What is Sales Enablement, Framework, Strategy, and Roadmap: Business owners and sales organizations need their sales reps to be more productive. They need them to be highly knowledgeable and skilled so as to meet their goals.
A lot of businesses are now investing in sales enablement in order to help sales reps be more productive. According to CSO Insights, 61% of companies have a dedicated sales enablement function.
The primary duty of sales reps is to convert leads and make revenues for your business. Providing your sales team with the right tools, materials, and resources that they need to convert more leads helps them to be more productive. They will be able to convert more leads to customers, make more sales and bring more revenue for your business.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the strategic process of providing your sales team with the right resources that they need to convert more leads and close more deals. These resources help them to be more resourceful and productive. These resources may include content, materials, tools, knowledge, product guides, and other necessary information that your sales team needs to convert leads and sell your product or service more effectively to customers.
The marketing team and sales team both own sales enablement and they both impact your business overall sales and revenue. The marketing team provides the sales team with a variety of resources that they need to effectively convert leads and close more deals. The sales team uses these resources to sell your product or service more effectively. Sales reps may share some useful information or content with leads and customers to help them make purchase decisions.
Sales can also communicate with marketing and let them know which materials or content that they are missing. They can share their thoughts with marketing about what leads and customers need to help them make faster and better purchase decisions. These contents and materials are instrumental to their success and also beneficial to leads and customers.
Why is sales enablement important?
Sales enablement is very important to the success of sales reps and to the business.
It prepares sales reps to conduct a more effective sales process
Sales enablement prepares and provides the right resources for sales reps to conduct a more effective sales process and achieve better results. Sales enablement equips sales reps with the right training, coaching, content, and knowledge that they need to be able to convert more leads and make more sales. They are able to know the right things to do and how best to take leads and customers throughout their buyer’s journeys in order to make faster purchase decisions.
It creates training and content clarity
Sales enablement creates training and content clarity for sales reps. Sales reps are able to know everything that they need to do and also have the right information to pass through to leads and customers. They are able to provide sales support to customers by knowing everything about their product or service.
It helps sales reps convert new customers
According to reports, acquiring new customers is six to seven times more expensive than retaining already existing customers. Sales enablement provides a smoother selling process. The sales reps take the customers throughout their buyer’s journey. The customers are able to make better purchase decisions. Sales reps can easily convert leads to customers because they have the right information and content to share with leads. The leads on the other hand are satisfied with the sales reps, hence they are easily converted to customers.
It helps sales reps to be more professional in their duties
Sales reps without the right knowledge, contents, and materials may not know the right thing to do. Such sales rep may be ineffective and unprofessional. Sales enablement provides the right materials, contents, training, and resources that reps need to become very efficient and professional in his/her duties. They are able to contribute positively to the growth of the organization. Due to their contributions to the growth of the company, they will be promoted and elevated in the organization.
Sales enablement equips managers to support their sales reps
Sales reps are coached by their managers and when the managers lack the right resources and materials to effectively coach their reps, they will likely fail in their duties. Sales enablement provides the right resources and materials which the sales managers need to coach and support their sales reps.
Sales enablement framework
Sales enablement framework is the areas and best practices to consider when creating sales enablement. This is your starting point when you want to create sales enablement for your organization.
Sales enablement framework includes:
Creating an enablement charter
Sales enablement starts with creating an enablement charter. Your enablement charter contains the expectations of senior executives towards the growth of the organization. It identifies the sales force challenges that you will likely encounter during the course of developing sales enablement.
Evaluating your current state
Your current state establishes the starting point for your sales enablement process. How good or bad is your current state will determine the starting point for your sale enablement process. You can begin to create a roadmap for sales enablement in your organization from your current state.
Align with the customer journey
You must align your sales enablement processes with your customer’s journey. The challenges sales reps encounter at each stage of the journey must be put into consideration. The content, materials, training, and coaching should be tailored to the challenges that sales reps encounter at each stage.
Inventory of existing content and training services
Assess and evaluate all your existing content and materials. Discard any content or materials that are of no importance or relevance to the stages of the customer journey. Assess your training services and coaching to ensure that they are consistent with the skill profile and knowledge of your sales reps.
Sales Enablement Roadmap
Sales enablement roadmap are sales enablement practices that you need to follow to ensure success. Sales enablement roadmap includes:
Focus on customer experience
Focus your sales enablement efforts on improving customer experience. With good customer experience, your customers will be happy and satisfied with your services and you will be able to retain them. Pay keen attention to your customer’s reviews, listen to them and know what they need. By knowing what your customers need, you will be able to provide sales enablement that meets their needs. Improving customer experience does not only help you retain existing customers, but it also helps you acquire new customers through positive reviews.
Share compelling content before and after closing a deal
Sharing compelling content such as emails with relevant information about a product, how the product benefits the customer, follow-up emails, etc, helps facilitates purchase decisions and close deals faster.
