Making sales has always been hard, but now it's even harder because buyers are smarter than ever. Buyers only spend 17% of their time shopping with vendors. They spend the remaining time conducting independent research at their own pace. In other words, buyers already do enough research about the products before they even talk to a salesperson for the first time. It's crucial to provide salespeople with useful, business-specific information because they have high expectations. This will influence their decision to buy.
Getting buyers interested in the right information isn't a simple, one-time job. This is where sales training comes in very handy. Without a robust sales enablement support system, salespeople may become disoriented and lack the necessary guidance to address prospects' questions and concerns during the sales process.
To keep up with the constantly changing market and buyers' dynamic needs, sales enablement is crucial for success. It helps the sales team learn new things and stay up to date on things like industry best practices and a deep knowledge of the respective product they are intending to sell. This way, they can always give something valuable that matters to the buyers and keep the momentum high throughout the deal cycle.
To initiate any kind of sales enablement effort, the first and foremost important thing is to find out for whom you are making these efforts and who are the ideal people you are going to target. This is the central core piece, where all your sales enablement initiatives branch out. Identify your buyer personas and create a data-rich document that covers all their interests, aspirations, motivations, pain points, decision-making flow, and, most importantly, their top burning priorities and why they run behind them.
Since most of your sales enablement efforts will be focused on producing sales content, it's crucial to understand how your personas consume information and the types of content they are most likely to prefer. With these quality data points as the central base, you will get a clear picture of whom you are going to target and execute your efforts that are so relevant to connecting with them.
"Sales enablement is about providing the right information to the right people at the right time. It's about arming your sales team with the tools, content, and knowledge they need to engage buyers effectively and close more deals."
Sales enablement will serve as a fueling element for both the sales and marketing teams. But without a healthy alignment between both the teams, no amount of sales enablement efforts can reap the projected outcomes. People commonly refer to this alignment between sales and marketing as 'Smarketing. This alignment's end goal is to improve collaboration and communication between both teams for a shared objective.
A well-structured sales enablement strategy should ensure that both the teams have a common shared goal and the right tools and environment to regularly communicate without friction and keep up-to-date information. When both teams are on the same page, every member can understand better about their ideal customers. This greatly contributes to the achievement of connected efforts between the sales and marketing departments, resulting in a shorter sales cycle and a more cohesive experience for the buyer.
Years ago, companies considered sales content as an optional tool to engage with buyers during specific stages of the deal cycle. But today, the sales content has a critical role even before the first interaction between the seller and the buyer. Relevant and quality content turned out to be the propelling force at every stage of the selling process. It empowers both sellers and buyers to reach a higher level of understanding in addressing a shared issue.
The sales enablement strategy should emphasize creating valuable and relevant content for the targeted customers. To achieve that, marketing teams should have access to the environment to see what’s happening during a sale and extract deep insights about the targeted customers. Additionally, marketing teams should provide salespeople with sufficient guidance on the content types required for various aspects of deal closure, given their profound understanding of the prospect's interests. This remains the strong foundation to create the relevant sales assets that can empower both the sellers and buyers to move forward in the deal cycle.
Here comes the most critical part in the sales enablement—sales training and coaching. Top-performing salespeople keep their target customers relevant by regularly updating them on market dynamics and selling techniques. Today's hot challenge in sales is that the technique and approach that worked well a while back are becoming obsolete after a certain amount of time with saturation.
Therefore, it’s a necessity for every salesperson to spend part of their time regularly upgrading their knowledge and skillsets with proper training modules. Organizations should focus on creating customized training programs and diverse training methods to refine the salespeople's skills. All these training efforts should be carried out in an organized environment provided with performance and feedback loops to encourage a culture of continuous learning for all the team members, from newbies to managers.
Before strategizing any new initiative, one should meticulously evaluate and map all the elements in the ongoing sales process. This will provide a comprehensive view of what is currently effective and what requires modification.
