A Comprehensive Guide to Sales Enablement

A Comprehensive Guide to Sales Enablement

Sales enablement has become one of the fastest-growing sectors over time. Within a few years, this technology has changed from a niche to an essential for sales processes.

Moreover, at least 80% of sellers who have reached a quota’s 150% or more are using sales technology once a week.

However, still, a lot of people out there don’t know what sales enablement means for their organization. Or when should you keep it a priority? What are the best practices of sales enablement?

Well, there are multiple questions to answer about sales enablement. Here in this guide, we can paint a comprehensive and clear picture of sales enablement. Here you can get an idea of how business owners can apply sales enablement to their businesses and how they can start with best practices.

So, here we go:

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is an ongoing process. The process equips your sales team with training, guidance, and content. So, they can effectively and efficiently engage buyers. Moreover, sales enablement analytics provide sales and marketing teams with useful data-driven insights. Consequently, the marketing and sales teams can efficiently optimize their strategies to drive revenue.

Putting a focus on sales enablement can help your teams to:

• Connect sellers to relevant sales content
• Provide more flexible and effective ways to present their content to potential buyers.
• Deliver business visibility into customer engagement in real time.
• Apply advanced analytics for optimized pitches and more informed marketing and sales decisions.
• Equip sellers with much-needed training and guidance.
• Map against the bottom-line results to improve these.
• Measure all the factors we have enlisted above.

The sales enablement definition is based on 3 different aspects. Let’s indulge in more details to better understand things here.

So, these include:

·        Committing to a necessary sales enablement process

Establishing a sales enablement process can provide you with an appropriate framework. You can use the framework to find, share, customize, and organize content coherently. However, the sales enablement process needs inputs from various teams, clear goals, and a comprehensive plan to execute. Moreover, the process will help you consequently reach your sales enablement goals. Sales enablement strategy should not be one-and-done.

Moreover, your sales enablement strategy is an ongoing process. Therefore, it has to be flexible for evolution when needed. The agility of this process will help you meet buyers’ changing needs. Consequently, you can stay ahead of your competitors.

·        Involving your sales team in the process

Consider that your sales process is a funnel with four stages. The upper half stages contain awareness and consideration steps. Your marketing teams own these two steps of the sales enablement process. So, you need to focus on developing your prospects’ interest in your company’s products and services here.

• Marketing automation tools have transformed this sales cycle’s part completely. This can help businesses to reach a broader audience. Consequently, you can nurture leads when they are ready to engage with your sales team.
• While the lower end contains evaluation and purchase steps. Your sales team is responsible for closing deals here to generate revenue. Fortunately, sales enablement tools are the key player here. These sales enablement tools can transform your sales cycle’s this part.
• Sales enablement software can equip a seller with skills, tools, and assets. These are the sources they need to engage with potential buyers more effectively. Consequently, they can generate the maximum possible revenue for the business.

Most importantly, your sales team is the key focus of every sales enablement strategy. They are the key reasons businesses spend money on sales enablement software. Your sales team can dramatically improve the number of closed deals by working alongside your marketing team.

Above all, a sales enablement strategy allows businesses to focus more on their sales team. As these people need every edge available to grow your business successfully.

·        Enhanced engagement means more revenue.

A sales enablement strategy can improve your business performance. It will help your business reps continuously engage with prospects and customers throughout their buyer journey. A salesperson understands that engagement is always an opportunity. They must develop a precise, data-driven sales content strategy in highly effective formats. Your content strategy needs to be highly useful for the target audience.

You can consider technology as a springboard for such engagement. However, your sales technology can provide limited benefits without a strong procedure, intention, and focus.

So, you must think about sales enablement strategically and use its best practices. Consequently, you can develop lucrative results and transform your sales effectiveness in the best possible way.

We have finalized some best practices for a sales enablement strategy that you must learn below.

Best Strategies and Examples of Sales Enablement

An effective sales enablement strategy can provide the sales team with various opportunities to observe and model the best sales executions. After in-depth learning about sales enablement, it’s time to know the best-performing practices. Sales enablement is a strategic discipline that’s here to increase your sales and business productivity.

However, you must consider the best practices we have enlisted below to make the most of this.

