What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the ongoing strategic process of providing your sales team with everything they need to engage potential customers. The idea behind it is that when your sales department has the resources they need to do their job, they’re far more likely to do it successfully. Seventy-six percent of businesses using sales enablement strategies saw an increase in sales between 6% and 20%. Whether it’s data, content, knowledge, training or productivity software, anything that increases your team’s sales prowess counts as sales enablement.
Why is sales enablement important?
The explicit goal of most businesses is to scale and grow. To do this, businesses need to attract customers and engage buyers through sales activities. Without an active sales department, you’re relying entirely on marketing and waiting for customers to contact you. Since some buyers need that extra push before deciding on a purchase, having a skilled sales team can greatly increase your revenue. This is why ensuring your sales team is well-equipped to work effectively is of utmost importance to business health.
How to get started
It might seem like a big deal to invest so much into your sales team. It’s important to remember how valuable they are for revenue growth. Getting started with sales enablement requires being mindful of several core components. By keeping the following areas in check, your sales will start increasing in no time.
1. Commit to objectives
Creating a plan gives you the structure to begin organizing, discovering and personalizing material in a systematic way. This approach often requires involvement from various departments. It’s also necessary to have clear expectations and strategies for achieving sales objectives. Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-and-done tactic.
Your sales enablement plan should have solid objectives but be flexible enough to develop, adapt and pivot when other variables change. Being able to adapt to stay ahead of trends will help you to stay ahead of the competition.
2. Engage your team
It’s important to have a sales team that is ready and willing to participate in any changes that will lead to increased sales. As such, an effective sales team willing to engage is paramount to sales enablement. Often, salespeople can have longtime habits or methods of doing things their way. However, when undergoing a company-wide sales enablement program, they’ll need to be able to put their old habits aside. Hosting a meeting to brief them on new strategies or tools they’ll be using is a good way to ensure everyone is on the same page.
3. Increase engagement
Every business-savvy person gets that engagement equals revenue. The more prospective and current customers you engage with, the more sales you’ll make. This isn’t to say that everyone you engage will make a purchase, but a proportion of them will. What percentage of engagement results in a sale depends on the quality of the engagement.
4. Focus on customer experience
If you’re using top-quality content to interface with your customer base, this will result in higher lead-to-conversion rates. A good way to refine user experience is to create pilot studies to get valuable feedback. This can involve hiring a freelance consultant to look at different aspects of how your company interfaces with customers and provide tips for improvement. After doing this several times, you’ll eventually perfect it.
5. Analyze data
Using data to track your sales is a great way to see whether the rest of your sales enablement efforts have been successful. It can also help you identify your most popular products or services, your target audience and patterns in your sales over time. The more data you collect, the more accurate your predictions about the future will be.
6. Optimize content
Brand content is an extremely important aspect of generating business. Your brand identity determines how people feel about your products or services. For this reason, developing your brand and marketing material that speaks to your target audience is a crucial factor in sales enablement.
Even if your sales team is among the top 10 teams in the country, unless you support them with high-quality brand content, they’re unlikely to get very far with it. Make sure that all content is up to standard before launching your next sales campaign.
7. Provide continuous sales training
The marketplace is a dynamic organism that undergoes constant change. That’s why offering continuous training to your sales team is necessary for staying ahead of the curve. Unless your team can adapt alongside market changes, it risks not performing as well as it could. Rather than hosting a regular yearly sales training workshop, consider integrating it into the monthly calendar.
Hiring a sales enablement professional
Sales enablement can be a long and complex process requiring much coordination. If you’re short on time and worry that you don’t have the skills to coordinate it alone, you might want to consider hiring a sales enablement specialist. A sales enablement role includes overseeing all sales team activities, analyzing data, coordinating strategies, working alongside marketing to leverage content and more.
In today’s technological landscape, having a competitive edge is becoming increasingly difficult. With new innovative tools coming out on a regular basis, it can be hard to secure a position in the top tier of the market. This is why sales enablement has been the focus of attention for many businesses wishing to scale and grow.
Sales enablement is the process of optimizing sales strategies to sell more effectively. Often, it involves a company-wide effort involving managers, content producers and marketing specialists. These helpful tips should help you get started with sales enablement. If you don’t think you can handle the extra work, it might be worth hiring a sales enablement specialist to oversee the process.
