The Fundamentals of Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is the ongoing process of preparing sales organizations with the right tools, content, and information to close deals. Successful sales enablement strategies provide salespeople with what they need to engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training they need to engage buyers. Placing a focus on sales enablement makes sales teams more effective by:

• Connecting sellers to relevant content
• Providing flexible ways to present content
• Delivering real-time visibility into customer engagement
• Applying advanced analytics to optimize pitches
• Equipping sellers with training and guidance
• Measuring all the above and mapping against bottom-line results

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement is crucial as a long-term solution to modern sales challenges. To start, companies with sales enablement have 15% better win rates than those without it. It also correlates with more effective sales training, stronger customer relationships, and higher quota attainment. There are other benefits, too.

Sales Readiness

Sales readiness is a core component of sales enablement. The goal is to ensure reps have the knowledge to maximize every client interaction. This involves all the strategic activities that prepare reps to sell and things one might need to know on the job, such as:

• Onboarding
• Coaching
• Continuous learning and reinforcement
• Product details
• Messaging
• Competitive positioning
• The many skills necessary for a valuable interaction

Sales Engagement and Retention

Sales enablement helps sales reps to succeed. This means reps are more likely to engage with their jobs and stay with your company long-term. The same applies when equipping front-line sales managers. Sales managers support reps with good coaching and communication. This improves seller engagement and leads to better results.

Client-Facing Success

Everyone who faces your buyers will also enjoy relevant content, training, and coaching. This includes sales engineers, customer success, service teams, and channel partners.

Effective Usage of Sales Tools

Sales reps might use several different tools depending on the situation. Sales tool usage is the 2nd-most common priority of sales enablement teams today. Sales enablement works with vendor CSM teams when new releases come out. It provides related training and makes sure sellers can make the most of their resources.

How is Sales Enablement Practiced?

To develop a sound business strategy, stick to sales enablement best practices. There isn’t any single best practice for a sales force to perform. It takes many practices to help a sales rep perform their job, as well as relying on a business’ marketing team.

Identify High-Performing Activities

Identify the sales leaders and what it is that they do to make them the highest-performing. Then, make them understandable and accessible as content for the rest of your sales team. This helps them learn to incorporate them via sales training.

Provide Easy Access to Content

American Marketing Association reports that 90% of content goes unused by sales teams. This is due to sales reps being unable to find the content. Sales enablement strategies should be:

• Flexible and performance-based, with your marketing automation program in control of sales event triggers
• Integrated, as the software should connect with other tools to keep the sales process streamlined and automated
• Organized, with all tools for content and sales should be easy to find and use

Align the Team Around CRM

Your CRM should be the single source of truth for your organization. It’s crucial everyone can access the same information in their CRM. It’s also important to integrate your CRM with other tools, set up relevant dashboards, and enable reports.

Invest in Ongoing Training

Provide and encourage training opportunities for reps at your company. Consider having a rep who’s great at phone calls give a lunch-and-learn meeting on their best practices. Or, send a few of your reps to an industry event, or bring an outside sales coach in for intensive training. It’s important to offer opportunities to reduce churn and increase salesperson happiness.

Formalize Your Process

Don’t assume everyone will adopt your strategies and execute them. It’s important to formalize your approach to sales enablement and process to ensure your team is working. According to CSO Insights, aligning your sales enablement plan with your business strategy provides teams with a 19.2% higher win rate.

Sources

https://www.hubspot.com/sales-enablement
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/make-sales-enablement-helpful
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-who-what-how-and-why-of-sales-enablement
https://seismic.com/knowledge-center/what-is-sales-enablement/
https://www.brainshark.com/ideas-blog/2013/July/what-is-sales-enablement-3-defintions

https://www.highspot.com/sales-enablement/