Start by mapping every stage of the sales process, from the initial touchpoint of lead qualification through deal closure and post-sales. To achieve each funnel stage's goals, record all actions, tools, and workflow structure. On top of that, list down the measured KPIs and gather feedback from the salespeople about the challenges they are facing and the resources they need to be more effective. The insights extracted from the above steps facilitate the identification of areas requiring improvement and the prioritization of respective efforts based on their potential impact on your overall sales enablement.
Setting the right measurable goals is the foundational thing for any strategic activity. The sales enablement goals will continue to serve as the central focus for all the various programs under the umbrella. Whatever the goals, they should be very specific and measurable without any ambiguity. To obtain that level of clarity in choosing the right goals, one should first know about the overall business objectives and what’s their status is in terms of the team’s performance and challenges. After completing these steps, the next task is to determine which sales enablement metric to prioritize. Always avoid keeping more than two metrics on your radar. Identify the root causes and fix one primary and one secondary metric. Here are a few examples of fixing the metric with the corresponding sales enablement goal:
After establishing the goals, it's crucial to engage in discussions with team members and key stakeholders to understand their viewpoints, enabling us to make necessary adjustments and enhance the precision of goal determination. This process will provide a clear direction for the sales enablement strategy, guiding the team's focus and designing programs to enhance the desired outcomes.
"Sales enablement is not just about technology - it's about people, process, and content. It's about creating a holistic approach that aligns sales and marketing and provides your sales team with the resources they need to engage buyers effectively."
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a significant foundational component for any successful sales team. It's a central hub for orchestrating all customer-related activities and storing all prospect and customer contacts in one single environment with instant access for every team member. CRM serves not only as a contact database but also facilitates sales enablement activities.
As the CRM system has the overall contacts database, it helps to segment contacts based on various factors like location, industry, follow-ups made, etc. This first-level segmentation helps both sales and marketing teams to segregate leads and act accordingly in their efforts. Salespeople can also analyze buying patterns and forecast sales based on historical data collected from contacts. Additionally, the CRM system's flexible integration capabilities allow it to connect to other sales enablement tools, providing essential data and enabling efficient workflows and collaboration directly from the CRM interface. Overall, the CRM system serves as a strong catalyst in the sales tech stack for any sales team, providing the foundational contacts and buyer interactions database for all other tools to operate at their highest efficiency.
As many of you may already know, there are a various sales enablement software available to carry out all these activities. These platforms, with the power of data and AI, help to automate and streamline a lot of repetitive tasks involved in the process. This greatly enhances sellers' ability to concentrate on their sales while also increasing productivity. Some of the popular workflows handled by the sales enablement platforms are sales content management, training and coaching, automating sales engagement, sales intelligence, analytics, and reporting. By streamlining the sales process with the right set of these tools for their sales strategy, organizations can empower salespeople to reach their maximum potential with minimum time and effort, which ultimately leads to improved sales outcomes.
From the discovery phase to the deal closure and post-sales phase, numerous activities are involved in advancing the deal, with manual repetitive tasks playing a significant role in this process. Sales enablement tools help to automate these repetitive tasks that save a huge chunk of time and effort for the sales team. To implement this, the first step is to monitor the existing workflow and identify the areas where repetitive tasks are involved. Based on the individual team’s workflow, this may vary between the teams, so it’s vital to identify and choose the relevant tool that rightly fits based on their process. Some of the key areas of automation are lead management, nurturing and triggered follow-ups, CRM updates, scheduling the meetings, locating the sales assets, and report generation. Once you've selected the right automation tools, provide team members with exclusive training on how to leverage automation in their activities. This will enhance the culture of utilizing automation in every workflow in the overall process to achieve improved outcomes with minimal time and effort spent.
Although both sales and marketing are involved in the sales content creation, most of the time, the marketing team’s efforts play a crucial role in the sales content creation. And, without proper collaboration and communication with the sales teams, no amount of marketing effort can create a high-quality, relevant sales asset. Collaboration helps to deeply understand the customer segment needs, and with that deep knowledge and data points, marketing teams can easily draft and improve the content relevance, which leads to better customer experiences and engagement.
