The competition is stiff, and you cannot afford to lose your customers to them. We will be helping you understand the importance of sales enablement in our article today.
Selling, marketing or managing daily operations take more than charming the customers into buying your product or services.
It is because the modern business scenario has become more customer-centric.
Also, buyers are smarter, well-informed and have the power of research on their side.
Chapter one: The introduction
In this section, as a reader, you will get to meet 5 major characters; what, why, who, where and when.
These characters will help you understand more about sales enablement and its importance in your business.
After all, everyone likes a great story, don’t they!
“Searches for “Sales Enablement” on Google increase by 51.2% year over year” – Google Trends
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement definition: It is the process of providing your sales team reliable content, information, and tools for effective selling.
Providing sales team members with the resources to keep the buyers engaged throughout the buying process in the foundation of sales enablement.
What is sales enablement strategy and why should business owners implement it?
Sales enablement strategy is the process or approach businesses must take to provide their sales team members with effective selling resources.
Important note: Business owners must know that the said strategy must be tweaked as per their sales teams’ specifications.
The technological trends have made their effects on sales enablement too. With the shift from physical to digital, sales, and marketing landscape is also shifting toward the digital horizon.
Your major task is to nurture prospects and reach out to a much larger audience in the early stages of the sales funnel.
It comes into play for managing the second half of your funnel.
The focus is on equipping sales team members with
- right tools
- skills
- assets
And we don’t have to stress on the importance of these factors for driving your organizational revenue.
By sales enablement, we don’t just mean upgrading the way your sales team refers to the sales training process. It also doesn’t mean adding new selling tools.
While training and inclusion of sales enablement tools help in effective sales enablement, they are just ingredients.
Why is sales enablement important for your business?
“Companies with a sales enablement team are 52% more likely to have a sales process that’s tightly aligned with the buyer’s journey” – Highspot
Don’t get surprised if we tell you this is literally a million-dollar question!
Let’s introduce two guest characters here; maximization and optimization.
In this section, we will get to know these characters and the role they play in your sales success.
Optimization of sales contacts
The market, your sales funnel, your website, for that matter every touchpoint between the prospects and your sales team is an opportunity to:
- close the deal
- progress the sale
But that’s just one side of the coin. The other side is that every touchpoint is also
- money and time spent
- opportunity costs
Imagine a scenario where every customer touchpoint is efficiently advancing the closure at a quicker rate.
This is where the very definition of sales enablement takes a different outlook.
Think of introducing sales enablement as an enhancement tool that will allow your sales reps to make every sales outreach more effective.
This can be done by:
- sharing engaging content to help trigger the lead into action
- using email sequences that pushes your prospects into making the purchase
- using text sequences to help customers make another purchase or upgrade their current plan
Instead of utilizing only one resource for pursuing the prospect, your sales team now has a suite of resources that fit each situation and touchpoints.
Maximization of sales outreach
“Over 75% of companies using sales enablement tools saw an increase in sales in the first year. 40% of those companies reported an increase greater than 25%.” – Manobyte
Everything comes with a cost, so do your salespersons.
For instance, you have a 5 person outbound team. Each member is working for eight hours with utmost dedication.
Find out how much they are spending on
- new contacts
- existing deals
- client support
How many outbound phone calls are being made by all of them combined in those eight hours? When and where are they hitting the max quota?
Sales enablement, when deployed properly within your organization, will definitely make your one-person team more efficient.
Instead of spending precious selling time on drafting new emails every time they will be using targeted, specific templates and reach out to the target audience.
Instead of losing precious minutes per contact dialing phones, they use multi-dialers to connect instantly.
They no longer have to explain how that one product feature fits this slightly different vertical eight times because they have a targeted infographic on a specific URL that warms the lead for them.
That is the maximization of your resources, and one of the biggest advantages of sales enablement.
Chapter two: Increasing the sales velocity of your business
Sales enablement highly affects your business’s sales velocity.
Sales velocity helps business owners determine how fast their leads are becoming paying customers.
Any positive value added to one of these variables above will increase your revenue.
- Increasing the number of qualified opportunities will increase sales.
- Increasing your win improve your sales.
- Shortening the sales cycle will increase revenue.
- Increasing the average deal value will increase revenue.
Sales enablement aligns sales and marketing
74% of high-performing organizations have strong sales and marketing alignment – Visualizeroi
Your business has two pillars; sales and marketing. Their alignment is an obvious component for the successful implementation of the revenue generation strategy.
Sales-enabled revenue goal
59% of companies that surpassed revenue targets and 72% that exceeded them by 25% or more – have defined sales enablement functions, compared to only 30% of underperforming organizations. – Forbes
Sales enablement strategies make sure that your sales and marketing teams have a clear goal to work on.
Sales enablement gives them the reason for working together towards fulfilling the organizational goal.
They must share a common end result and feel its ownership; sales enablement helps in doing that.
Let’s give you a general scenario.
You provide your sales team with quotas and metrics to the marketing team.
Based on this, the sales team has to close ‘n’ number of deals by ‘d’ date.