So, here we go:

Start with a goal to develop an effective sales enablement strategy

Make your sales team work from an effective enablement playbook to maximize win rates. These sales enablement playbooks must be repeatable and predictable. Sales communications without specific missions can’t provide effective results in real-time.

Therefore, starting with a clear goal or mission is a must to develop an effective sales enablement strategy.

Start with an absolute purpose and clarity if you want to create and maintain an effective sales enablement strategy.

Why are you creating a plan to increase win rates? This certainly is your first question to answer.

What do you want to do next? How will you achieve your sales goals? Well, these are some of the questions to answer before creating any sales enablement strategy.

Just like any marketing strategy, your sales enablement strategy should also focus on your scalability and ROI goals. Before getting into sales team training or developing a strategy, consider the right questions. The strategy may vary for different contexts, companies, and industries. However, the fundamental ideas below can work as an effective blueprint for any business.

So, these include:

• Enhanced communication and alignment between your sales team.
• Creating the right content designed specifically for the sales team
• A streamlined process for lead qualification
• Properly trained sales teams
• Joint efforts evaluation to close the loop on entire lead generation output.
• New channel implementation for demand and lead generation.
• Incorporating new and right technology

So, your business mission is more often to enable sales teams to perform their jobs. However, your team needs to develop a clear and easy-to-share mission before getting into the process.

Determine your high-performing activities

The sales enablement practices have two steps. For instance:

• Firstly, you need to identify the highest-performing salespeople in your team. Understand what characteristics or approaches make them the highest-performing professionals in the team.
• After identifying these people, you need to institutionalize these for your remaining sales team. This step means making them accessible for sales teams as content. They can help your team to learn the effective practices they use through sales training.

This practice will also help your entire sales team to leverage key sales enablement best practices. Consequently, they can also use these strategies to boost their performance in the best possible way.

Tailor your sales enablement strategy to the buyer’s journey

So, here we have another best practice of sales enablement to know. Keep your sales team from bombarding any prospect with a general sales pitch. This is the pitch that newbies usually use when starting to work with your business. However, currently, nobody has enough time to sit through this.

So, your sales team must know how to tailor their sales pitch according to the unique needs of a buyer.

You should also not let your sales process remain unsuited and untouched for longer. This practice can die your entire process.

Moreover, you should also remember that the best way to increase sales isn’t to talk but to listen. Identify the behavior of your potential customer. Learn more about their needs and pain points. Learning from your ideal customers would help you better equip your sales team.

Use analytics to understand and modify your sales enablement strategy

The efforts require you to create appropriate collateral for your sales team. Sales enablement works effectively only when it accords with your buyer’s needs. Your buyer’s needs vary significantly for each buyer throughout their buyer journey.

So, you must always analyze the content, tools, and process your sales reps are utilizing. Make your sales reps indulge in the field with the intention of regular tweaking and analyzing. Moreover, if some of your content isn’t resonating effectively, you better skip that. Similarly, if your sales enablement software technology is difficult to understand for your reps. Then you should prefer changing it.

Trust your analytics always to make better and more informed decisions.

Create different sales content for different stages of the funnel.

Always remember that everyone visiting your website isn’t purchase-ready. Moreover, your prospects are not even sure whether they need your solution. Therefore, providing them with the information, in fact, plenty of info they don’t even need, can make them go away.

So, you should first identify at which stage your potential customers are in the buying funnel. Then you should mold your offering and pitch to them accordingly as per particular time and their requirements.

This practice in your sales enablement strategy will certainly work amazing for you.

Make content accessible to the sales team.

According to American Marketing Association, sales teams don’t use about 90% of the content. The biggest reason is that your reps cannot find that content.

So, you must make your business content available for the sales reps. For that, you must keep your sales enablement software:

·        Organized

All your sales enablement tools for sales and content must be easy to find. So, the sales reps can use these tools and content from this repository. This is certainly one of the best practices for your sales enablement strategy to consider.

This way, you can provide your sales team with all the essential sales enablement tools and content they need. Consequently, you can expect them to do their jobs in the best possible way.

