What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is when you provide your sales team the tools and resources they need to sell more. It is any process you use to sell and close more deals.
Throughout a sales enablement strategy, sales leaders are the ones who make everything possible. They decide to enable sales reps who then can convert more leads.
This article will provide you with the elements of a sales enablement strategy which will allow you to get more leads through the buyer’s journey.
The importance of sales enablement
Sales enablement is very important for all businesses as it facilitates better use of resources for both sales and marketing teams. It helps your sales reps know more about the most important deals, the strategy they should follow, and who are the stakeholders.
Knowing these three key aspects will help representatives understand a lead’s problem and come up with a solution that you offer.
Without sales enablement, your sales reps may struggle to move prospects through the sales pipeline because of less-qualified information or a poor sales process.
The tools needed for sales enablement strategy
These tools are very important for sales enablement, as they let your sales reps concentrate on your prospects while handling all the rest of their duties. Here are the most important sales enablement tools you’re going to need.
A CRM software
The CRM software will let you track your customers’ data while also spotting opportunities in your pipeline. The great thing about a customer relationship management system is that everything stays in one place.
That means you can get a bird’s-eye view of where your company is heading, and you can look at each individual potential customer with ease. You can insert this software into your business’ system to let you automate the flow of your customers’ data and your revenues.
A sales enablement tool
A sales enablement tool is a platform that will give you more visibility of your sales team. This tool links between your sales and marketing teams, and your customers. It will also help you track your teams’ performance through various reporting features and monitoring functions.
A sales enablement tool not only gives various pieces of content to your sales staff, but it holds them accountable to complete their daily duties.
A learning management tool
A learning management tool is a tool that will help your sales team learn more about your business’ new products, and how to sell your products or services.
This can also come as something like Coursera or other online tools that will help teach them how to engage clients successfully and sell products or services.
A call coaching tool
A call coaching tool tracks your sales team’s performance and behavior so you can use it to either improve your process or use it as an example for training. This tool will help you know if your team is making any progress in selling your product or service.
Call coaching can also come in handy if you want to hire an outside sales consultant or another company to help with facilitating your sales process. Another aspect of call coaching that you should consider is call recording. This will help you keep track of what happens on calls and how you can improve consistently.
The next step in the sales enablement process is building a sales enablement strategy.
How can you build a sales enablement strategy?
1. Construct a clear mission
The sales enablement team needs to have a clear and concise mission set, where they can also share it with other teams. This will make it a lot easier to communicate with the different departments and measure completed achievements. It will also allow your sales team to communicate with potential customers more effectively.
2. Establish your goals
The best and most successful sales enablement strategies involve establishing sales goals.
You should also provide key performance indicators, to put targets and goals for your team to work towards.
This will also include insights that will help your team succeed. For example, putting deadlines will make it easier for your team to know what’s expected of them and for you to evaluate and track your sales enablement strategy’s success.
3. Understand why sales enablement is important
To build a successful sales enablement strategy, you need to understand its importance and the impact it can have towards your business.
It’s very important to explain its importance to your team. When they understand why it’s important and how it can help your business, they are more likely to implement it and take it more seriously. Thus, making it more successful.
4. Have one place to store all your data
Storing all data like contact, account and collected deals’ information in one place can really save time and effort for your sales team.
Your team will need to use this information for future conversations with your customers. Instead of wasting time on looking for data, they can use this time to engage with potential customers to close more deals. Consider using a customer relationship management or lead management tool to store data.
5. Communicate and give feedback
To build an effective sales enablement strategy, you need to have a committed sales enablement team that is also connected to your marketing team.
According to Marketo and Reachforce, when your sales and marketing teams are aligned together, your business will become better by 67% at closing deals.
To have a successful sales enablement strategy, you need to communicate, collaborate, and give feedback to your sales and marketing teams.
6. Provide your sales team with the important tools
Provide your sales enablement team with the tools they need and want to help them close more deals.
There are tools that would help your sales team have quick and easy access to the most up-to-date data, that will also help them be more successful and productive.
7. Train your team
If you have all the tools that would help your sales team move forward but without giving them the know-how, then you’re never going to move forward with your strategy.
You need to train your team and educate them on the values each tool provides, so they would want to use it. Therefore, it’s very crucial for you to train your team before applying a new strategy.
8. Evaluate your strategy
You need to evaluate and analyze your sales enablement strategy. As it’s not something that you would do one time and never check again.
You need to evaluate how your strategy is performing and know where you can improve it. You could evaluate your strategy on a monthly basis or whatever timeline works best for you.
Best practices for sales enablement
Define your goals
Your sales enablement program would give your salespeople all they could need for them to close more deals. You should also consider changing ongoing processes to strengthen your strategy.
Concentrate on your buyer’s experience
The entire purpose of sales enablement is to make your salespeople close more sales and have more engagements with your buyers.
Therefore, your buyer’s experience is very important. To make your buyer’s journey a successful one, you need to first make sure your sales reps have all the tools they need to understand the buyers and their needs.
Provide good content
You need to provide good content for your customers to push them towards buying your product or service.
The content can be blogs, white papers, and videos. Having good content will give your salespeople more value to your buyers. Some salespeople prefer to let the buyers look at the content rather than telling them all about the product.
Constantly provide sales training
Training is always important. Providing constant training to your salespeople will let them sell more.
Many businesses give these training sessions once a year, which will not be very effective because the salespeople will forget about what they learned shortly afterwards.
Therefore, sales training should be a regular thing that happens on a monthly basis to let your sales people remember and stay up to date with what they learned and the information they received.
Who would own sales enablement in your business?
Depending on your business’ goals and priorities, customize your sales enablement strategy. Usually, sales and marketing teams share sales enablement initiatives.
The marketing team gives the sales team all the resources they can need to close more deals. Their resources can be blog articles, videos, and product guides, that will help sales reps to have more successful interactions with prospective customers. The sales reps then share these resources to the customers to potentially make them buy.
The sales team can communicate with the marketing team to know more information about what to share with potential leads through their buyer’s journey, to make more sales. They can then share this information with the sales reps to let them reach more potential customers and make more sales.
Conclusion
Now that you know all about the elements of a sales enablement strategy, what it is, its importance, the tools you need, and how to build your strategy, you should immediately consider applying them to your business.
Want something specific to be covered about ways to improve your business? Reach out to us at marketing@dyl.com
