A quick look at sales enablement and its benefits

Like any function in a business, sales teams 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 to have a new outlook and plan. This is where sales enablement enters. Find out what sales enablement can do for a business in this article.

What is sales enablement?

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

With the help of sales enablement, companies can maximize their salespeople’s engagement with customers and improve their 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. This is why both teams should establish strong communication with each other.

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.

Sales coaching and training

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

Companies should invest hugely into 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 skillsets.

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

Content

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

Powerful content creation is measured through the following elements.

• Organization. A company’s content must be organized and collated into a single system. This helps 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. With sales enablement, firms 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. Nowadays, it’s best to post all content online so clients can see it more easily.

Technology

Modern leaders leverage technology to power most business functions, including sales enablement. 

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

Engagement

Lastly, salespeople know that engagement bears revenue opportunities. To do this, sales teams must have transparent, data-driven, and realistic strategies to help them encourage more buyers for their offers.

How sales enablement 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 with each other. 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. They can at least customize each journey for their buyers 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.

Increase productivity

According to Forrester, sales enablement tools can reduce ramp time for average sales hires. Meanwhile, having both tools and strategies can make it easier for sales teams to work with closing deals, increasing their productivity in return.

Build better client relationships

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

Best practices for successful sales enablement

It usually takes time for companies to successfully implement sales enablement in their teams. However, it can be evident once they see steady growth in revenue, customer base, and satisfaction.

The following are some of the best practices to consider for successful sales enablement.

Tailor sales speech to each customer

Don’t let a salesperson use “generic” sales speeches with customers. Instead, continuously train sales teams 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 and coaching.

Always utilize data

Data is one of the most powerful tools that sales and marketing teams can have to attract customers. Make use of data as much as possible to make the customer experience better.

Implement sales enablement to the entire organization

Lastly, enablement 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.

Tools for sales enablement

The technology is another factor that makes sales enablement possible for a company. With the presence of sales enablement tools in the market, companies should find a suitable system that can help them improve and maximize their processes.

For starters, consider some of the best tools for sales enablement below.

• Brainshark. Helps drive sales productivity to the top with the help of data. Its flexibility can help sales teams access information and get proper training anytime and anywhere.
• Boomerang. Empowers teams to maximize email marketing efforts. It gives insights into the patterns and behavior to find out how teams can utilize email better.
• Cloze. Gives the power to manage sales and marketing via email and social media. It puts all customer interactions in one place so teams can keep track of client relationships better.
• Salesforce. A powerful tool for integrating sales and CRM into one. Mainly a CRM tool, it lets users integrate their sales enablement plans and systems to manage them better.