·        Flexible

Moreover, the content you recommend must base on performance. Additionally, the marketing automation platform should control your sales event triggers. Consequently, you can align your sales conversations better per different stages of the buyer’s journey.

·        Integrated

Above all, your sales enablement software must connect with other tools seamlessly. These tools must include your marketing teams’ software solutions for better alignment. Consequently, you can keep your sales process automated and streamlined.

Besides that, you should also keep updating your content strategy. This practice will ensure that all your sales reps are at the same stage. You can also rest assured that your reps aren’t making any mistakes while interacting with prospects.

Combine sales and marketing

Sales and marketing both have a strong connection to any business’s success. So, this time you have to combine your sales and marketing departments officially. We have been witnessing blurring lines between both of these departments.

Reps can’t do sales without the creativity and ingenuity of their marketing. While your marketing works blindly without the guidance of your sales team.

Therefore, it is imperative to unite these two sections to experience improved sales in the best possible way. Moreover, combining sales and marketing efficiently can also help you create captivating stories. Consequently, you can better hook your buyers with that.

Make your sales enablement team well-prepared

Once you have established sales enablement tools, team, and tech, you can start working on creating your plan. Similarly, preparing your sales enablement team is essential to successfully achieving your sales goals.

Therefore, your HR department and recruiters must know the key qualities and buying experience they should look for.

• Firstly, to implement your sales enablement strategy, you must know whom to involve in the decision-making process.
• Always remember that working on an efficient sales enablement strategy has become more important than ever.
• A sales enablement agency is responsible for aligning your marketing team. Also, a sales enablement agency you work with will ensure that your reps have what they need for success.

Consequently, an effective sales enablement strategy, well-prepared reps, and efficient training materials. All of these are vital for your business to close more deals. These things will also help your marketing team to capture more leads effectively.

Moreover, you should also create a targeted sales enablement strategy in place to make your reps more efficient and productive.

Define responsibilities clearly

Although for some companies, establishing a formal sales enablement strategy is an additional workload. They find it harder to manage on top of their busy schedule. Moreover, a sales enablement strategy can cross the boundaries between your marketing and sales teams.

As we already have mentioned that alignment is the key here. Therefore, the entire execution process can fall apart if you haven’t defined your reps’ responsibilities.

You must clearly define responsibilities between the marketing and sales department in the beginning.  This practice is imperative to implement your sales enablement strategy on the right foot. You must consider the following functions.

These include:

• Sales enablement software and strategy onboarding
• Efficient management of sales methodology and process
• Customer relationship management
• Sales content and playbooks
• Sales enablement tools and technology
• Deal support and competitive analysis.
• Sales campaigns and projects.

This is where you can get benefits from hiring a sales enablement agency. You can simply sit with a sales enablement agency to communicate your business goals. Consequently, the sales enablement agency will help you align your sales team for better results.

Provide your teams with the right sales enablement tools and technology

Over time, sales enablement has emerged as a standard practice in different industries. Therefore, you can simply find more sales enablement tools and technology available in the market. These sales enablement tools will help you to connect your reps with the content and information they need.

Moreover, managing the right tech stack for reps can also benefit your sales team in multiple ways.

These sales enablement tools and tech will also let them focus on closing deals and increasing revenue. Consequently, your sales team will achieve your business revenue goals more effectively.

An efficient sales enablement platform can help your departments:

• Have a better communication
• Execute prospect outreach
• Align their tasks more efficiently.

Moreover, a sales enablement platform can ensure the best representation.

Therefore, you should always focus on the technology that can work amazingly for your business. Choosing the right sales enablement tools to start from learning:

• How the unique sales process of your company works?
• What are the key challenges that your sales team faces?
• Does your business have any kind of gaps in sales pipeline management?
• Which best solution can streamline your process?

You can simply choose to work with the best sales enablement platform. So, you can have a one-stop solution for all your sales enablement needs. It must include the following:

• Marketing and sales automation tools
• Content management solutions
• CRM software, and more.

Above all, sales enablement automation with the best technology is important for an effective sales enablement strategy. As this practice can give you a more powerful approach to reaching sales enablement goals.

Start small, and grow gradually.

