Most portfolio marketers are familiar with the concept of enabling the sales team. Often we think of it as making sure our sales colleagues have the latest product information before a launch or sending them the latest persona we built. But we know this doesn’t always work. We forget about the other people who are interacting with buyers and customers, and we can make the mistake of overwhelming sales with information they can’t sort through and act on. We need to take a different approach to enable ALL of our sales, marketing, product, and customer success colleagues. We need to give them the information that THEY need to be successful so they can better engage with buyers. Here are three reasons portfolio marketers must approach enablement from a new perspective:

  1. Buyers want to talk to lots of people from a provider organization. Many of these interactions include those with customer success teams, product managers, and executives. Failing to enable these roles means our buyers get subpar experiences. The organization is unable to deliver a consistent message that resonates with buyers and helps to move them efficiently through a buying decision process.
  2. Buyers love content, but not all content is great. We know that buyers want not just interactions, but also content — and good content at that! As portfolio marketers, we often leave out content creation teams, demand marketing teams, and others that are building content and ultimately, experiences, for our buyers. These teams need to be enabled so they understand not just what buyers crave, but how they connect content to broader themes that are playing out in the market. And just shipping out the latest persona to our marketing colleagues is not enough if it doesn’t come with the context and insight to help them leverage it and answer buyers’ questions.
  3. Not everyone has time for enablement. One big issue we see in lots of organizations is that many, many people want to enable sellers. Often this ends up as “sales infliction” — teams think they’re doing the right thing by focusing their efforts on sellers, but sellers have priorities that compete with the real work of selling. By considering all of the roles that engage with buyers, portfolio marketers can identify when and where additional knowledge to sellers is most impactful and make sure that interactions that buyers have with other teams are also impactful.

When considering portfolio marketing’s role in enablement, take a revenue enablement approach to ensure that knowledge is delivered to the various teams that require it in the way they want to receive it, and delivered when they need it. This can have an enormous impact on the success of the organization in attracting, engaging, and moving buyers through their buyer’s journey. Work with your colleagues in sales enablement, partner enablement, and customer marketing to start identifying who is engaging with your buyers with live interactions and content assets, and start enabling these other roles in your organization.

Come join my colleague Paul Ferron and me at Forrester B2B Summit where we’ll be discussing this topic in our session, “Cultivating Knowledge Across The Revenue Engine To Win Buyers.” We look forward to seeing you there!