Therefore, establishing a regular communication channel with an enhanced feedback loop is crucial for the creation and distribution of high-quality sales assets. As discussed in the earlier topics, setting a shared common goal and KPIs for both the sales and marketing teams will push them to work together. Sales enablement tools can support this with a content management system, where both teams can collaboratively be involved in the content creation process and store their collaterals to easily access and distribute during the sale.
Establishing a feedback loop system is essential to achieving continuous learning and improvement in any process. To ensure alignment between sales and marketing, both teams must adhere to a robust feedback flow to gain expertise in their respective tasks and workflows. Sales teams should indulge in developing structured methods to collect valuable feedback from the prospects and customers after every sales call. This can be done by sharing a quick digestible survey form with the right set of questions and options. The marketing team should gather both quantitative and qualitative feedback on the sales assets they've created by monitoring the download rates and directly obtaining insights from the sales team about the extent to which the content has benefited the salespeople and customers during the deal cycle. Encouraging this type of feedback loop cycle among teams is necessary to address the dynamic needs of buyers, and it will enhance collaboration.
Data and analytics help both sales and marketing teams to extract deep insights about buyer behavior and trends. We can easily segment, and target prospects based on their buying intent and potential by analyzing data on various factors such as demographics, behavior, preferences, and transactions. These deep customer insights at the sales enablement level enable the formulation of strategies with greater conviction and confidence, allowing for informed decision-making on all planned initiatives.
To execute this properly, sales and marketing teams should have common goals with clear KPIs to track their work and advanced collaboration and analytics tools to handle large data sets from the customer interactions. Various digital sales rooms and sales content management tools offer comprehensive solutions for tracking sellers' consumption and buyers' interactions. With these things in place, organizations can easily learn about their customer behavior patterns, which positively impacts the overall effectiveness of sales enablement programs designed over time.
One of the most crucial steps in designing a sales enablement strategy is understanding the end-to-end buyer’s journey. Before making a purchase decision, the buyer undergoes several stages, where they are learning all the aspects about the products in that niche right before interacting with a salesperson. Popularly the stages are classified as awareness, consideration, and purchase. Each of these stages requires dedicated efforts, which dictates various sales enablement activities across the funnel. Ultimately, as the buyer progresses through the stages, they require more personalization and high-quality content for their evaluation. To enhance engagement and boost sales performance, align the sales enablement strategy with the buyer's journey.
As mentioned earlier, different stages in the buyer’s journey required various dedicated efforts. One of the significant aspects of designing efforts for various stages is to map the sales content based on sales stages. It is important to identify the most relevant type of content that will be useful at each stage, as the buyer's objective differs. This data guides the creation of content that incorporates an appropriate narrative style, statistical data, and personalization. The following guidelines aim to illustrate various content types in relation to the sales stage.
Providing the correct information at the right time is the overall objective of the content mapping. By understanding the needs and behaviors of the customers in the first place, one can easily incorporate the content mapping into their sales enablement strategy.
Today the content types have spanned across various formats like series of videos, shorts, interactive demos, illustrations, etc. However, utilizing this variety of content types without taking the customer's interests into account may not be the most effective approach. Industry-specific audience preferences vary, and it's your responsibility to identify whether they prefer reading a text document or engaging with an interactive demo. Use these insights in your content efforts and develop appropriate formats for the sales stage to maximize the benefits of your sales assets. Tools like digital sales room software assist in storing, organizing, and showing various content formats like documents, videos, and interactive demos in a single place.
Sales training and coaching are two other important aspects of sales enablement. Before strategizing this part, it’s important to know what all the existing gaps in the ongoing training process are and what the team needs. There are a few steps involved in identifying these gaps, and the first one is to analyze the sales metrics, specifically the content engagement and representatives' performance metrics. This is the first indication that the team is lagging.
Conducting a Sales Training Needs Analysis (TNA) can provide valuable insights by dissecting and analyzing the process across various sales stages, considering customer expectations, market trends, and competitors' activities. On top of all these activities, be open to gathering feedback from your sales team by regularly conducting surveys and one-on-one interviews. By following these steps, organizations can easily identify the team's needs and implement the appropriate coaching programs to train them.
