“Good salespeople are not born. They are trained.”
– Dave Kurlan
Selling is hard work. However, with the right tools and resources, even the most difficult work can be easy.
We are talking about Sales Enablement — a series of strategies to help you create an excellent sales team by improving your sales process and leading your business to a higher ROI.
“Sales teams that leverage a sales enablement platform report 7% higher win rates than teams that don’t.”
Source
If you want to understand and adapt a sales enablement strategy for your team, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we will learn two things and two things only
- What is sales enablement?
- 6 Best practices for effective sales enablement strategies
“Organizations that leverage sales enablement tools are 4x more likely to effectively provide insights into what works to ensure sales rep consistency.”
Source
Best practices for sales enablement
- Your sales approach needs to be aligned with your customer’s journey to understand their buying behavior better
- Create engaging, high-quality inbound and outbound sales material
- Invest in comprehensive training- onboarding, between-sales, and upskilling
- Ensure your marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams are in sync
- Choose the right automation tools – focus on AI-powered
- Establish a data-driven culture by regularly measuring success and optimizing the sales enablement process
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales and marketing team (yes, both teams need to be aligned for better efficiency) with the correct resources to close more deals. The resources can be a combined system of software, product or service knowledge, tools, information, content, training, and more to help your business team sell better.
“The misalignment between sales and marketing teams costs businesses $1 trillion yearly in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts.” Source
Sales enablement strategies help improve your sales team’s productivity and efficiency.
However, sales enablement is meant for more than just your sales team. Effective implementation depends on the cohesive alignment between the sales and marketing teams.
Your sales team needs to sell your goods and services to grow. They require the right messaging and system to manage the sales-ready leads. Your marketing team helps your sales team by creating contextual content, increasing engagement, and nurturing leads. With feature-rich sales enablement tools, your marketing team can go beyond content creation.
The right tool can help them fill the pipeline with higher-quality leads, which can help your sales team to close more deals. Stronger alignment between your two teams positively impacts your ROI.
The best sales enablement tool your business requires depends on your industry. Take, for example, if you are a SaaS company with a complex sales cycle that requires features that include
- In-depth product or service information
- Relationship building platform
- Personalization in sales content and more
Encharge can be the perfect sales enablement marketing automation tool for your business. You can tailor the strategy to your unique business requirements so your teams can target a larger audience to convert leads to paying customers.
However, when developing your sales enablement strategy, remember to follow these sales enablement best practices.
Now that you know how your sales and marketing team can cohesively work with the best-fit sales enablement tool, it’s time to understand best practices to help your sales team increase productivity, drive revenue, and achieve success.
1. Align the sales approach with the customer journey
“54% of buyers agree that sellers can steer them into a new mindset or assumption about a new product or service.”
Source
The ultimate goal of your sales team is to close more deals; for that, your salespeople need to understand your customers’ journey. When you understand where your buyers are coming from, you can better understand what goes into their purchasing decisions.
When building your sales enablement strategy, approach the development through your customer journey. Make it the center of your sales strategy and your sales process.
When your sales rep understands your customer’s journey, they are better equipped to
- Curate and tailor their messaging
- Uncover potential gaps in current messaging and strategy
- Understand customer pain points, preferences, and buying triggers
2. Develop high-quality sales materials
“Consumer questions during sales calls are up from 13 questions in 2022 to an average of 18 questions.”
Source
Agree or not, your entire sales process depends on your content. Empower your team with high-quality, engaging sales material, and see how your sales soar. With relevant information, they can address any query raised by potential customers, give them the best solution, and convert them into paying customers more efficiently.
Creating sales enablement content without the right sales enablement tool can be time-consuming. Feature-rich sales enablement templates and tools help you build internal and external content.
Clear and concise information for internal teams
An internal knowledge base helps your team develop skills by acquiring the appropriate product knowledge. It empowers your sales reps to engage with the audience and build a conversation.
- Sales book
- Training material
- Customer persona
- Cold email templates
- Onboarding documentation
Engaging customer-facing content
External content engages your audience and provides them with the required information. It showcases your product or service while adding value to them and nudging the prospect towards converting into your customer.
- Sales deck
- Testimonials
- Case studies
- Product demo
- Whitepapers & ebooks
Look at this Landbot case study.
Used by more than 50,000 businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, Landbot is the most intuitive no-code chat builder. They started using Encharge for new user email journeys and soon discovered infinite functionalities, including lead qualifications, sending advanced events to product analytics tools, automating sync segments, and more.
When you have relevant and engaging customer-facing content, you attract more potential by simply having information that adds value to their work.
3. Ensure continuous upskilling of internal teams
“Effective sales coaching has improved win rates by up to 29%.”
Source
When you invest in your employee training and development, you are investing in your talent and your business. You empower your people by giving them the required tools and knowledge to help them nurture the customer and the relationship further. This ultimately helps create a better sales and customer experience.