You shouldn’t expect a huge turnaround from your sales enablement strategy overnight. In fact, you should start with realistic expectations. Similarly, consider making small changes over time to make your team adjust well to the process. This will also keep your customers from noticing any quick changes.

Always remember that sales enablement isn’t about face-to-face interactions that the reps have with buyers. In fact, you can also extend the interaction to informational videos, passively consumed content, blogs, etc.

Taking enough time to grow will also mean sticking to your sales content and avoiding demotivation. The concept of starting small and growing gradually also applies to various things. These include:

• Content for customers
• Content for the sales team
• Company’s growth
• Sales team’s growth
• Your customer base’s growth

All these things need to happen at an effective rate. Otherwise, things may get out of your hands quickly. Consequently, these will pose a detrimental effect on your business. Sales enablement strategy best practices should facilitate your business’ natural growth.

Align sales approach with buyer’s path

Your buyer’s path may vary significantly based on their needs and profile. Generally, your sales team must know how to capture and keep your customers’ attention. So they can convince them of the value of your service or product.

However, your sales rep doesn’t cover the entire buyer’s path. Moreover, your company needs to know the specific buyer’s path.

You can achieve this by doing the following things:

• Creating your buyer’s persona
• Understanding your audience
• Researching and knowing the goals of your buyers.
• Map touchpoints to understand when your customers came into contact with your business.
• Identify pain points to learn more about the difficulties your customers face.
• Know which team member can handle their needs in the best possible way.

Completing all these steps will certainly help you to find the right sales approach for your buyers. Aligning your sales approach with your buyer’s path will ensure more successful sales. This best practice of your sales enablement strategy can smoothen out the bumpy roads of buyers.

Examples of Sales enablement Strategy

Here are some effective examples of using sales enablement tech to create a powerful approach. So, here we go:

·        Sales email sequences and templates

Your reps can use a sales email template to kickstart their own outreach. However, sales enablement equips reps with tools, knowledge, and resources to make them successful. Providing sales sequences and email templates is another key element here.

These will provide a framework for your sales reps to improve their outreach. You can also help them to save time and inline sales process with the companies. Overall, these are primary to improve sales win rate.

·        Direct messaging

Incorporating a live chat is also one of the effective sales enablement tools as automation on the website. The perfect time to communicate with your customer is when they are perusing your website already. Your sales reps can use live chat to close any potential leads.

·        Automated lead prospecting

Any sales enablement platform must do more than just provide email templates and sequences to reps. Although these are helpful resources but only possess a small part of what a sales enablement strategy aims to achieve.

A comprehensive sales enablement platform must provide automated lead prospecting besides other solutions. Moreover, a holistic sales enablement approach can ensure that your teams have all the necessary resources.

·        Sales enablement software

Any helpful sales enablement platform can help you consolidate all the necessary aspects of the process. You can have sales enablement content and material in one manageable and accessible location. An efficient sales enablement platform can provide all useful sales enablement tools in a central space. Consequently, you can use these to create, edit, manage and share resources.

Setting your team up with the right sales enablement software can align your marketing and sales efforts. Consequently, you can improve your communication.

Things to consider when choosing the best sales enablement tools.

Sales enablement software allows your team to manage all the materials and content from one central location. These sales enablement tools can let you create, edit, manage, and share sales content more effectively.

However, the very best sales enablement software must include the following:

• The ability to create email sequences
• Automated prospecting
• Implementation of direct messaging
• A good customer relationship management tool
• A data or sales intelligence tool.
• Your chosen sales enablement tool must be easier to use.
• It must help you organize, create, and deliver content.
• Your chosen sales enablement tool must be mobile-friendly.

Best Sales Enablement Tools you Must know.

Do you want to know some of the best sales enablement tools? Here we have enlisted some of the best sales enablement software you must consider.

So, here we go:

HighSpot

HighSpot is arguably an amazing sales enablement platform that the sales team loves. This sales enablement platform can empower businesses to elevate effective customer conversations. Moreover, these solutions can help you to drive more strategic growth.

Additionally, this sales enablement platform has combined the following:

• Sales team training solutions
• Intelligent content management
• Customer engagement
• Contextual guidance
• Actionable analytics, and more.

