Growth Enablement: An Efficient Marketing + Sales Approach for Tech Startups
I've worked with early stage, high-growth potential startups for the last decade. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, "How do we get started with marketing?" Often, what entrepreneurs really mean is something like, “We’ve been focused on sales to demonstrate early traction; basically, that looks like the digital equivalent of knocking on doors. We know it’s time to think about marketing, but it seems expensive, and we don’t really have the sales funnel to support that cost. How can we get started with marketing in a way that isn’t going to ruin our runway?”
And to that, I inevitably answer: “We start by understanding where your ideal customers are living, online and off, and then we meet them there with value-forward messaging that reflects your product, your positioning, and their needs.”
As strategists and builders, we think in terms of funnels, flywheels, and pipelines. There are good reasons why we break up the customer journey and our marketing and sales funnels (or flywheels, or loops), like internal roles and responsibilities, scalability, and strategic insights. But as consumers? It’s all one brand, one experience, one relationship.
I believe that companies that really embrace that reality will have a much better chance of being successful with marketing and sales - even in a tough environment like the one we’re currently navigating.
If you want to actually see the value of the leads you're generating - and what marketer or entrepreneur doesn't? - you'll need to be committed to empowering sales success and customer retention. In a value-forward growth environment, that means getting really comfortable with sales enablement.
Ultimately, that’s why aligning content marketing and sales enablement matters. It helps you connect more to your customers.
So why does aligning content marketing and sales enablement matter? The simplest, best reason there is: your customers.
When you can create resources that meet your leads where they are, before, during, and after the sale, you're not only easing the sale. You’re also equipping your customers to market and sell on your behalf through positive comments, shares, and referrals. (As I've said before, your best marketers are paying you!)
Over the last 18 months, I’ve developed a marketing approach that’s designed to mitigate the risks of investing in marketing, while delivering qualified lead flow and supporting sales. For now, I’m calling it “growth enablement” - a way to unlock the potential in everyone who interacts with your brand. It integrates content marketing with sales enablement strategies to create a full-funnel strategy for growth.
Today, we’ll dive a little more into this strategy, and how to get started.
Understanding the Startup Marketing & Sales Landscape
I think it’s important to take a look at the business context that this approach grew from:
Over the last year and a half, the startup environment has become significantly more budget-constrained. The drumbeat of “extend runway” could be heard ‘round the world.
I’m often one of the first marketing leaders, which means I’m bridging the gap between the marketing function and the rest of the business functions. This means lots of overlap between what we might consider “departmental responsibilities.”
That said, there is usually a product leader in place, and often a sales leader, too (especially in a B2B environment). This is important, because it means there’s already some deep insight about product value intended - and delivered.
Small teams mean everyone wears a lot of hats. That means lots of collaboration and transparency - and some very real budget and bandwidth constraints.
In both B2B and B2C environments, there’s usually some market education required. I’m working with startups that are trying to make a positive impact on the world, so they’re building something that’s new and probably unfamiliar (but awesome).
We have high-information buyers, tons of competition for decreasing attention, limited budget and bandwidth, and a desperate need for more sales.
Sales enablement would be key here, but for a sales team of one or two, it’s likely overkill. Content marketing could be incredibly valuable, but there’s probably not the budget for a full content program.
And that’s exactly why a hybrid approach can work.
Introducing Growth Enablement
Growth enablement (as I’m thinking about it today) blends content marketing strategies and sales enablement strategies in a unique way. This unlocks:
A bone-deep knowledge of your ideal customer that you can leverage for product development, sales coaching, and scaling your marketing program.
Data-driven insights about consumer behavior before, during, and after the sale.
Actual alignment and synergies between your marketing and sales teams.
Content that gets a lot of mileage, because it can be used for both marketing and sales purposes.
A consistent brand experience for your leads, prospects, and customers.
Aligning your lead-generating content marketing efforts with your deal-closing sales enablement efforts means that the brand world is more consistent, the overall experience is higher quality, and the customer is more empowered to act as an evangelist.
What is Content Marketing?
Feel free to skip this if you’re already familiar with content marketing strategy. If not, content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing high-quality, high-value content to attract interested strangers and convert them to leads. Content marketing leverages both organic and paid channels to attract and convert inbound leads.
Success in content marketing is typically measured by metrics like new leads generated, content downloads, or new subscribers. Content marketing typically goes hand-in-hand with marketing tactics like SEO, or search engine optimization, and advertising, to ensure that your content is found by the right audience.
It’s important to note that content marketing tends to focus on leads and opportunities, rather than customers.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement refers to the process of equipping sales teams with the materials, tools and information they need to engage with and convert customers effectively. This typically includes training, messaging guidelines, process documents, sales-ready assets, and coaching.
Success in sales enablement is typically evaluated with metrics like time per deal stage, close rates, close speed, and funnel fallout.