Besides improving your team’s productivity and efficiency, sales enablement training also boosts their confidence, especially for new hires, as it equips your sales reps to deal with any customer query they may encounter.
Sales training can be divided into three areas:
1. Pre-training
- Assess training requirements and gaps
- Create diverse training material
- Select a suitable training method
2. In-training
- Give a richer understanding of your product or service and the industries they serve
- Aim to keep it engaging and interactive by using real-time examples
- Include discussions, feedback, worksheets, and presentations
3. Post-training
- Review, measure, and analyze the impact
- Take feedback to understand gaps, if any
- Iterate according to the dynamic changes in the market
4. Create synergy between teams and departments
“There’s a 67% higher likelihood of successfully closing leads generated by marketing for companies with integrated sales and marketing teams.”
Source
Success is teamwork, and so is sales enablement. Cross-department collaboration not only adds value to your team and business but also to your customers. When your sales and marketing teams are in sync, they can give your customers a better and more consistent experience across all touchpoints. But adding product and customer success to this mix becomes a sure-shot formula for a happy customer experience.
With shared goals and defined roles, each member can responsibly contribute to the ultimate goal of revenue growth. Also, it helps one department understand the requirements and pain points of other departments and customers.
The benefits of collaborating your sales team with marketing, product, and customer success teams include
- Up-to-date information on product updates, features, and benefits
- Increased knowledge and information sharing within the teams
- Give your customers a consistent and memorable experience across all touchpoints
- Feedback from the sales team can help the marketing team with better strategies and vice versa
- Work cohesively across the entire sales enablement process of creating content, training, and execution
5. Select the right tools for sales automation
According to 68% of sales professionals, most software will feature built-in AI capabilities by 2024.
Source
Sales processes at most companies are repetitive and time-consuming. The good news is that part of them can also be automated, giving salespeople more time. And more time for salespeople automatically means more chances to woo prospects.
For example, the regular tasks of data entry, follow-up emails, payment reminders, account updates, and other such tasks don’t have to take up most of your team’s time. These mundane processes can be automated with the right set of tools. Invest in a sales enablement platform that offers a full suite of AI-powered tools to help your sales team work more efficiently.
- Initial prospecting
- Pipeline management
- Sales enablement marketing
- Lead scoring and nurturing
- Email campaign
- Analytics and reporting
- Follow-up reminders
6. Measure success and optimize the process
“Sales intelligence tools used by 43% of people is for sales tracking and pipeline tracking. It shows a 54% increase from the previous two years.”
Source
Lord Kelvin aptly said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Your sales team has to meet its target continuously, requiring ongoing assessment. Regularly checking on the metrics gives your team a higher chance to refine strategies and adapt changes quickly, keeping them ahead of your competitors.
You can start by measuring and analyzing:
- Sales enablement KPIs
- Sales win rate
- Sales cycle length
- Sales content usage and engagement
- Customer feedback and satisfaction
- Overall revenue growth
How can you go wrong when you have one eye on your target and one on the metrics and KPI? It helps your team be more data-driven, and that further helps them to:
- Understand customer behavior
- Identify areas that require improvement
- Set benchmarks to measure success
The correct implementation of a sales enablement strategy influences almost all facets of business performance. It requires initial hard work to reshape traditional sales approaches but ultimately drives more efficient outcomes.
Read more: 11 Sales Operations KPIs You Should Start Tracking
Wrapping Up
“For 55% of C-suite leaders, sales enablement technology has become a priority investment .”
Source
We have laid it all out. Sales enablement and its best practices.
A good sales enablement program is a potent combination of strategy, team, and resources. When creating your sales enablement strategy, make sure it is dynamic and adaptable. By correctly implementing the best practices, you are giving your sales team the best resources to acquire more leads to convert them into sales.
Besides following these six best practices, make sure you follow one more.
Regularly update your sales enablement assets.
Why?
Simply because B2B buying needs and behavior are constantly evolving, and so is the market. You need a sales enablement strategy that meets the customer’s requirements. Don’t just focus on the seller’s skills and knowledge; also focus on the seller’s experience.
Now that you are all set to create a sales enablement strategy, all you need to get started is the perfect tool that meets your unique business requirements. Choose a tool that empowers your sales team to cover it all.
- Sales enablement content
- Automation functionalities
- Pipeline management
- User segmentation
- AI-powered tools
- Personalization
- Analytics
- CRM and more
“Enablement in leading organizations is tasked with true capability building — and not simply relegated to onboarding and training,” Harvard Business Review.
Help your sales reps onboard, improve their skills, and, most importantly, sell.
Drive growth with a sales enablement strategy aligned to B2B buying behaviors.
If you need help aligning your sales and marketing departments and automating repetitive tasks in your processes, do not hesitate to book a free consultation call.