Sharing content with your customers shouldn’t stop immediately after closing deals; it should be a continuous thing. Maintain ongoing relationships with your customers by sharing updated content with them. You can do this by sharing monthly e-newsletters with them or emailing them about new products or services. You can also ask your sales reps to make monthly follow-up phone calls to customers to update them about new products or services. The content you share with your customers should always be relevant to them.
Make sales enablement a part of your sales culture
Encourage your sales team to always attend sales workshops, seminars, conferences, networking events, and training that will increase their knowledge and experience. Make sales enablement a part of your sales culture and ensures that sales reps are always adapting and evolving with new sales trends to make them more efficient and productive. Sales managers that are well-groomed and experienced can train sales reps by creating office seminars, workshops, and training for sales reps.
What is the difference between sales enablement and sales operations?
Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping your sales team with the right content, materials, resources, and tools that they need to be more informed and productive. Proving your sales team with the right resources, content, and tools ensures that they are able to convert more leads and close more deals. Sales enablement is aligning your sales team with customers to ensure sales success.
Sales operation is a set of sales activities and operations that help a sales organization or sales team work more effectively and efficiently. Sales operations include sales support, business operations, and sales. Sales operations handle your CRM and other related issues.
What is a sales enablement specialist?
A sales enablement specialist is a well-knowledgeable and highly skilled professional that knows everything about sales enablement. A sales enablement specialist works closely with sales managers and the sales team to increase efficiency and productivity, enhance sales performance, and drive in revenue. A sales specialist has an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s journey, buyer’s behavior and perspectives, and the sales process.
A sales specialist has an in-depth understanding of inbound methodology and should communicate these methodologies with sales reps and managers. A sales enablement specialist equips salespeople with the right knowledge, resources, tools, and strategies that they need to succeed.
What are the elements of a sales enablement strategy?
A sales enablement strategy is the approach that your business takes to provide sales reps with the resources, content, and tools that they need to effectively convert leads and close more sales deals. This strategy is tailored to your specific sales team’s needs so they can target the right leads and convert them into customers with ease. Sales enablement strategies include analysis of the resources, tools, content, and information that you provide to sales reps.
The elements of a sales enablement strategy include:
Reporting and Analysis
Reporting and analysis is an integral element of a sales enablement strategy. Sales reps are always overwhelmed with a constant stream of information and this could hinder their productivity. Analyzing and breaking down these information can help sales reps better understand and digest them.
Below are some of the ways of analyzing and reporting information:
Standardized Reporting
Standardized reporting is a way to obtain valuable insights from business data. Common reports include activities logged by sales, leads generated and lost, products demos delivered, and deals won and lost.
Sales enablement professionals or specialists can understand what reports are beneficial to the business.
Review sales process
Reviewing or auditing a sales process is an in-depth, data-backed analysis of a company’s sales process. This in-depth analysis helps sales enablement specialists to discover areas where sales performance could be improved.
Leads qualification
Qualifying a lead helps to save time and resources. Sales enablement specialists use lead scoring systems to determine if a lead is a good fit for a product or not.
Sales content optimization
Optimizing your sales content ensures that they are relevant to your customers.
How can you optimize your sales content?
Conduct sales content audit
Conduct a full content audit to ensure that sales reps find the right resources and content to share with leads and customers. Keep all your content and resources up to date to ensure that your sales reps get the right content and resources to succeed in their duties.
Create case studies
Case studies are very important in the library of a sales team. Case studies contain customer’s success and stories about their experiences. Ensure you add videos to your case studies because it is a highly effective way to reach out to prospects and leads.
Create email templates
Email is the most effective way for sales reps to reach out and connect with leads. Create standard email templates that are delivered straight into the inboxes of leads.
Technology and automation
Sales process can now be automated due to technological advancements. Before now, sales were entirely manual, but now it can be automated. Using technology to automate your sales enablement process can positively impact the success of your sales reps.
Here are some ways you can use automated technology to aid your sales enablement process:
Create email sequence
Sales enablement specialists can create email sequence that will trigger automatically if leads haven’t responded or replied after a set duration of time.
Automate prospecting
A set of emails sent in a salesperson’s name that includes a direct link to their calendar is known as automated prospecting. Prospects can schedule an appointment with a salesperson using the link. By doing this, sales reps can find qualified buyers or leads who are ready to have a meeting with the reps and possibly make purchases. This saves time for the reps.
Implement direct messaging
You can implement direct messaging by providing live chats on your website where sales reps can have live conversations with interested leads. You can also provide direct messaging chat apps where sales reps can communicate with leads and customers in real-time.
Use sales enablement software
Through sales enablement software, sales reps can access and manage sales materials and contents from a centralized location. You can create, edit, share and manage materials and contents from a centralized location.
How much do sales enablement managers make?
The base salary of an average sales enablement manager is $68,957. Additional compensations and incentives can total $21,088.
5 Most important sales enablement strategy
5 important sales enablement strategies include:
- Collect deal, account, and contact information of leads in a single place.
- Collaborate, communicate, and provide feedback from your customers
- Give your sales reps the tools they need to be successful.
- Make sales materials and content accessible to sales reps.
- Educate and train sales reps.
