The HubSpot Academy Sales Enablement Certification

HubSpot Academy has long been the leader in inbound marketing education. In the past couple years, we've put a lot of effort into educating the world about inbound sales as well.

But how do inbound marketing and inbound sales fit together?

What if your marketing team embraces inbound but your sales team doesn't want to change? Even if marketing and sales both buy into inbound, how do you align their goals and processes?

These are hard questions, and to be completely honest, we didn't know the answers right away. So we went out into the world and asked 28 successful business leaders what they thought. We recorded the interviews, analyzed the recordings, and ultimately discovered that there was one answer to all three questions: Sales enablement. And later this month, we'll be releasing the Sales Enablement Certification to teach you everything we learned.

So what is sales enablement, anyway?

Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. As it turns out, this is something marketing is very well equipped to execute on. Once marketing starts focusing on empowering sales to sell efficiently at a higher velocity, marketing and sales become more aligned—and sales becomes more willing to adopt inbound practices.

What is the course like?

The course is made up of 12 half-hour classes that are filled with clips from the interviews we recorded. You'll learn from real-life business leaders what it takes to align marketing and sales to achieve your business goals. In addition to the online classes, you'll get a sales enablement strategy guide to help you apply your learnings to your own company.

Here's the syllabus:

• Class 1: Introduction to Sales Enablement
• Learn the basics of sales enablement, and see a real-life example of how it can transform an entire organization.
• Class 2: Aligning Your Teams Around a Unified Revenue Goal
• Learn how to create a goal that will motivate marketing and sales to work together.
• Class 3: Developing a Lead Qualification Framework
• Learn how to set up a lead qualification framework that will satisfy both marketing and sales.
• Class 4: Holding Your Teams Accountable With a Service-Level Agreement
• Learn how to hold your teams accountable and what to do if one team falls behind the other.
• Class 5: Maintaining Alignment With Smarketing Meetings
• Learn how to run meetings that solve problems and improve outcomes.
• Class 6: Using Buyer Personas in Sales Enablement
• Learn how to identify the people your marketing and sales teams should be focusing on.
• Class 7: Using Jobs to Be Done in Sales Enablement
• Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School explains how to use the jobs to be done framework to gain a deeper understanding of what motivates your buyers. It might surprise you!
• Class 8: Creating a Hero Statement
• Learn how to combine personas and jobs into a single statement your whole company can rally behind.
• Class 9: The Power of Content in Sales Enablement
• Learn how to use content to increase your sales team's efficiency and velocity.
• Class 10: Aligning Your Business Around Content Creation
• Learn how to get your whole company involved in the content creation process.
• Class 11: Continuing Enablement After the Sale
• Learn how to enable customer success and how doing so can result in future sales.
• Class 12: Evaluating Sales Enablement Technology
• Learn how to identify your tech needs and how to strategically build a tech stack that will help you achieve your goals.

Wait — Clay Christensen is in this course??

Yes. The best-selling author of The Innovator's Dilemma sat down and explained to us his latest theory: Jobs to Be Done. The course also features Marcus Sheridan from The Sales Lion, the CEOs from three of Inc.'s fastest growing private companies in America, the authors of four bestselling books, and leaders from a variety of B2B and B2C companies in the United States, Canada, and Germany.

How do I take the course?

Head on over to the learning center in your HubSpot account (or sign up for a free one if you haven't yet), and you can start the course right away.