Ariana Shannon, Creative Director & Marketing Coordinator for SalesIntel
Sales enablement is a results-focused strategy to enable sales teams by providing them a wealth of different kinds of resources to sell effectively. These resources include technologies, content, marketing assets, training, knowledge, and information to work more leads through the buyer’s journey or boost conversions. Sales enablement sees a phenomenal synergy between sales and marketing teams to empower sales reps with everything they need to close more deals and drive revenue.
Sales Enablement vs. Sales Operations
The collaboration between sales enablement and sales operations teams is crucial to your sales growth. While both of the teams work together to set up your sales workforce for success, they have distinct roles to play in your organization:
- Sales Operations: Manages sales team logistics and organization to drive the team forward.
- Sales Enablement: Applies efforts directly to the sales workforce and helps put sales plans in action.
If that distinction seems fuzzy, here’s an example. Imagine a company wanting to deploy a new sales technology to improve productivity. Sales operations will work behind the scenes to optimize the use of the technology, create dashboards with metrics and statistics, and open new accounts for sales reps and SDRs to work on the technology. Sales enablement, on the other hand, will train the sales workforce to use the technology, create the training content, and onboard the sales workforce.
Now let’s turn our focus to how to better use sales enablement to improve your sales performance. Here are five sales enablement goals you should have as a sales leader.
1. Allow Easy Communication between Sales and Marketing Teams
Uninterrupted, effective communication between sales and marketing departments is key to the success of your sales enablement strategy. Use team collaboration technologies like ProofHub, Freshdesk, or Flowdock to ensure consistent, fast, and effortless sharing of relevant content across the departments on a single platform.
A powerful CRM system can also help with communicating customer data, marketing content, and giving a heads-up on quality leads to your sales reps. In addition, it can help send more valuable intel gathered by other departments, not just marketing, throughout a modern sales process.
2. Power Your CRM and Marketing Automation Systems with Accurate B2B Data
It’s not enough to have a reliable sales enablement tech stack — data is the lifeline of your CRM and marketing automation systems. With verified technographic, intent-based, and firmographic data in your tech stack, you can reduce the time your sales reps spend on research and lead generation so they can focus on accelerating the pipeline.
Optimizing your sales time by using accurate B2B contact and company data is another brilliant way of ensuring more robust sales enablement, thus strengthening your sales strategy.
3. Equip Your Sales Team with Personalized Marketing Tactics
Personalized marketing does not necessarily have to be digital, though personalized emails and phone calls have their own advantages. In today’s hyper-digital world, sending direct mail, tangible items, or a personal note to your prospects will certainly push your sales strategy forward. Contemporary sales teams take full advantage of the matchless combination of direct mail and digital marketing to drive sales. So why shouldn’t you?
There’s no doubt marketing plays a critical role in sales enablement. One way of enabling your sales team to close more deals is adding personalized marketing tools to their arsenal. Such tools — for example, the PFL Personal Marketing Center and SwagIQ — can be easily integrated with your existing tech stack to manage both direct mail and digital marketing efforts.
4. Measure Sales Enablement Metrics to Improve Win Rates
Statistics have a special place in any sales enablement strategy. Without accurately measuring sales enablement performance against sales rep productivity and revenue, you can’t properly demonstrate ROI and identify areas of improvement for your sales team.
To put your sales results into context, measure sales enablement metrics such as time to productivity, training content consumption, the time sales reps spend selling, and time to pipeline and revenue milestones. Then use the insights gathered from these metrics to determine the root cause of poor performance or the key reasons for success.
5. Optimize Your Sales Content to Reduce Content Creation Time
It doesn’t take much to understand that every minute your sales reps spend to create sales content is deducted from your total selling time. Optimizing your sales content is a great way to increase the efficiency of your sales reps while also helping them deliver relevant, high-quality content.
You can create a single source of truth and properly organize your sales content materials (case studies, product demos, how-to videos, ebooks, pricing and discount data, whitepapers, and so on) into appropriate content libraries. Segmenting your sales content into different content libraries will help your sales reps to find the right content at the right time. A capable CRM or simple tools like Google Drive can host your sales content libraries.
A Final Thought
Don’t forget to align your sales enablement plan with your business strategy. A research finding shows that those businesses who follow this enjoy more than 19% higher win rates. Automation and technology can be a remarkable combination to use to draw extraordinary outcomes from your sales enablement. Sales enablement software like HubSpot and Outreach, live chat with prospects, automated prospecting, and sales sequences can enable your sales reps to sell quicker and better.
