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Imagine you want to cook your favorite dish but need the recipe. You have a vague idea but aren't sure. What if you get the recipe book? It will become easier to cook.
Sales enablement (SE) is your recipe book for making more sales. This article will help you learn and understand the basics of sales enablement, strategy, tools, best practices, and how to use SE successfully to generate a huge return on investment (ROI).
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement strategically equips the sales team with various resources, such as content, guidance, and training. These resources help reps to convert leads into buyers successfully. Simply put, sales enablement is about training your reps to make more sales.
For sales enablement to work effectively, the marketing and sales teams should collaborate throughout the process to shorten the sales cycle, improve conversion rates, and increase revenue with forecast accuracy. This process is often manual and time-consuming, reducing your reps' productivity. You can create a more productive and efficient sales team with the correct people, processes, and platforms supported by improved technologies.
Think about chalking out your customer’s journey. It will help identify what type of sale enablement content to create, fixing gaps in the journey where buyers feel unsupported. It will equip your sales team to support buyers in every funnel stage.
Defining principles of SE
To make sure your sales enablement is working effectively, you abide by the three defining principles:
Principle 1: Commitment
Rome was not built in a day.
You can't expect your SE process to show results from day 1. Building an efficient SE helps you spin the required environment to start organizing, finding, sharing, customizing, and analyzing content. However, this process will need input from multiple teams, a defined objective, and a proper plan to execute your roadmap to successful SE. Make sure to commit to your goal and stick to the process. Patience is the key.
Principle 2: Inform and involve
We know the upper half of the funnel is “Awareness” followed by “Consideration.” Inbound marketing handles this part and is focused on generating prospects and leads. Sales owns the bottom of the funnel and is driven to convert those leads, close deals, and generate revenue.
Keeping the sales team informed and getting them involved in the entire journey is necessary to ensure they understand buyers’ requirements. Provide them with resources that align with their unique ways of closing the deals.
Principle 3: Engagement is revenue
Continuous engagement of your reps with prospects and customers is the rule of thumb when generating and converting leads. Strategizing and applying best practices in the critical areas of SE process and operations can increase revenue and improve sales effectiveness.
For example, you should set tools to keep all customer interactions in one place and let the who team collaborate easily on client communication.
If customer interactions occur on WhatsApp, you can use Cooby to give your team complete visibility into WhatsApp communication. Learn more.
Importance of sales enablement
Sales enablement develops your reps’ training process to generate revenue. It gives your salesperson an upper hand in the long run by providing new and improved techniques and content.
Report and analysis
Sales enablement professionals create systems to use data judiciously. This ensures that your reps are not overwhelmed, hurting productivity. Here are a few ways to do so:
Standardized reporting
Creating standardized sales reports is the most commonly used way to derive valuable insights from collected data. These reports are based on activities recorded by salespersons, product demos delivered, closed and lost deals, and converted prospects to generate leads, among other things.
Review sales process
Before executing the sales process on customers, review the process of a few closed deals. A sales process audit and analysis help find possible loopholes and areas for improvement.
Qualify leads
Too many prospects might be overwhelming if the results are repeatedly negative. This is where qualifying leads come into the picture. It helps save time and other valuable human resources.
To overcome this, you can implement a scoring system that assigns positive or negative scores to the prospect. These scores are allocated based on specific parameters to narrow the list of potential leads.
Tip: Cooby helps you train sales reps based on historical interactions and their deal closure rate. It integrates seamlessly with HubSpot to keep all client communication in one place.
Take a Cooby’s free trial.
Content optimization
Marketers are not the only people who produce content. Every sales rep produces content every minute, not for sale but to understand the buyer's journey. The buyer’s journey comes in exceptionally handy while nurturing leads.
Organizing sales content
Content audits are essential for the success of any sales enablement strategy. Companies with high-quality sales content on the website centralize the existing sales content in one location. This helps your sales team pull these resources quickly. Examples of sales content that should be audited and organized are
- Customer case studies
- White Papers and ebooks
- Product demo decks
- Pricing and discount information
- One-pagers
Content libraries are created using tools like Google Docs, an internal wiki using Microsoft SharePoint, and a CRM.
