How Agencies Can Implement Sales Enablement

In this episode of Agency Journey, Andrew interviews Doug Davidoff from Imagine Business Development about sales enablement.

Doug began his agency years ago, assisting businesses with their sales. Seeing issues were starting at the top of the funnel, he began helping his clients fix these issues.

This leads him into the world of marketing and especially inbound marketing. Since then, he’s focused on helping clients overcome the chasm between lead generation and sales.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview.

Sales Enablement is a Land Grab

Sales enablement has become one of the newer “markets” in the agency space. It’s still early on and not as crowded as it will be, so Doug takes his business into these waters and establishes a name in this vertical.

This type of “market” occurs semi-frequently in the agency space, whether inbound marketing, social media, or some new platform. Still, in the early days, it’s important in a new market to establish leadership.

As an agency, establishing leadership in a specific space will help you niche down and define your agency as the solution to specific pain points. You’ll become the “go-to” source. It’s better to be first in the arena than to show up with all the other “me-toos.”

The Sales and Marketing Chasm

There is usually an issue in business between sales and marketing departments and staying on the same page, but also between sales and marketing and other parts of the business.

Sales and marketing are “open loop” systems, which means they iterate based on how the market reacts to accounting or human resources.

This also causes these two areas of a business to be siloed, and executives may not see them as the dynamic part of the business. They are complex systems that need to be treated as such.

Agencies can serve a purpose by educating their customers about the issues that arise from siloing marketing and sales.

Focus on What Matters

Many businesses focus on vanity metrics such as traffic or email open rates when at the end of the day, these numbers aren’t the most important to driving the business forward.

Doug uses the example from the book Moneyball. In contrast to how many would think to find the best baseball player for a team (hits), the better stat to track actually runs, which can come in various forms, including walks productive outs.

Agencies need to focus on the core metrics that drive results for their customers and not get wrapped up in the vanity numbers that look good but aren’t driving a business forward.

Be the Expert

Doug talks about the light bulb moment of realizing that he needed to become the expert in one function for his business to get paid the way it could and to really set itself apart from the competition.

Many agencies focus on every piece of the puzzle and being everything to every client, but Doug’s approach is to own one piece (sales enablement) and leverage this into all the benefits that come from it.

It’s about finding a niche, whether it’s a service or industry.

There are plenty of other agencies that can do better at one specific thing that you can, and Doug’s advice is to leverage that when working with clients to deliver the best results.

Doug’s interview breaks down important insights for agencies interested in offering sales enablement and how to position their businesses for success now and into the future.