Marketing team will pursue achieving ‘n’ number of leads and its percentage must be as high as ‘n’ by ‘d’.
When you introduce sales enablement, it makes one thing clear to both the teams, all these metrics are nothing but noise.
Sales enablement allows to see through this noise and helps them realize that revenue is the ultimate goal.
That’s the bottom line right, but many times your teams are not focused on it.
This is how you can help them refocus on the bottom line.
Help them achieve these numbers together:
- Number of marketing qualified leads generated in the current month
- Number of deals that were closed in the current month
- Avg. value of deals
Just think about a scenario where the marketing team is generating better-qualified leads which in-turn is helping your sales team increase their closure rate.
We will give you a better scenario.
What if the marketing team is providing the sales team with resources that help in overcoming the objections.
This will mean your sales team is spending less time on each lead, giving them more time to advance their prospects inside the pipeline.
What if the marketing team deploys well-optimized nurturing emails to their existing leads. This will automatically increase the MQLs from your existing database.
All the above scenarios are possible if sales enablement is deployed successfully.
Hold more “SMarketing” meetings
SMARKETING, Sales + Marketing, is gaining a lot of traction.
We discussed how sales and marketing alignment can help solve problems within the revenue-generation process above.
You just need to adjust the frequency for these meetings.
The SMarketing agenda:
- Identification
- Discussion
- Action items
- Timeline and agreements
Identify problems within your revenue generation
Ask the correct questions and analyze your KPIs.
Here are a few questions that can be asked in the smarketing meetings:
The end goal of these questions is deriving new ideas and fixing problems. Identify any pending issues, discuss them, ask for ideas and push for an implementation timeline.
A framework for lead-qualification
This is the final step toward the alignment of sales and marketing.
Marketing needs to know what type of leads the sales team is closing.
Knowing the how and why will allow marketing teams to narrow down their lead generation effort and procure quality leads.
n is to identify hard metrics for qualifying a lead.
Sales enablement matrix
A hand-raiser is someone who explicitly asks to talk to sales.
If leads fail to match one of these categories, there is no sense wasting time and resources on them.
Quality will always trump quantity
Sales efforts always boil down to daily dials.
The churn-and-burn approach of hitting a sales call volume is the foundation of low conversion rates.
Achieving quality over quantity is what sales enablement does for you.
There are sales tools that make it easy for sales reps to deliver a valuable message across to the leads in an easier and effective manner.
If you look at your buyer’s journey, it is easy to conclude that a small fraction of customers’ are willing to make a certain amount of purchase at a given time.
This makes it all the more important for the quality of your leads to be better than the quantity.
Only a small fraction of the market is interested in buying at any given time. This means the quality of the sales interaction is more important than the number of sales interactions.
When is the best time to implement sales enablement?
Prevention is better than cure so you might understand what we are trying to tell here.
The best time for you, as a business owner, to invest in sales enablement is before needing it as a backup plan.
However, it’s rarely the case that companies invest in sales enablement as a proactive measure.
But we will be listing out situations where you might see the need for implementing sales enablement.
- Your sales reps can’t find content when they need it
- They are using the wrong content at the wrong time
- They aren’t sure which content is effective or not
- Your reps aren’t completing your internal training
- New reps are taking too long to get up to speed
- Sales managers aren’t delivering standardized coaching
“How” to deploy sales enablement for organizations?
Here are a few tips for deploying sales enablement and seeing it through to success.
1. Set goals
Define what your sales-enablement program must accomplish. These goals will push your team towards achieving the desired results.
Analyze the issues faced by your sales team and how they can be resolved.
Based on your findings, create clear goals and set achievable timelines.
2. Establish accountability
Once you define the goals, creating roles is another important step towards realizing your sales enablement success.
Create roles for each team member and let them know how they can help their teammates reach various objectives.
Establishing roles refines accountability.
3. Choose the right sales enablement tools
Closely analyze your team’s requirements.
This way you can determine which tools your sales team and will help them in their sales success.
Make sure you opt for the best-suited tool. Look for ease of use, better features and place it against your budget. You must go for a tool that increases your sales team’s overall efficiency.
Implementing CRM into the sales enablement process
If you are looking for sales enablement solutions, then, you have reached the right place.
The ultimate goal of sales organizations is to drive revenue at an optimum rate. For that to take place, you must make sure you follow the various sales enablement best practices.
If your sales enablement game is up to the mark then your sales operations will run smoothly and fulfill your revenue goal without unnecessary hiccups.
We truly believe that sales enablement is about providing your sales team with the tools, information, and resources that enhance their productivity.
Or just that it creates an alignment between your sales and marketing department.
This equilibrium of info and resources creates an environment that helps your business achieve the desired goals.
We would like to add that sales enablement is a strategic process that acts as a guiding light to the path of profitable and successful sales.
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Saptarshi Das
A writer with an uncommon funny bone and a knack for perfection, Saptarshi loves to write about anything that can be of help to businesses, people, and dogs! A true human at heart, he likes to spend most of his time researching the internet to find ways technology is influencing our daily life (positively).