Sales is a dynamic job, and even top performers often struggle at some point of time to get things done. Therefore, to consistently enhance performance and retain salespeople within an organization, it is crucial to implement regular coaching and training programs. It facilitates the transfer of knowledge among individuals and speeds up overcoming the learning curve. It is crucial to first assess the organizational needs to identify skill gaps and other required initiatives. With this data right in place, establish clear program objectives like improving team collaboration, enhancing the performance of new reps, etc. Implement a well-defined framework to create training programs and launch them to your team by clearly communicating the purpose and benefits they can get.
To conduct the above-said training programs in a structured way and regularly monitor every team member, sales coaching and training platforms are crucial. Sales coaching platforms help to organize and segment the training modules based on their respective roles. New age technologies like interactive virtual training platforms leverage real-time engagement methods like breakout sessions and video conferencing. This helps to deliver immersive learning experiences, which is far better than individual learning. In addition to this, using gamified approaches like leaderboards and badges, salespeople like to access the training sessions and share knowledge with their peers through discussions. Overall, in the modern sales era, leveraging sales training tools is a necessity to deal with worldwide team members and keep them all engaged to develop their skills consistently.
So, it doesn’t end with launching sales enablement initiatives alone. To understand the effectiveness of every program and ensure that it contributes to overall business growth or not, tracking the right KPIs is a must-do thing for any sales team. Some of the most important metrics for measuring sales enablement success are time to productivity, content performance, sales cycle length, lead to opportunity rate, rep engagement, and quota attainment.
With the integrated sales enablement tech stack in place combined with the right strategy, any organization can easily track both the quantitative and qualitative metrics and reflect on their launched initiatives. These metrics will serve as indicators to take the right actions on time and enhance the overall sales performance by tweaking the sales enablement effort made.
Apart from measuring through dashboards to collect qualitative metrics, there is no other best option than collecting direct feedback from salespeople and customers. Earlier we talked about the benefits of establishing a feedback loop system for sales and marketing teams. Direct feedback collection is essential for any sales team to measure the impact of sales enablement efforts and strategies, as it uncovers hidden insights that are not accessible through tools.
The first step in implementing this is to set up clear, structured processes for gathering feedback from the appropriate channels and integrating them seamlessly into daily workflows. Encourage open communication among team members and hold regular meetings to provide feedback on their day-to-day customer interactions. Build training modules for sales teams to teach them how to effectively collect feedback from their customer interactions without stressing them too much. Once the feedback is collected, identify the valuable ones and immediately act on them so that team members feel valued, and this process can continue in the long term without losing their motivation and interests.
With the above-said things right on track, any sales team can get a clear picture of the outcomes driven by their sales enablement efforts. The gap between strategizing a sales enablement initiative and executing it precisely as planned is significant. The slippages are natural because it's a huge effort and time-consuming process, and that's where data-driven adjustment comes into play to set the strategy on the right track. It's always better to give it some time, identify errors in the early stages, and then tweak it on the go. That’s why setting up the right metrics and regular monitoring is vital for improvisation. No strategy is perfect, and data-driven iterations can uncover a lot of insights during and after the launch. With these insights, organizations can easily optimize their enablement strategies, which can potentially drive better business outcomes.
Though the sales enablement effort brings a lot of values and benefits to the sales and marketing teams, most teams resist adapting to the changes, and this can cause significant challenges. When examining the reasons behind this resistance, we often uncover the company's rigid processes, cultural barriers, a lack of awareness, and change fatigue. Even top-performing sales teams across organizations are often resistant to making changes to their existing workflows.
To overcome the above set of challenges across teams, it is critical to clearly communicate to the teams the benefits and outcomes of how these changes can impact their target KPIs with less time and effort spent. Showing some real-time case studies can help them get enough conviction to implement new programs in their process. Also, it's better to include the sales team in the decision-making process to foster a sense of ownership for them in the changes made. In summary, a positive learning culture should support the teams in empathetically addressing changes and concerns, thereby minimizing resistance to change within the organization.
