What is sales enablement? The term sales enablement may have a different meaning for every individual. But, primarily, sales enablement is the process of equipping your sales team with relevant resources and accurate information so they can provide a valuable sales experience to their prospective customers. You may or may not agree with the statement, but the fact is that sales enablement is absolutely necessary for a company to be successful.
Today, there are advanced sales enablement software and platforms available, so that a company’s sales team can effectively train, onboard, inform and educate new personnel, for them being able to successfully engage their prospects or customers into buying a product or service. Such custom enablement software and programs are now easily made available, when you’ve partnered with an expert like “Guidde” that not only designs, but integrates one such sales enablement platform into an organization’s operational environment.
Sales reps spend less than 36% of their time actually selling products/services. So, you need to make them more productive and efficient in the time they’re actually in contact with the prospects. Whether you are establishing a brand new sales enablement strategy or just refining the old one, it can be quite a task. However, these tips and practices will help you create a foolproof and effective sales enablement strategy.
Documented Sales Enablement Plan
Creating a formalized structure for your sales enablement strategy should be your first and foremost priority. This documented plan will provide a clear-cut list of aims and objectives you and your team need to work on. The outcome that is expected out of a sales enablement strategy often varies from company to company. Therefore, it is extremely important to establish your goal at the very beginning of the planning process.
It will become an official step-by-step guide of your enablement process, and such a formal document is more likely to gain executive support when presented in a meeting. Hence, it will become a foundation of a successful sales enablement strategy, through which every single person in the team is formally aligned with the company’s goals.
Be Customer-Centric
Whenever you’re developing a sales enablement strategy, observe it through a customer’s lens. The center of your focus and your strategy should be the buyer journey. Your sales enablement strategy must equip your sales rep with all the accurate information they need, for them to carry out an impactful and effective conversation with the prospective customers. A good sales enablement strategy must be able to pave a seamless customer path, by fixing the gaps between communication.
A CSO insight study showed that around 42% of the companies that align the sales enablement strategy to the customer’s path, get an 8.1% increased success rate. The numbers should probably give you an idea of what you’re missing out on if you don’t do so.
Also see: How to Create an Effective Global Business Strategy
Cross-Functional Team Approach
Sales enablement aligns different departments of a company that comes together to make the sales team more efficient. So, your sales enablement strategy should be able to define roles across teams at the very beginning. Now, when we talk about a team approach, most people think of it as bridging the gap between the sales and marketing departments. Sure, marketing teams provide valuable content needed by the sales to close deals. But, the matter goes further beyond that.
Any company representative that comes in contact with your customer, during any point of their journey is worth investing your time and resources on. Because they are going to have a direct impact on the customer experience. Moreover, you’ll be needing assistance from many different departments. For example, you will have to contact the legal supervisor to clarify some points in your contracts or need the product designer if some element needs redesigning. So your sales enablement strategy must be designed in a way that it brings all the different teams into a loop, provides them with adequate resources, and allows them to collaborate to create a cross-functional team approach.
Technological Resources
To support your sales teams, you need to provide them with the best technological resources out there, such as sales enablement tools. It will not only help scale your sales enablement plan but make your sales representatives all the more efficient.
Now, there are different types of sales enablement tools that help you in different areas. Some tools bring together all your up-to-date content and materials for effective communication. While others allow sharing confidential documents with prospects, manage modifications of documents, or enable collaboration between the sellers and the sales team. Keep in mind that these are not some magic catch-all software solutions that will get rid of all your sales enablement problems. But are mere tools that are used to increase efficacy and nothing more than that. For the best results, you can rely on Content Camel.
Always remember that sales enablement is the continuous process of improvement and development. Every aspect of sales enablement should be integrated with learning and improvement to make sure that sellers understand the current strategies/situations, know their way around different tools, and are provided with targeted coaching so they can always improve their performance.
