Better Bang For Your Buck
Most companies spend too much money on sales enablement. That’s because salespeople spend a lot of time using their platforms to manually research the specific contacts to whom they want to pitch their products. But salespeople are expensive, made even more so with every hour spent looking up individual records of, say, CTOs at specific businesses.
That means companies are not getting the best bang for their buck when their budgets are focused on platforms that create a time sink for their sales teams. But if a company were to reinvest a portion of that budget into a data marketing platform (such as NetWise), those same dollars would come from the budget of the marketing unit, whose widespread efforts can create numerous inbound leads, rather than a small pool of hyper-focused sales enablement leads. The scale and quality of those leads would be much higher than any individual salesperson could deliver.
We believe that companies should apply the best practices of their sales teams to their marketing teams. This will allow them to reach more high-quality contacts and maximize the value of any spend earmarked for technology.
How Much to Allocate
How much should companies reallocate? I would estimate that 50-75% of sales enablement platform money should be redirected toward a marketing data platform. If you’re spending $120,000 a year on a sales enablement platform and getting 500,000 contacts, for example, reallocating $60,000-90,000 to a platform like NetWise would net far more touch points to reach those same individuals. There is a lag between when the value from that reallocation is realized: Your marketing team needs three to six months at most to stand up the best practices of those sales teams within your marketing efforts and multichannel approach. But after that three- to six-month time period, your sales team will be inundated with inbound leads, which would require far less time manually researching and cold-calling potential customers.
Strategy in Action
When lead-gen provider Union Resolute added NetWise to its stack, it found us to provide multiple clear advantages compared to other big-name contact-level data providers, according to CTO Logan Kelly. “The first is accuracy and breadth of data. Being able to rely on accurate data is crucial,” Logan said. “The second is the UI. Attention to detail in the audience building UI has reduced minutes and hours from multiple points in the process compared to the other interfaces we use.”
That’s why we believe companies should redirect sales enablement budgets to marketing platforms. The right solutions will be able to surface more high-quality leads at scale, saving sales teams precious time to focus on what matters most: sealing the deal.
Want to get in to see what we’re talking about? Sign up here.
More Netwise:
YouTube | Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin | Web I Blog+Newsletter
