Looking for building sales enablement strategies to help your sales team close more deals? Check out this blog that contains a 6-step guide on building sales enablement strategies and some tips for the same.
Chris will fail and only you’re to be blamed.
Why? Because Chris is in your sales team while Filip is in your competitor’s.
Your competitor has provided Filip all the resources – an array of materials, templates, content, and sales tools to sell effectively. The result? His sales pipeline is overflowing and he’s closing more deals and helping to skyrocket your competitor’s business revenue.
While you’ve set Chris on the sales expedition clueless and worst, resource-less! And you’re wondering why he’s failing miserably at converting leads? Until you realize that this is your wake-up call, and your business and Chris are in dire need of a sales enablement strategy.
Wait, what’s that?
Well, let’s find out what this effective sales strategy is and what you can do to develop your own unique and strong sales enablement process.
Table of Content
What is Sales Enablement Strategy?
Sales enablement is a process wherein you empower your sales teams by providing them the resources they need to sell efficiently and close more deals.
These resources that are invested into sales enablement efforts include content created by marketing teams, software tools, methods, and guidelines.
This strategy is implemented in a way that demands sales and marketing alignment and the active collaboration of sales and marketing teams of an organization. It’s about training professionals to build better customer relations thereby increasing the sales performance and profit of the business.
As per LinkedIn Sales Blog, 86% of future customers engage with sales reps that provide valuable insights about the business, products, or services.
Numbers like these are enough to convince you to implement robust sales enablement metrics in your business if you haven’t already.
6-Step Guide To Build A Sales Enablement Strategy
Start With The Right Plan And Data, Plus Set Targets
After identifying the need for sales enablement solutions and sales enablement strategy in your organization, the next step is collecting proper data and setting important sales enablement goals.
An effective sales enablement plan that is backed by relevant data is always more effective. Buyer’s journey, customer acquisition, KPI, sales productivity, and sales quota are some important metrics to keep an eye on. Using existing data, it is possible to find areas that need more focus.
Identifying target areas that require more work and then setting relevant goals is crucial. While implementing a sales enablement strategy, these sales metrics and target areas need to be constantly monitored for improvement.
Assembling The Team & Defining Roles And Responsibilities
The sales enablement team will consist of sales enablement professionals, a sales enablement manager, and marketing specialists. In most organizations, the VP of both marketing and sales makes significant decisions after analyzing the metrics.
The sales enablement manager acts as a link between both marketing and sales teams as she or he knows all the resources that a sales rep must use.
The marketing team’s main responsibility is to create relevant sales enablement content like case studies, white papers, blog posts, product demos, conversational and product guides that will be used by the service reps. Marketing also monitors the performance of content and identifies potential leads before handing them off to sales.
Regarding roles and responsibilities, all members of the sales enablement teams must be in alignment and the sales enablement leaders must give them proper feedback. Every sales member should participate actively while collaborating on ideas. This is to ensure that the sales enablement strategy brings maximum results after its implementation.
This is to ensure that the sales enablement strategy brings maximum results after its implementation.
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Provide The Right Tools And Resources
These are a horde of tools and software available to organizations that intend to implement sales enablement services smoothly. Various automation tools technologies sanction the sales team to pay more attention to the crucial factor — selling.
For example, using email templates can be useful in maintaining uniformity in the dozens of emails that are sent by an organization’s sales enablement team.
Reduced time (and marketing efforts) in crafting emails and the option to customize according to a client are some of the reasons email templates can prove powerful.
Some of the many software tools that can be helpful are :
- Email Templates
Especially useful for follow-up emails to prospective clients. These emails can be automated and sent in case prospects are not responding after a set amount of time.
- Live chat on the website
Live chats allow the sales representatives to better connect with potential customers, have seamless sales conversations, and convert them to clients.
- CMS or Sales enablement software
Content Management System or sales enablement software is useful to keep all materials and sales content in a single sales enablement platform – accessible for all team members from a central location.
The sales team will, thus, always have access to a relevant version of all content that’s continuously updated by the marketing department.
Leveraging these solutions, you can pursue sales content optimization – create, edit, manage, and share all your resources and sales content easily.
Not only this, such solutions make collaboration between sales and marketing departments much easier as all the team members have access to the content and everyone’s on the same page.
One such efficient tool is CloudTutorial. It is a fully customized option that helps you create comprehensive FAQ pages and knowledge bases with ease.
- CRM – Customer Relationship Management
Tools like HubSpot, Salesforce include marketing automation tools, advanced reporting, and in-depth sales analysis of the entire sales cycle.