Create case studies
Nothing speaks as strongly as a case study does for the business, be it a sales story, marketing story, or any related topic.
Your company should aim to have at least one in the first six months after launching your product or service. It should showcase how exactly your business helps clients solve their problems.
Create email templates
Email is the most effective way of connecting to prospective customers, cold calls being the first. Sales reps don't cry over arranging mail copy for nothing.
Email templates help salespeople draw emails directly from their inboxes, dramatically increasing productivity.
Technology and automation
Ten years ago, sales was a manual job. But now, many manual processes are automated, enabling sales reps to sell better and faster.
Create email sequences
To save time, sales reps can prepare email sequences for follow-up mail. These emails can automatically trigger if a prospect hasn't responded to the first mail in a set amount of time.
You can use personalization tokens for contact and company details in the email sequence to tailor it for a specific prospect.
Automate prospecting
Automated prospecting uses advanced technology and AI to target and initiate engagement with prospects, streamlining the sales process significantly.
Unlike traditional prospecting methods, which often involve cold calls/emails and manually generating leads, automated prospecting refines the process with increased efficiency and precision in targeting potential customers.
Implement direct messaging
The best time to chat with a prospect is when they're on the website. Setting up a live chat option allows your reps to engage with them and close a few deals in real-time.
WhatsApp is a great solution for engaging prospects on direct messaging since it feels more personal and helps them connect closely. Cooby makes WhatsApp ready for sales, with features like CRM integrations, organized inbox, notes, Inbox Zero, etc.
Use sales enablement software
Sales enablement software allows the sales team to manage all resources and content from a single location. It allows you to easily create, share, edit, and manage your materials and sales content.
Your reps can access all the information here anytime, anywhere. It allows marketing and sales to collaborate on the content they create to share with customers and prospects.
Who owns sales enablement?
Coming to ownership, who is responsible for designing strategies and training the sales team throughout the process?
The sales enablement leaders work as the intermediate between the platforms that deliver the content. The sales team strictly follows the process and technology made available to make the system work.
On the other hand, their marketing counterparts must ensure increased engagement and set the bar for ROI.
Sales enablement roles vary from company to company according to their size, sales model, and the market they serve. While some companies believe that sales enablement is a team effort where leadership and salespeople work hand in hand, some assign a sales enablement manager who looks after everything including building guides and training the team. In case the team doesn't have a dedicated sales enablement manager, the responsibility is handed over to executives like the VP.
If you are starting with the SE procedure, following the RACI framework is advisable. RACI is a standard method for allocating expectations, roles, and responsibilities.
- Responsible: SE Lead
- Accountable: VP of Sales Enablement or Marketing
- Consulted: VP of Sales, content creators, sales operation managers.
- Informed: The broader SE team, sales reps, and senior marketers.
This distributed understanding helps the cross-team collaboration needed for the success of SE.
How to build a sales enablement strategy
A sales enablement strategy provides salespeople with the materials they need to drive sales and increase revenue. The guidelines below will help you meet your business' goals.
- Analyze current marketing and sales processes. Conduct a SWOT analysis to identify potential opportunities for improvement. Note them within a SE charter to create a foolproof roadmap to propel your company.
- Define and allocate roles and responsibilities. After preparing the charter, assign roles and responsibilities for each sales enablement stakeholder.
- Understand your target market. As you develop your strategy, identify your target market and ideal customer image. This will cover most of the groundwork for your SE processes.
- Plan content that aligns with the consumer journey. Monitor your customer journey and generate your buyer persona. Outline each profile's journey to ensure the new content matches the existing content developed according to specific consumer stages and their respective pain points.
- Identify your top performers. Observe your sales team and their daily operations. Talk to them whenever you get a chance. Talk with the sales managers and review each rep's performance.
- Provide sales onboarding, training programs, and support. Club everything from customized training plans to detailed content with solutions and mock sales calls. Plus, the strategy should remain flexible and try new training methods to stay current with market trends.
- Set KPIs and identify parameters. To measure success, it is crucial to set a standard to refer to. Establishing KPI metrics and parameters helps identify good performance and quantify success.