The sales team can utilize HighSpot to ensure a unified buying experience. Consequently, you can ensure improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue, and customer retention.

HubSpot Sales

HubSpot is arguably one of the most popular growth platforms. This platform has been accommodating thousands of consumers worldwide. HubSpot platform comprises of:

• Sales hub
• Marketing hub
• Customer Relationship Management
• Service hub

In short, HubSpot can offer you everything you need to equip your sales team with all the tools they need. Consequently, they can work better to grow your business.

HubSpot sales can offer you a complete suite of tools and technology to boost productivity. You can also use these tools to improve deal cycles and make the process more human-friendly. These tools will keep your sales reps from the workload.

Ambition

Ambition is another one of the most amazing gamification software for the smartest teams in the world. Whether you have an in-house sales team or work remotely, it can provide sales loafers with all the essential tools.

Moreover, you can use these sale enablement tools to:

• Train their teams
• Hold their sales team accountable for reaching goals
• Motivate performance
• Close more sales

Additionally, the tool can also integrate into your CRM technology and sales stack. Consequently, your teams can instantly turn overwhelming data into actionable, easy-to-see insights. Fortunately, no spreadsheets and mathematical processes are necessary for this.

Membrane

Here we have another amazing sales enablement software solution. This CRM tool can make it easier for your reps to:

• Execute sales enablement strategy more effectively
• Train sales teams better
• Improve your sales process continuously.

It can help you drive the behaviors required to manage complex business sales. These sales enablement tools can help you achieve consistent performance and improve sales effectiveness.

Above all, this sales enablement software can replace your traditional CRM systems.

Nimble

Here we have another leading CRM solution that provides top-notch content management tools for individuals and teams. Businesses can use this software to nurture their customer relationships efficiently.

Moreover, the solution also helps you build customer relationships across 90+ cloud-based applications. These solutions also include social networks, emails, and more.

Above all, Nimble has combined the benefits of classic content management, traditional CRM, sales intelligence, and marketing automation. Consequently, you can consider this as a powerful sales enablement platform. Moreover, this tool can drive key relationship insights anywhere you work.

Gong

Gong is another amazing sales enablement software that allows reps to have the following:

• Complete visibility into deals
• Sales performance metrics
• Market advancements, and more.

You can use all these solutions here can help you breed productivity and profitability. You can achieve this by analyzing the customer-facing interactions. Moreover, these interactions often include email, web conferencing, or phone.

Reps can closely monitor these conversations to understand your buyer’s needs more accurately. Moreover, they can use data-driven solutions and automation to stay connected with the entire sales team.

Moreover, this sales enablement software will help you make more data-driven decisions.

SEISMIC

SEISMIC is a sales enablement software that runs on an AI-powered platform. This software can help you to:

• Plan sales enablement strategy
• Effectively engage your audience
• Plan your sales content

Moreover, you can also personalize your sales content more effectively to ensure positive customer interaction. Additionally, your reps can also find and share personalized, meaningful content within no time.

Above all, the engagement tracker can significantly shorten the sales cycle.

Pitcher

The pitcher is also the best provider of sales enablement tools and content management solutions. Both marketing teams and field sales teams can leverage these tools to close more sales. This intuitive and feature-rich sales enablement platform can make things easier for marketing and sales teams across all industries.

Above all, you can execute this feature-rich sales enablement platform on different mobile devices and desktops.

SalesHood

SalesHood is another popular sales enablement platform that can help teams quickly boost their sales performance. Sales teams can also use this tool to learn, train and sell more.

Moreover, SalesHood can also help businesses to:

• Improve their time to ramp
• Increase their sales velocity
• Boost quota attainment

Additionally, this is a purpose-built platform that can enable fast-paced sales and marketing teams. Consequently, your sales teams can boost their productivity quickly at scale. The tool has improved to assist you during the hyper-growth time of the business.

Showpad

The buyer experience with Showpad is an ultimate differentiator. The user experience of this sales enablement platform helps it to stand out. Moreover, this platform is one of the most flexible sales enablement tools that your sales and marketing teams can rely on.

However, you can use this sales enablement software to engage buyers, prepare sellers, and ensure optimized performance. Above all, the platform helps you to use insights to make data-driven decisions in the best possible way.