"The goal of sales enablement is to make your sales team more effective and efficient. By providing them with the right resources and support, you can help them sell more effectively and close deals faster."
Misalignment and a lack of buy-in from sales and marketing teams can result in significant process inefficiencies and negatively impact overall performance. Some of the common causes include teams having different objectives and goals, insufficient communication, mistrust and lack of cooperation, and inadequate training in certain business areas. To overcome this challenge, align the sales and marketing teams with shared goals and create a seamless environment to enhance their collaboration. At the end of the day, both teams are interdependent, and it’s important to consider joining successes in celebrating milestones for both teams, which can encourage them to work together to drive better results.
Difficulty in the measurement of sales enablement impact can complicate the ROI assessment. Additionally, teams may become discouraged if their efforts don't lead to success. Long sales cycles, data integration issues, time lag in expected results, and complexity in the overall attribution are common challenges to identify when measuring the impact. Although it is impossible to achieve 100% accuracy in attributing all sales enablement efforts due to the various dynamic factors involved in sales, there are strategies that can be implemented to minimize the chaos in measurement.
First, define clear targeted metrics to attribute an activity, rather than relying solely on top-level or vanity metrics. Follow a holistic approach of combining quantitative and qualitative data to get a high-level picture of the efforts made instead of just relying on numbers. On top of all these steps, utilize integrated sales enablement tools that can seamlessly integrate with other tools, streamlining data collection and reporting to achieve high accuracy in attribution.
When launching a sales enablement initiative, effectively communicating the strategy is just as important as formulating it. Any strategy, no matter how good, cannot come to life without the support of its people. To improve communication, the first step is to align with the respective leadership from each team. Gain their buy-in and support by clearly communicating the positive outcomes that their team can achieve. Don't limit yourself to just the sales team. Engage cross-functionally with all other teams, such as marketing, product, customer success, and operations, to incorporate their inputs into the strategy. This will create accountability and ownership among the teams to actively participate in the strategy. On top of this, develop an overall communication plan that outlines the key messages for each team to highlight the target benefits they can reap and reach through all the channels like emails, meetings, and in-person events.
Encourage open communication among the teams so that they can freely express their opinions and feedback on the initiative taken. This will generate numerous fresh ideas and insights, enhancing the effectiveness of the designed strategy through collective feedback from various directions and perspectives. No strategy is optimal in its initial phase. It’s always better to implement it with a minimum viable version and iterate it on the go with team feedback. Create a long-term, structured, automated process that ensures team members are aware that their input is actively considered and incorporated into the development of the sales enablement strategy.
To foster a positive work culture and encourage hard-working individuals, acknowledging the efforts is vital to promoting a sense of accomplishment across the teams. Sales enablement strategy implementation should include the formal recognition programs that can spot the best performers in certain time frames, like a month or quarter. Use incentives and rewards not only for achieving the target KPIs, but also for collaborating with other teams, providing support, and providing feedback. Every aspect, such as sales training and cross-functional collaboration, should incorporate these mechanisms. Regularly share the results of the marketing and sales teams’s achievements across the organization. This will help other team members understand their role in the overall business outcomes and how they can contribute. This culture of celebration will surely drive continued collaboration across the teams and maintain a healthy, happy working environment to stay away from burnout.
The core principles of the sales enablement process emphasize consistently improving the sales team's efficiency with the help of necessary tools and content resources that will drive healthy engagement internally and with prospects. The sales enablement process's major efforts are heavily reliant on sales content creation and management. To handle all these activities, a proper, structured process is necessary for the team.
To create an effective sales enablement strategy, deeply understand the needs and challenges of both the customer and sales teams. Involve the sales team in strategizing and listen to their opinions and feedback. In an outline, any strategy should fundamentally improve cross-functional collaboration, a data-driven approach, and consistent training to help salespeople stay informed about effective sales techniques and product updates. By committing to a structured process, organizations can build a healthy and powerful sales environment that can close deals by providing real value to the customers.
Following are the recommended books, articles, and tools for further learning and implementation of sales enablement strategies.
Books:
