Why do some sales teams struggle despite knowing the product inside out?
While your sales team may have expertise in the product, they may not have access to the bigger picture. This includes how the product fits into the market and meets the target audience’s unique needs or your brand’s long-term goals. As competition increases in every industry, connecting these dots between marketing and sales is essential to closing deals faster and more efficiently. Thus, sales enablement acts as the bridge between departments to align your organization's larger goals with your sales pitch.
In this guide, we will explore the concept of sales enablement, its relevance, and how you can set up a successful sales enablement strategy to outshine your competitors.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is an ongoing process of supporting your sales team by providing them with relevant resources such as content, training, tools, and strategies to increase their sales productivity.
Sales enablement is usually a collaborative effort. It involves various departments such as sales, marketing, revenue, etc., and consists of organizing information and resources to provide your sales team with the required skills and materials to close deals more effectively.
Sales enablement must not be confused with sales operations. Sales operations is the process of ensuring the effective functioning of the sales process. This includes managing the sales pipeline, creating sales forecasts, managing compensation for sales staff, determining pricing structures and so on. Sales enablement, on the other hand, has a narrower scope. It largely focuses on the sales team’s requirements, i.e., what resources they need to engage with customers and close deals more effectively.
Why is sales enablement important?
Increasing competition and the shift to digitally driven markets have led to various new challenges for sales teams. Buyers are now more informed, have more options, and expect highly personalized experiences throughout their purchasing journey. This new reality requires a much more comprehensive approach to sales. Here are some ways in which sales enablement can benefit your organization:
1. Improvement in sales performance
Sales enablement can significantly boost your sales by ensuring that your sales team has access to the required content, training and tools. As a result, it provides a structured and consistent approach to sales that leads to improved effectiveness of sales processes.
2. Better alignment between departments
Sales enablement ensures greater alignment between the goals of various departments, especially sales and marketing. This leads to greater efficiency and better communication within departments, allowing all departments to work together towards larger business goals.
3. Scalability
Sales enablement establishes systems and processes that can be followed when your organization grows in size. For instance, even as teams grow, the onboarding process is smooth and scalable as every new team member has equal access to the required foundational knowledge. Similarly, the sales enablement team may also prepare a list of answers to customers' most common queries to address concerns swiftly.
How to create a sales enablement strategy
Sales enablement is a complex process that involves multiple aspects. Therefore, it is necessary to build a proper strategy before you can start the process. Here are the key steps you need to follow to build a successful sales enablement strategy:
1. Audit your current state of sales
The first step is to assess your current state of sales to have a clearer picture of the challenges you need to address. Here are a few key metrics that you can measure to determine your sales productivity:
- Sales ramp-up time: This refers to the amount of time it takes for a sales team or representative to reach full productivity after hiring. Calculating this metric allows the sales enablement team to measure the effectiveness of training modules.
- Sales cycle length: This refers to the number of days that it takes to close a deal from the identification of a prospect. For a more comprehensive understanding, you can consider the average sales cycle length.
- Sales conversion rate: This refers to the percentage of closed deals compared to the total number of deals pursued.
2. Determine your objectives
The next step to creating a clear strategy for sales enablement is to outline your goals and the expected outcomes that you wish to achieve. This majorly depends on the challenges your existing sales process is facing and may include:
- Increasing your win rates or revenue
- Reducing the length of your sales cycle
- Reducing the sales ramp-up time
Having a clear idea of your objectives can help you to determine your strategy’s success over time.
3. Incorporate solutions to address challenges
The next step is to develop effective training and tailored content required by the sales team to make the sales process smoother. This involves setting up processes to develop onboarding programs and training modules to build essential skills such as objection handling and consultative selling. Further, you must audit and create content for every stage of the buyer journey that is stored in a centralized and accessible repository. It is also important to ensure that these resources are regularly updated to stay relevant in changing market conditions.
4. Establish lines of communication and assign responsibility
In this step, you must implement systems to establish shared goals, proper communication channels, and protocols between various departments, such as sales, marketing, and revenue, to ensure proper collaboration between them. You may also set up a platform where all teams can access and share updates on their tasks in real-time and schedule timely briefs or meetings. These steps ensure that all teams are on the same page regarding key objectives.