Also, the Showpad provides an amazing user experience. Due to this, you can easily discover and share the right sales content. You can also deliver the right training and coaching to your sales reps to make them more efficient and productive.

Overall, this sales enablement software can help you to maximize your reps’ productivity more effectively.

Top-notch Sales Enablement service providers

Do you want to learn about the best sales enablement service providers? Here we have enlisted some of the best sales enablement agency options for you.

So, here we go:

SmartBug Media

SmartBug Media is a globally popular and award-winning sales enablement agency. The agency specializes in helping B2C and B2B businesses to improve their revenue. Moreover, this sales enablement agency uses Intelligent Inbound strategies to provide data-driven and intelligent sales strategies.

The execution process leverages the following:

• Sales enablement
• Creative branding
• Demand generation
• Paid Media
• Public Relations
• Web design
• Inbound marketing, etc.

Consequently, businesses can partner with this sales enablement agency to improve marketing ROI and grow revenue.

Mkt4edu

Mkt4edu is another top-notch marketing and sales enablement agency. This service provider comprises Inbound, AI, Strategic sales, and CRM specialists. Moreover, these specialists have the expertise and knowledge to help you grow your business.

This agency has also won multiple awards for sales activation and for using innovative technologies and AI. Additionally, specialists here use innovative tools and tech to administer sales and marketing campaigns. Consequently, these can help your business to leverage the growth it deserves.

You can consider partnering with this sales enablement service provider to save time.

Avidly

Avidly is the leading CRM, inbound marketing, and Martech agency. It has helped numerous businesses to achieve HubSpot success worldwide. Moreover, this service provider offers a variety of services. These services usually include:

• Sales enablement
• Web development
• Creative design
• Sales and marketing strategy development, and much more.

This sales enablement agency has been helping businesses across multiple countries. The specialists here help businesses to achieve their business growth goals. Moreover, they also let you make better data-driven marketing and sales results. Above all, the sales enablement service provider can help you to develop a sustainable and strong brand.

Bigtincan

So, here we have another sales enablement service provider you must know. Bigtincan is one of the most popular sales enablement automation companies. Since its inception, this sales enablement platform has become a popular SaaS provider.

The go-to-market headquarters of Bigtincan is available in Boston, MA.

However, the sales enablement services from Bigtincan are available anytime and anywhere. These services here are available for personalization at scale.

Companies can also use the products of Bigtincan for different purposes. These usually include:

• Efficient management of sales content
• Training and coaching your sales reps
• Managing internal communication more effectively
• Effective document automation

Above all, Bigtincan is a sales enablement service provider that works as a publicly traded company on the ASX.

The PMG

Here we have another demand generation and content marketing agency for SaaS and tech services. This service provider also offers top-notch sales enablement solutions. You can work with The PMG to empower your sales teams. Consequently, your sales team can get effective, relationship-building, and strategic sales enablement content.

Moreover, The PMG allows you to empower your reps with collateral. So they can meet and communicate with your potential buyers throughout their buyer’s journey. Additionally, you can also create a sales enablement toolkit personalized as per your business needs.

Here you can get:

• A variety of forms
• Seamless transitions
• Effective sales content with an appropriate call to action and tone.

This sales enablement service provider allows you to develop content and experiences. These sources can encourage your customers to take action. The service provider can help you meet them where they are through highly targeted campaigns. These campaigns are effectively designed to convert prospects into buyers and close more sales.

Final Thoughts

Sales enablement strategy focuses on the experience that sales reps provide to a prospect throughout their touchpoints. Over the years, sales enablement technology has become more popular with top businesses using the tech. Therefore, various sales enablement agencies are now claiming services all about these practices. However, before choosing a sales enablement agency or software, you must learn exactly what sales enablement is.

This is not all about technology only but also an effective strategy. The strategy can then maximize your reps’ abilities to communicate value with prospects and convert them. You can train them to differentiate buyers and their needs at different points of the buyer’s journey. Consequently, they can learn to differentiate more compelling, consistent, and clear.

You can also look at the detailed guide we have given above to get a better idea about every sales enablement aspect. Consequently, you can make more informed decisions about this.