- Email Templates
Provide Proper Training Plan To Sales Teams
All software tools (of the sales enablement space) are purposeless until your sales operations teams have comprehensive sales training and knowledge to handle these tools. It is imperative to give proper training and guidance about the processes and tools, especially to the newly onboarded sales team members.
Your organization’s sales process is sure to become easy with CloudTutorial. This tool is easy to use and frictionless. Your sales team will hardly require any training to leverage it.
It is also important to identify top performers in a sales team and identify tools and training that will improve them even more.
Trained marketing professionals are an asset to any organization, so set aside an ample amount of your sales enablement budget for knowledge transfers, teaching, and providing guidance.
Understanding The Ideal Customer
Customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal of any organization. Hence understanding the behaviors and inclinations of your ideal customer is important. Analyzing a unique buyer’s strategy is useful in building a robust sales enablement process.
As mentioned before, customers value in-depth insights and thorough support for their service and products. Thus your sales enablement strategies must ensure that prospective leads stay and become long-term clients for the unique value you offer.
Understanding the motivations, triggers, and pain points of customers will be fruitful in the long term. It will get revealed in the next stages of any consumer’s journey while doing a purchase.
Analyze The Performance Of The Sales Team And Strategy
As sales enablement is an iterative strategy, it goes without saying that the performance of the sales enablement team should also be monitored closely. Providing valuable feedback to the team members is crucial in motivating them to put their best foot forward.
Analyzing the sales enablement process itself is a given as changes are inevitable to any plan especially in an evolving industry such as sales.
As a sales project cannot work in isolation and needs the support of marketing, it’s important to make sure every employee has a sales-focused mindset and is capable of implementing best sales enablement practices for seeing optimum results.
Tips For Building Sales Enablement Program
Developing a successful sales project requires careful analysis. It is also noteworthy to understand that sales enablement services are not a one-time implementation. Sales enablement is a process that undergoes many iterations to develop into the perfect strategy that will benefit your organization and can bring in the desired results.
Here are some tips that you can make use of while building a sales enablement program:
Appropriate Training And Coaching
Sales training and guidance are proven to find better results than any other method. Making sure sales representatives and managers understand the use of the right tools like CRM is imperative to building a successful sales enablement plan.
For all sales professionals, continuous learning is extremely useful as they understand dealing at dissimilar phases of sales and customer journey.
Hence it is important to make sure the newly onboarded reps understand their tools well enough and are in sync with the rest of the team.
Environment For Communication And Collaboration
One of the most important aspects of sales enablement strategy is the collaboration between cross-functional teams. Sales enablement is a constant back and forth from marketing and sales teams. Feedback from both teams helps to improve the sales enablement plan.
Make sure to foster a collaborative environment and that both teams are working in alignment. When you encourage your marketing reps with the right materials, tools, and resources, they will have the capability to deal more efficiently.
Research Customer Background
Sales teams will be more effective in implementing the sales enablement plan when they can customize it to fit the customer’s unique needs. For this, it is important to collect relevant customer background information, data on their past engagements, what content works best with different clients, and more.
The marketing reps need to keep a record of all this to make the interaction between the prospective clients smooth and efficient.
Relevant Content And Tools
It’s important to avoid the risk of using outdated content and resources. Also, ensure that the latest and updated tools are utilized and the content is reviewed continuously by the marketing department.
Using irrelevant content can do more harm than good because clients need assurance and your content can make or break the deal.
Most organizations, large and small are actively building up their version of a sales enablement strategy. Using this strategy, the sales reps can close more deals and increase revenue. One important benefit is also the increased efficiency in reps as they are constantly in a learning environment and sharpening their skills.
When your organization reaches a point where it cannot strategically meet sales goals or struggles to convert leads to clients or find profits falling, then it’s time to strategize and build a sales enablement program. It must also be done carefully and thoroughly.
Both have equal responsibility. While marketing creates resources for the sales reps, the sales utilize these resources to see results. One can’t work effectively without the other. Their collaboration is of utmost importance to see any success in implementing this strategy.
Conclusion
Introducing a successful sales enablement strategy does not happen overnight. It requires a major shift in thinking and a commitment to its proper implementation.
Seeing success after its introduction also has a similar trajectory. But after multiple iterations and tweaks, it will be quite evident that it’s one of the best strategies for your organization.
The benefits of a sales enablement process range from streamlining processes, to improved client acquisition, increase in revenue, overall efficiency, and productivity of your employees. If staying above the competition is one of your organization’s goals, then you can’t go wrong in introducing the sales enablement strategy to your business.
The results of a sales enablement strategy can vary across businesses, it’s important to understand and align your plan according to your business’s unique needs.
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