources that help the buyer qualify the organisation’s solutions against their needs. Providing clear, objective comparisons that highlight the company’s strengths, assists buyers in understanding key differentiators.

Key actions include:

• Comparative Analysis: Develop detailed, comparative content, case studies and webinars that showcase the benefits and applications of the solutions offered.

• Interactive Content: Use interactive content like calculators or assessment tools that help buyers evaluate how different solutions could address their needs.

• Sales Training: Equip sales teams with in-depth knowledge to answer complex queries and engage in consultative selling.

Committing to Change 

In this pivotal phase, buyers weigh the benefits against the cost and disruption of change and decide whether it is worth making the investment. 

No matter how well researched, decision-making always feels like a leap of faith. At this point, you need to provide the affirmation they’re seeking that the decision will deliver value. Content needs to align the buyer’s desired outcomes with the company's value proposition, emphasising the potential for transformation.

You can support this by:

• Demonstrating ROI: Offering tools and calculators that demonstrate the potential return on investment and long-term benefits of the solution.

• Providing a Vision of Success: Share customer stories and testimonials that illustrate the positive changes other customers have experienced.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Creating in-depth content tailored for different stakeholders within the buyer’s organisation to address their unique concerns and objectives. Consider white papers and research reports that speak to different target audiences.

• Risk Mitigation: Sharing risk assessments and mitigation strategies to alleviate concerns about the costs and potential disruptions of implementing a new solution.

Selecting a Solution 

With options at hand, the buyer is now looking to narrow down their choices to the best fit for their specific context. They look for differentiation points and seek evidence of effectiveness.

Content must enable buyers to see the solution’s impact on their specific problems. Help sales teams to consult and assist in the selection process by highlighting the unique benefits and competitive edge of the solutions.

This requires:

• Demonstrating Value: Offer customised demonstrations, interactive tools, and trials that allow buyers to experience how the solution would work in their environment.

• Detailed Product Information: Provide exhaustive product specifications, case studies, and testimonials that reinforce the solution’s efficacy.

• Consultative Selling: Train sales teams to engage in deeper business conversations that connect product features with strategic business outcomes for the buyer.

Validating Their Choice 

Before finalising their decision, buyers require external validation to feel confident in their decision. They look for testimonials, case studies, and third-party endorsements to mitigate the risk of their choice.

Offer decision support through in-depth information that reaffirms the buyer's choice by offering:

• Third-party Validation: Facilitate access to third-party reviews, customer references or industry experts who can provide unbiased opinions to build the buyer’s confidence.

• Awards and Certifications: Highlight industry awards, certifications, and accolades that lend credibility to the company and its solutions.

• Trial Programs: Implement trial programs or pilot studies that provide tangible evidence of the solution’s effectiveness in the buyer’s specific context.

Purchase 

Finally, as buyers move to purchase, the focus is on making this as seamless as possible. At this stage, the buyer needs clarity on the purchasing process, total cost of ownership, and reassurance of post-purchase support.

Guide the buyer through the process step by step, addressing any final concerns and facilitating internal stakeholder agreement. Create clear purchasing guides, financial justification tools, and workflows that make the purchasing decision as straightforward as possible.

Your buyer will expect:

• Streamlined Sales Processes: Ensure that sales processes are clear and straightforward, with well-defined steps and expectations.

• Documentation and Support: Provide comprehensive documentation and support options that address potential post-purchase concerns such as onboarding and integrating solutions.

• Customer Success Stories: Share stories of successful implementations that not only reassure the buyer but also illustrate the ongoing support and partnership they can expect post-purchase.

Creating Content that Converts

The goal of enablement content is not just to sell. It's also about building authority and trust to establish strategic customer partnerships. When content aligns to the customer's needs throughout the customer journey, it positions the company as an obvious ally when the time comes to commit.

Enablement content plays dual roles. Externally, client-facing content engages prospects across channels like blog posts, social media, and targeted emails. Internally, content arms sales teams with the knowledge they need to have relevant conversations and close deals.

The question becomes: How can sales and marketing leaders combine their strengths to build content that serves both internal enablement and external engagement?

The most significant barrier to effective sales enablement content is often the gap between the two teams when collaboration is key. Marketing cannot simply pump out enablement materials and expect sales teams to leverage them effectively. And sales cannot scale one-to-one selling alone or expect to land new business without supporting sales enablement tools.

Bridging the gap is pivotal. When these two disciplines are tightly aligned, they drive the company's narrative forward in a way that resonates with buyers, supports the sales process, and ultimately enhances the customer experience.

This makes formalising processes for open communication and collaboration the first step to take.

Communication and Collaboration

Effective enablement content requires sales and marketing to plan strategies together. Joint planning creates an aligned view on achieving the business’ objectives. It also creates the messaging consistency that is paramount in building trust with prospects.

