A quick look at sales enablement and its benefits

Like any function in a business, a sales team would work better with the right tools and resources at work.

While generic sales scripts and speeches will work at first, companies should change their strategies once their customer base and revenues get stale.

When firms are not maximizing their sales enough, it’s time for a new outlook and plan. This is where sales enablement enters.

This article explains how implementing sales enablement can be a game-changer for your business.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement refers to equipping sales teams with the tools, training, and best practices they need to target customers. It covers everything from the tools to the best practices for winning more buyers.

With sales enablement, companies can maximize their salespeople’s engagement with potential customers to improve their buying process and experience.

Sales enablement is usually a part of a company’s broader sales management strategy. It is easily integrated into teams with the help of online tools and resources that support this function.

Sales enablement principles

A highly effective sales enablement program has five guiding principles.

Communication

Sales and marketing functions are crucially connected, so both teams should establish strong communication.

For one, captivating and informative content can only be made with the help of sales and marketing. While marketing provides the creativity needed to attract more leads, sales fill the expertise in converting them into paying customers.

Sales and marketing teams can create more actionable content through good communication.

Proper coaching and training for sales reps

A massive part of sales enablement is training and coaching salespersons to increase revenues.

Companies should invest hugely in their sales teams. While a one-size-fits-all approach to coaching is not always practical, leaders can tailor their training according to their teams’ strengths, characteristics, and skills.

Having a dynamic approach to sales coaching helps them strengthen their selling strategies and gain customers better.

Content

Aside from coaching, sales enablement content plays a significant part in attracting and converting customers. Sales and marketing teams combine their knowledge and expertise to create great content that will generate traffic for the company.

A powerful sales content creation process is measured through the following elements:

Organization

A company’s content must be organized and collated into a single content management system. This helps enablement teams see which can be optimized and repurposed for an up-to-date look.

Type

Different content types must fit their intended audience and purpose. Marketing and sales professionals have to ensure they have the right content suitable for each audience and their respective journeys.

Distribution

Lastly, the audience won’t quickly notice the content without proper distribution. With the help of the marketing team, it’s best to post all content online so clients can see it more easily.

Technology

Modern sales leaders must leverage a powerful revenue enablement platform for a more efficient sales cycle.

As part of this, organizations must focus on using proven sales enablement tools to make sales functions easier. At most, CRMs and collaboration tools integrate all the data, processes, and metrics needed by sales teams to become more efficient at work.

Engagement

A sales rep knows that engagement is key to revenue enablement.

Sales enablement peers must have transparent, data-driven, and realistic strategies to encourage more buyers to accept their offers and enhance the entire sales cycle.

How an efficient sales enablement strategy benefits your firm

Organizations looking to improve their revenue further should have a strong sales enablement process. Aside from empowering sales teams, sales enablement provides other benefits, such as the following:

Aligned sales and marketing

At times, sales and marketing teams don’t collaborate enough to maximize content and revenues. Through sales enablement, sales and marketing teams can align their work.

This makes it easier to produce usable content according to their intended audience.

Customized buyer’s journey

With sales enablement, teams cannot simply rely on sales scripts alone.

With the help of sales enablement software, they can at least customize each buyer’s journey according to their preferences and capture more suitable customers in return.

Better cross-selling and upselling strategies

At the same time, sales enablement opens opportunities for better upselling, cross-selling, and reselling to buyers. Salespeople can easily use their buyer’s persona to tailor added services that can increase their revenue.

Virtual selling is one effective sales enablement strategy, especially for cross-selling and upselling.

Increase productivity

According to Forrester, sales enablement tools can reduce ramp time for average sales hires.

Meanwhile, having both tools and strategies can help the sales enablement team close deals, increase productivity, and measure success of sales operations.

Build better client relationships

Lastly, sales enablement helps build better relationships with clients. With their information and patterns solved in the database, sales reps can build rapport with buyers quickly and establish better interactions with them.

Best practices for successful sales enablement

Companies usually take time to successfully implement sales enablement in their teams. However, this can become evident once they see steady growth in revenue, customer base, and satisfaction.

The following are sales enablement best practices to foster better sales strategies:

Tailor sales speech to each customer

Sales reps tend to use “generic” sales speeches with customers. Instead, provide continuous sales training and the right sales enablement materials to make their speeches dynamic.

Provide ongoing training

87% of information learned through training is forgotten within a month, according to research. Don’t let the sales team’s learnings get stale by providing ongoing training.

Another option is to acquire coaching services from renowned sales enablement professionals.

Always utilize data

Data is one of the most powerful tools that a sales enablement team can utilize to attract customers. Use data as much as possible to improve customer relationship management.

Implement sales enablement to the entire organization

Your sales enablement initiative won’t be successful inside sales and marketing teams alone. It needs the input of the entire company to improve and get updated over time.

Hire a reliable sales enablement manager

A reliable sales enablement manager can significantly improve the sales team’s performance by ensuring they have access to the right tools, resources, and training to succeed.

A seasoned sales enablement manager stimulates sales and marketing alignment, optimizes processes, and leverages data analytics to drive strategic decisions. This ultimately leads to improved sales operations and higher revenue.

Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement resources are another factor that helps boost a company’s sales funnel. With sales enablement tools available on the market, companies should find a suitable system that can help them improve and maximize their processes.

There are many sales enablement platforms available today. Below are some of the best options:

Brainshark

Brainshar uses data to drive sales productivity to the top. Its flexibility allows a sales enablement team to:

• Access information
• Receive proper training anytime and anywhere
• Create effective sales enablement content

Boomerang

Boomerang empowers teams to maximize email marketing efforts and sales effectiveness. It provides insights into patterns and behavior to determine how a sales team can better utilize email.

Cloze

Cloze empowers marketers and salespeople to manage marketing and sales via email and social media. It also puts all customer interactions in one place, allowing a sales enablement team to better track client relationships and amplify sales success.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a powerful tool for integrating sales and CRM. Mostly a CRM tool, it lets sales managers integrate their sales enablement plans and systems to manage them better.

Fostering sales enablement success

Sales enablement processes are an indispensable element in the modern sales ecosystem. It seamlessly bridges the gap between marketing and sales.

Investing in the right sales enablement platform empowers sales teams with the resources, tools, and knowledge necessary to engage effectively with prospects and close deals more efficiently.

Robust sales enablement leadership provides structured training, relevant content, and insightful analytics. Sales enablement leaders should not only help enhance individual performance but also drive organizational growth and customer satisfaction.