- Choose the correct SE tool. When selecting the right enablement tool, look for platforms that align with your requirements, in addition to streamlining communication and automating tedious tasks.
Types of sales enablement content
With the right SE content, your team can smartly tackle tricky situations. They can answer questions and address complaints, concerns, objections, and pain points. With correct content, your reps will fuel your growth in converting prospects into clients.
It is indisputable that sales enablement content will help your team generate revenue more effectively. The question is what resources the SE team should provide and whether they are user-friendly enough for the reps to use.
Here are the most common and effective types of content to choose from.
Explainer videos
Explainer videos are short videos that effectively and concisely highlight a company’s product/ services or business goal. Most companies upload explainer videos to their landing pages or feature them on their website's homepage.
Interactive demos
Interactive demos or interactive product demos provide your sales and marketing team with a hands-on walk-through experience of your product throughout all the stages of the funnel. This helps your reps provide precise solutions to ease away the pain point of potential leads, increasing conversion rates and closed deals.
Case studies
Case studies are customers who speak highly of you. They offer data, a demo, and a description of how your solution benefits your clients. Case studies help build credibility and trust among customers.
Case studies include videos, written text, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, and more. These formats are designed to provide solutions to client-facing reps via call, mail, social media, or live chat.
Battlecards
Battle cards are a way to record competitor analysis, primary product information, targeted pain points, and your company's value proposition. They can be used as a talk track compiled into a sales playbook or used as is.
Battlecards especially come in handy for effective pitching, staying ahead of all competitors, and practicing specific sales situations.
Sales decks
A sales deck is a presentation created using Google Slides or PowerPoint. These are not presentations per se, but more of a strategy documented on slides.
Sales decks are the fundamental tools that support marketing efforts and equip your reps with the necessary resources to make better sales.
One pager
One effective way to enable sales teams is a one pager. These are a short and sweet, easy-to-understand document that defines your product's USPs, target market, and the impact your product makes. You can customize them according to the audience. A one pager delivers only the required information to the audience, cutting out unnecessary data for the specific audience group in focus.
Sales scripts
A sales script equips your reps with the exact dialogues that help them share relevant solutions to customers' pain points. However, it’s necessary to sound natural instead of just reading whatever the script says.
Sounding like a kid reading his textbook might result in customers not taking the rep seriously.
Top sales enablement software in 2024
Take a look at the best sales enablement software in 2024.
Cooby
Cooby helps sales teams that choose WhatsApp as their customer communication channel. It integrates Hubspot and Salesforce CRM with WhatsApp, bringing all customer communications to one place.
Pricing: Starts at $15.99 per user per month.
Superhuman
Superhuman AI takes email communication to the next level, helping salespeople focus more on personalizing than repetitive writing.
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Pricing: Starts at $30 per user per month
HubSpot
HubSpot is best known for providing powerful integration and features such as sales analytics, engagement tools, forecasts, and other advanced permissions. It’s user-friendly and contains almost all the material your sales reps need to close more deals smartly.
Pricing: Starts at $90 per seat per month.
Outreach
This sales engagement platform helps your salespeople to communicate better by building a roadmap to optimize your workflow. Outreach increases prospect meetings, improves engagement through voice and email, and automates tasks to reduce manual effort.
Pricing: Starts at $100 per user per month.
Make the right choice
Now that you have your recipe and the ingredients, let it cook. Sales enablement will help your business grow manifold and increase your profit influx exponentially. With multiple sales enablement software on the market, you need to
consider your requirements and choose the best one for your business.
To understand how to choose the perfect sales enablement software for your business, consider the pros and cons of the leading software.
FAQs
What are the benefits of sales enablement?
Sales Enablement can benefit your business by helping your sales team to align with other teams, increasing productivity, and generating better ROIs without compromising on the business principles.
What are sales enablement best practices?
The best practices to succeed with your sales enablement strategy are
- Connect your customer data to your sales enablement tools with a CRM
- Create content libraries to store all the information, material, and resources in one place.
- Train your team with multiple yet short modules to minimize information overdose.
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