Further, teams must be assigned the responsibility of managing each of the core components of sales enablement, such as content management, sales training and tools. Each individual’s responsibility must also be clearly defined.
5. Monitor and optimize
Sales enablement is an ongoing process that requires constant optimization. To ensure that your sales enablement strategy is effective and up-to-date, track key sales enablement metrics such as win-rates, ramp-up time, sales cycle length, etc. This is important to ensure that decisions about changes in content, training, or sales processes are based on adequate data.
You may also conduct annual or quarterly audits of your strategy. These periodic reviews allow you to identify areas for improvement and refine your strategy to adapt to changing market conditions.
Core components of sales enablement
As we discussed before, sales enablement consists of multiple aspects. Here are the core components that are essential to any sales enablement strategy:
1. Sales enablement content
Sales enablement content refers to the various types of content that sales reps use during the sales process to sell their products/ services. This includes customer case studies, demo modules, ebooks, pricing charts, discount information, email templates/sequences, etc.
Sales enablement process creates, consolidates, and updates this content so that it is easily available on demand. The content library usually contains a diversity of content to cater to various situations and needs. Further, since sales enablement ensures collaboration between various departments, it also ensures that the sales content aligns with the larger organizational objectives and messaging and reflects any changes in approach or policy.
2. Sales training and development
Sales enablement is also responsible for curating, implementing and improving various training and development programs required for the sales team. This may include onboarding new staff, sales coaching for existing staff, and other periodical assistance in various sales processes. Thus, sales teams can be equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to handle various challenges and increase their productivity. Further, sales enablement is responsible for periodically updating various training modules based on evolving needs.
3. Tools and technology
In the current context, one of the most important functions of sales enablement is to provide the sales team with the right tools and technology to assist their sales. This includes automating key processes and ensuring a smooth flow between various sales aspects. Here are a few important sales enablement tools:
- CRM software: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software collect and manage all data about customers, regardless of where the data is produced. It allows seamless customer data transfer between and access to data by various departments. Examples of these include Zoho, Insightly, Pipedrive, etc.
- Sales enablement platforms: A sales enablement platform is designed to provide centralized access to sales content, training resources, and tools. This allows the sales team to learn and gather all required information on a single platform. Examples of these tools include Highspot, Brainshark, Seismic, etc.
- Conversation intelligence software: These tools are used to provide better training for sales call staff. They allow you to record all sales calls made by your team, which can be later used to identify effective strategies and scope for improvement in call-based selling. These recordings can also help you provide personalized feedback to help your sales team improve their interactions with customers. Some tools even offer Artificial Intelligence (AI) support to automate this feedback. Some examples of such tools include Enthu.AI, Jiminny, Chorus, ExecVision, etc.
Challenges in sales enablement
While sales enablement has several benefits, here are a few challenges that you must be mindful of to ensure that your sales enablement strategy is implemented smoothly:
- Complexity of the process: Due to the number of factors and various departments involved in the process, sales enablement can be a complex process as it requires a knowledge of various aspects apart from sales, including product development, marketing, and revenue structures.
- Conflict between teams: Sales enablement requires effective collaboration between various teams and departments, which can increase the chance of conflicting interests and opinions. A sound sales enablement strategy ensures that these conflicts are resolved promptly and smoothly.
- Resource overload: Sometimes, the sales enablement team can provide sales teams with large amounts of information and tools. This can lead to chaos and overwhelm since the sales team can get confused about what information to use and may not be able to utilize all the resources. This can be resolved by proper communication with the sales team to understand their specific needs.
- Low adoption: Sales enablement efforts can go to waste if the sales team does not properly adopt them. This could happen for various reasons, such as lack of timely communication, conflicts between the teams, confusion about responsibilities, etc.
Conclusion
Sales enablement is a crucial aspect of modern sales and marketing strategies. By empowering sales teams with the right tools, resources and training, you can create systems that drive better results across the board. When implemented effectively, sales enablement can ensure consistency within your organization and better customer engagement throughout the buyer’s journey. Ultimately, a well-designed sales enablement strategy can be a game-changer for your sales to maintain a competitive edge and ensure sustained growth over the long run.
