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• Worst: A marketing guess as to what will help sales based on instinct or general wisdom, and without input or refinement or permission from sales (yes, this does happen). Any guess is likely to be off at least a little, if not completely, depending on the insight available to marketing. The symptoms of failure are a sales organization that gets angry because marketing contacts its prospects without sales permission with the wrong programs, or a lack of utilization of tools or programs offered to sales. Don’t blame poor cooperation from sales if marketing delivered something they did not ask for and don’t need.
• A Bit Better: A collection of requests from sales based on their instinct or general wisdom (this happens a lot). While this guess is still likely to miss some key opportunities, it will not be unwelcome and will fill some needs. The symptom of failure will be limited utilization by sales because the programs don’t have wide enough appeal, or a lack of impact on close rates because they did not address the most important problems in the pipeline.
• Best: A sales enablement plan based on data from the sales pipeline that identifies where opportunities fall out or stall, plus root cause analysis as to why that happens (it would be great if this happened more). We call this Pipeline Dynamics. A plan for sales enablement based on this data is set up for success because it is fact-based. It results in programs prioritized to fix pain points or move deals forward that sales will use and that marketing will learn from to improve future demand creation campaigns. The signs of success are shorter selling cycles, more efficiently recycled leads, and higher close rates. Marketing options include pipeline acceleration programs and sales or marketing playbooks that speak to the specific challenges sales (and buyers) are experiencing.

Before time and money go into projects for sales enablement, take stock of how the specific requirements were defined. If pipeline analysis was not involved, there’s a good chance some of those efforts are not as targeted as they could be. Don’t leave this investment to chance: Marketing teams have a perfect opportunity to deliver impactful sales enablement programs by starting with pipeline dynamics analysis.