Sales enablement typically focuses on opportunities, and less on retention.
For better or worse, marketing is typically heavily involved in creating sales enablement content and supporting the sales team in using it.
Content Marketing + Sales Enablement = Growth Enablement
The key here isn’t just to understand the connection between content marketing and sales enablement, but to gain the customer knowledge to build assets that allow you to leverage efforts in both functions simultaneously. This isn’t just about blogs or case studies. It’s about creating cross-functional content and processes that are mapped really tightly to the customer journey, so that you get more mileage out of every piece you create.
If you haven't consciously tried to align your content marketing, including product marketing, with your sales enablement materials, it's likely that you're delivering a disjointed prospect experience and a negative impact on your brand - without even knowing it.
The good news? Achieving real, powerful alignment between these disciplines is fairly straightforward, because there’s already so much natural overlap. Both are focused on delivering value-forward resources that help the prospect, and enhance the value they gain from the brand. Both rely on certain foundational business insights, such as an ideal customer profile and a buyer journey, to truly thrive. Yet these two teams often work separately for most or all of the year.
Bringing them together in an intentional, thoughtful way, with your ideal customer as your north star, has the potential to unlock powerful growth opportunities - even on a tight budget.
How to Get Started with a Growth Enablement Strategy
So you’re on board with the idea of a streamlined, integrated content program that bridges marketing and sales. What’s next?
Here’s how to create a growth enablement strategy (or more accurately, how I would do it):
Develop your ideal customer profile (sometimes called an ideal customer persona). This is much more detailed than just a short list of demographics. Your ICP needs to allow you to understand the world that your customers live in, personally and professionally. Because this data-backed profile is informing both marketing and sales activities, it needs to be comprehensive and detailed. This is one of the steps that frequently gets overlooked, to a company’s detriment.
Map your customer’s journey from stranger to evangelist. Sometimes referred to as a buyer journey or a user journey in other disciplines, this looks at a customer’s behavior from an integrated marketing and sales perspective. To put a finer point on it: we want to document what your customers do before, during and after the sale, online and offline. The best of these will also provide insights into their emotional state, so that you can ensure that your content meets them where they are.
Identify what they're looking for when they interact with your brand at every stage, and how they're feeling. Outline any specific sales questions that need to be answered, and try to keep in mind their mentality during the process. Buying a high-tech medical device for cancer recovery is a really different experience than signing up for a social media software. You need to know how your leads are feeling as they’re shopping, so you can meet them where they are and build an authentic connection.
Open a conversation with your marketing, sales, success, and product leaders. It’s important to get all of these customer-focused disciplines involved. Each team will likely have a different perspective on the relationship with the customer. Talk through the buyer journey. Ensure it feels accurate. Discuss the content ideas that have surfaced so far, and listen for assets that appear to have cross-functional value; those are going to be high-priority. Leave a little time to brainstorm together about what each team hears from leads, prospects, and customers. Are there opportunities to leverage those insights and customer stories into assets?
Link in any content you already have. This exercise will probably function like a mini-audit, allowing you to highlight existing resources that can be updated, and flag gaps.
Prioritize critical content needs! After reviewing this customer journey with the whole customer-facing team, a few key content ideas should surface. They could be explainer articles, demo videos, competitor comparison sheets, market education blogs, white papers… you name it. Try to create at least one piece of content for each stage of the buying journey; in other words, make sure that you’re creating content both for people who are interacting with your brand for the first time and new customers. The highest priority content should flex across both marketing and sales needs; case studies and demo videos are good examples.
Begin production. I usually like to start with the top-of-the-funnel content, and work down the buying journey. However, some brands realize that there’s an acute need for sales-supporting content at the end of the conversion process. How you prioritize content will depend on both your team’s insights and data about funnel performance and conversion rates.
Track, analyze, and optimize. In any performance-focused organization, it’s important to track leads generated, opportunities created, customers converted, and customers retained. It’s also helpful to look at fallout. This allows you to know what’s working, and what’s not. (After all, opinions are good but data is better.) Your goal is to have clarity into what happens from the moment you generate a lead until the moment they become a customer. All-in-one tools like HubSpot can help, but to be honest, even a spreadsheet is a great place to start.
By the way, there’s a good chance you’ll have more content ideas than budget to create in the first wave. That’s a good thing. Make sure to document additional content goals for future initiatives. It’s also usually valuable to have a place for everyone to add content ideas as they arise.
I deeply believe that if you take care of your customer, everything else takes care of itself. By aligning your marketing efforts to the actual wishes, needs, and wants of your customers - at every stage in their journey - you unlock a streamlined growth strategy.
Want to learn more? We’re hosting a Growth Roundtable all about how to align marketing and sales to close more deals. You can register here.
And, if you’d like some support with implementing this strategy, book a call with me here.
