How gift giving can boost your sales enablement metrics

This is part one of a three-part, thought leadership series for chief marketing officers (CMOs) and other marketing and sales leaders. For part two, check out 4 Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices. For part three, check out How to Automate Offline Marketing with a Scalable Gifting Strategy.

‍KEY POINTS

• How to get success in sales today
• Common sales enablement challenges
• Why incorporating gifting helps with sales enablement

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I’d like to share with marketing teams my own experience as a former customer of Sendoso. At my last company, we brought Sendoso in for a specific reason: that was to support our enterprise push, to support account based marketing, and to support our outbound efforts.

Sendoso was great at giving our target accounts a reason to engage. What I didn’t realize at the time was Sendoso was also valuable up and down the full revenue funnel. It took some trial and error, but eventually, we realized we could use it at different touchpoints, and in many different ways…it was actually a very versatile platform.

How to get success in sales today

​What does it take to be successful in sales today? While some salespeople may have used charm and wit to wow potential customers in the past, today’s smartest and most effective salespeople know it takes more than a sparkly smile to get someone to sign the dotted line. Sales is still a numbers game to some degree, but it has become quite reliant on a set of intelligence and engagement tools.

In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s essential to maximize every single opportunity. According to one survey, about 20% of sales managers and personnel say they don’t have the resources they need to get their jobs done.

That’s why many firms have turned to sales enablement software. It arms team members with content, business intelligence, analytics, automation, and other tools that make the entire process more effective. Sales enablement tools have proven valuable in driving up:

• Response rates
• Meetings-booked rates
• Event attendance rates
• And other metrics that turn into sales leads

While sales enablement tools are moving prospects down the sales funnel, are they enough?

Sales Enablement Challenges

Simply having a set of tools is often not enough to make an impact. You need a time-tested B2B sales strategy. It doesn’t matter if you have the world’s fastest sports car if you don’t put gas in it (or plug it in if it’s electric). There are a number of challenges that organizations employing sales enablement strategies need to consider in order for their tools to work effectively.

Turning cold leads into warm prospects:

Your customers and prospects are bombarded day and night by digital noise. Email campaigns. LinkedIn messages. Digital advertising. They don’t always have the time or energy to sort through all of that digital outreach and content, even when it might be helpful. After all, they’re busy just like everyone else!

Understanding the buyer’s needs:

Going back to our sports car analogy, understanding your buyer’s needs is akin to having a GPS. Understanding a prospect’s pain points can help you map a route to closing the sale. A GPS isn’t helpful without a destination. And in similar fashion, you can’t help your customer if you don’t know where it is they are trying to go. Once you know their destination, you can help them overcome challenges, pain points, and help direct them to the smoothest route possible by selling them your product or service.

Lack of personalization:

Too often, sales enablement efforts treat every prospect essentially the same. Not only do they not take the buyer’s needs into account (see above), but they fail to recognize individual circumstances, budgets, etc. Today, personalization can boost your ROI, and has been a huge part of marketing for 15+ years.

While all these challenges can be overcome with the right tools and training, there’s one approach that, when added, can vastly improve all sales efforts and add value at all stages of the sales funnel.

I’m talking about gifting, of course, but specifically gifting with a sending platform.

Why Gifting Works

It’s amazing what adding a corporate gift can do to boost sales metrics. Gifts don’t have to be expensive or elaborate, making them extremely cost-effective. As I shared in a previous post, adding a small incentive boosted webinar attendance by 6%. That might not sound like a blockbuster number, but it was a significant impact when looking at top-of-funnel metrics. It can also have a big impact on pipeline growth (more on that below).

Another powerful example is when we sent gift cards for coffee along with brief meeting reminders. Just this act alone kept our salespeople not only top of mind in their prospects, but it also generated a sense of good will and openness to hearing our pitch.

The truth is that when you have target accounts or are working on an account-based marketing strategy, the simple addition of gifting is valuable up and down the funnel. Of course, to make this work at scale, it’s essential to have a sending platform that automates much of the manual tasks associated with sending gifts.

If all this sounds a little too pie in the sky, you can look no further than at some real-world examples of companies using corporate gifting to amplify their sales enablement tools to achieve real results, such as:

CompaniesResults 1Results 2BlendAchieved 62% conversion rateAchieved 40x growth of ROI on pipeline valueChili PiperGrew reach to prospects by 400%Saw a 33% boost in meeting show ratesZuoraIncreased email open-rates by 75%Increased meeting show rates by 18%

To be sure, each of these companies has their own distinct sales enablement programs (heck, Chili Piper is a sales enablement tool). And each of them found that adding gifts can have serious growth in key metrics that, ultimately, contributed to revenue growth.

By adding corporate gifting that is uniquely designed to help create more sales enablement/development opportunities, companies can more easily fill their sales pipeline with more leads, especially at target accounts.

If you would like to learn more about corporate gifting and sales enablement, check out our latest guide on Gifting: The Missing Piece of ABM.

About the writer: Alex Ortiz is the Chief Marketing Officer of Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform. Alex is responsible for the global marketing and partner organization and will focus on category leadership, brand strategy, and customer growth. Previously, Alex held executive marketing roles at high-growth technology companies including Tray.io, QuanticMind and Salesforce. He brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise marketing.