What is Sales Enablement?

To get to the answer of this question, you should first know how sales enablement came into existence. Marketing and sales have traditionally had a bit of a contentious relationship in many companies. With miscommunication, vastly different goals and objectives, and sometimes an inability to see the other’s point of view – these two teams who need to work together often find themselves at odds. And out of that contentious relationship, a new role was born: sales enablement.

But, this role has vastly evolved over time and has become an end-to-end supporting process for salespeople to help them excel in their role. Sales Enablement is now a strategic, ongoing process to equip the sales teams with the tools, resources, and skills to make them more efficient, and ultimately improve sales execution and drive revenue.

Short and Crisp Definition:

“Sales enablement is the process of making sales teams able to efficiently move customers through the sales process to the point where the customer can make a buying decision.”

Why do you need sales enablement?

It’s no secret that selling has gotten a lot tougher.

Whether it’s changing markets, new buying habits or aggressive growth goals, today’s salespeople are struggling to keep pace. The result? More than 50% of sellers missed quota in 2018, making it five years in a row that quota attainment has fallen.

Sales organizations need their reps to be more productive, knowledgeable and skilled in order to meet their goals, which is why so many businesses have begun investing in sales enablement. CSO Insights reports that 61% of companies have a dedicated sales enablement function – more than triple the number of programs that existed in 2013.

Here is a list of reasons why every organization needs to have a sales enablement department:

• To align content to key stages of the buyer journey, creating a personalized experience that will increase win rates.

• To align your sales and marketing efforts and facilitate collaboration between these two departments.

• To avoid sellers spending too much time on non-selling related activities. Sales enablement tools increase efficiencies and maximize the time sellers spend selling.

• To have the ability to measure and analyze actual results to inform future deals, increasing customer retention rates by 14%.

So now that we’ve given you a good number of reasons to consider sales enablement, how do you actually go about implementing it? We have got you covered with that as well. Here are 5 best practices to follow in order to implement sales enablement perfectly.

Sales enablement best practices

1. Collaborate Sales with Marketing

According to Hubspot, 95% of buyers buy from someone who gave them the right content at each stage of the buying process.

Therefore, it is important to make sure that prospects are getting the right content at the right time. To do that, your sales team should be closely aligned with marketing so they can utilize the blog posts, case studies, or one-pagers necessary to answer prospect questions and close business quickly.

In fact, when salespeople have access to the content they need from marketing – and are trained in how to use that content effectively – research shows win rates can increase by up to 16.6%. So, make sure that there is good communication established between the sales and marketing departments and that they work together to align the sales processes and the content strategy to the customer’s conversion path. This, in turn, helps to drive better customer engagement.

2. Invest in continuous and ongoing training

This is the most important aspect of sales enablement. In order to have a well-performing team, you need to encourage and provide training opportunities throughout the year and lifetime of reps at your company.

Apart from your regular training sessions, have your reps use a digital training platform where you can send regular updates about crucial information, conduct quizzes to test their knowledge and coach them on their articulation skills. Also, regularly send them to seminars, industry meet-ups and events to keep their knowledge up-to-date on the latest happenings in the industry. It’s important to offer these opportunities to your reps to reduce churn and increase their job satisfaction. As a result, this raises the revenue of your business as well.

Also read: Why is continuous training important in sales?

3. Replicate High-Performer Best Practices

If you have reps who excel in certain areas or practices, find out how and why and then replicate those practices across your organization.

Say a rep has a specific call cadence they’ve experimented with and got it just right. If that call cadence consistently lands big target accounts, then implement that call cadence as the standard for all your reps. Institutionalizing such best performances across the team ensures that the whole team is competent enough to meet your customer’s expectations at every stage of the sales cycle.

4. Embrace technology

This might seem like an obvious one, but a study by CSO Insights found that 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to a lack of proper tools.

So, invest in the right technology stack that suits your sales process and team. This will fuel your sales efforts by helping you with forecasting, goal-setting, training, analyzing performance and more. In order to maintain alignment, try to leverage the same technology as the marketing team, where possible.

Sales enablement should be a mandatory part of the corporate culture in every organization. It’s only through a perfect sales enablement plan that organizations will be able to make an impression on the customers and prospects. So, choose wisely and implement these sales enablement best practices to significantly improve your sales efforts and outcomes.

Learn how sales enablement can boost your sales revenue in 2021

How Sales Enablement can drive revenue growth in 2021?

Learn how sales enablement evolved in 2020 and how to plan your sales enablement in 2021

How Sales Enablement shifted in 2020

The Sales Enablement 2021 Yearly Planning Guide

Learn what is going to trend in sales in the year 2021

6 Trends that Sales Experts are predicting for 2021

Want to create a happy, prosperous, and successful sales environment in your organization?

Click here to learn how to build a successful sales environment at your organization