Cross-functional transparency is key throughout. Whether co-creating content, leveraging data, or measuring impact, sales and marketing must structure processes to work in tandem.

With cooperation across teams, enablement content speaks directly to accelerating deals. Teams can co-develop compelling value propositions and cleanly integrated messaging. Structured co-planning reduces guesswork and duplication of efforts. Shared insights from past deals and campaign results guides decisions, allowing for smarter resource allocation to the content with the highest impact.

Regular inter-departmental meetings and informal communication channels are critical for ideas to flow between sales and marketing.

For example, joint annual kickoff meetings can allow both teams to shape goals and KPIs focused on customer needs, and agree roles and responsibilities. Teams can create a shared view of the target customer profile and typical buying journey, and identify opportunities to advance prospects with targeted content or interventions. They can agree on the kind of content to produce, how to leverage various data sources, and how to measure overall business impact.

Ongoing check-ins let groups review and adjust content plans. Collaborating on calendars makes it easy to spot gaps or redundancies across teams. It also ties content directly back to overarching revenue milestones.

Through continuous communication, the teams’ priorities stay connected and aligned on both strategy and messaging, keeping the buyer experience cohesive. The payoff is content that moves the buyer forward and the business upward.

Sales Insights and MarketING Intelligence

Sales teams are at the frontline, directly interacting with prospects and customers on a daily basis. This places them in a prime position to gather a wealth of insights that are crucial for shaping both sales enablement and marketing strategies.

They can contribute their on-the-ground experience to ensure content’s practical relevance. Marketing can gain advice on specific buyer questions, objections raised during sales conversations, the nuanced needs of different customer segments, and information on the competitive landscape.

By marrying information from actual conversations sales are having with interaction data, marketing can refine content strategy, campaign targeting, and messaging.

Meanwhile, marketing sees the 30,000 foot view on the topics people are engaging with. They have hard numbers on what interests customers and what turns them away. And they can offer these insights at segment, account, and individual prospect levels. They also bring considerable expertise in communication and distribution.

Ensuring these insights reach sales allows more precise targeting of the right people with the right message and at the right time.

At the end of the day, both teams want customers to say "yes." Aligning intelligence from sales chats with marketing data makes content more human. Sales gets content answering real questions. Marketing creates resources that match up with what customers think and feel.

By working together, both teams can refine their tactics based on what is or isn't working and get better results all around.

Scalable Personalisation Through Technology

As customer journeys grow more complex across channels, sales and marketing teams cannot lose sight of the importance of personalisation. 

Specificity is key. Prospects not only expect tailored, relevant messaging demonstrating an understanding of their pain points across each lifecycle stage. Sales enablement content must be also customised to the buyer’s industry, culture, and market position.

To drive decisions, enablement content must do more than just inform across the buyer journey. It must educate in the context of specific buyer questions and triggers - enabling them to come to a decision. Content should be adaptive, evolving with feedback and insights gathered at each interaction.

Marketing automation leverages data to segment prospects, tailors messaging according to customer intelligence, and tracks engagement. Advanced solutions even integrate predictive analytics to determine sales readiness, recommending which opportunities sales should prioritise based on likelihood to close. This enhances pipeline velocity.

The management of content is equally vital. Outdated or hard-to-find content can hinder sales efforts. Content management systems provide a centralised repository and a single source of truth, ensuring that everyone uses the most current and effective materials. Tagging based on products, services, industries and other variables allows reps to align assets to prospect needs quickly.

The result is sales representatives who are equipped to consult with and guide buyers to advance opportunities. The sales team is able to not only react instantly, but also proactively steer the buyer towards a solution using workflows that feel tailor-made for their needs. It offers a smoother journey for the buyer and a more predictable and efficient sales cycle for the company.

Transform Sales Enablement Together

All of this effort towards aligning sales and marketing is in service of one aim -  to arm client-facing teams with superior content. This means content that captures customer interest, drives action, and elevates conversations.

The result is felt through increased pipeline velocity, bigger deals, and happier customers. 

At its core, what is required is a commitment to continuous improvement.

Regular feedback loops ensure content is refined based on real-world insights. Campaign analytics reveal performance gaps to address. Regular check-ins, performance analyses, and field testing ensure resources resonate.

This fluidity is the lifeblood of an intelligent enablement strategy.

Even with extensive upfront planning and coordination, conditions change. Competitors launch new offerings, customers present fresh use cases, and new technologies emerge. Agility to adapt positioning and content to ever-shifting market realities is mandatory.

Joint orchestration can realise the promise of content to accelerate sales cycles and outmanoeuvre competitors still chained to legacy funnel mentalities. And it stems from a simple leadership choice - to work together to achieve shared content goals.

The first step towards sales enablement transformation starts with a conversation. Book time with 1827 Marketing’s specialists to get personalised advice on using content strategy and marketing automation to bridge internal divides.