Diana May-Jennings Without proper resources, a sales team may struggle to close deals that may otherwise be an easy win. But by implementing sales enablement, your entire team will have all the resources they need to close more deals faster. Check out exactly what sales enablement is and how to create this strategy to boost your team’s success.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, software, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. Typically hired as a full-time role, the Sales Enablement Manager is the bridge between Marketing and Sales efforts that is essential for success.
According to our VP of sales, Sean Huckstep,
”Sales enablement gives sales reps the ability, the content, and insight to successfully and repeatedly move people through the sales process.”
Why should you care about Sales Enablement?
For Nissar Ahamed, founder of CareerMetis.com, sales enablement is a crucial part of a company’s success, not just a sales team. Any brand that wants to compete in today’s marketplace must understand the importance of aligning marketing with sales. He says, “If any marketing team is disconnected with sales, there’s an easy recipe for disaster or failure.”
“It’s not a best practice—it is a must-have.”
–Nissar Ahamed
But having a sales enablement process not only assists your sales team, it aligns the company. Ahamed says, “Marketing needs to support sales, not just through CRM and lead flow, but [also] making sure they have the right message to align with the buyers’ journey.” Without an alliance between your marketing and sales team, you’ll face insurmountable company-level issues. Sales enablement is an investment your company should be making as soon as possible.
3 Steps to create a Sales Enablement process
A sales enablement strategy is the approach your business takes to provide sales with the resources they need to effectively sell. This strategy is tailored to your specific sales team’s needs so they can target your audience and close more deals. Here’s 3 things your sales enablement strategy should include:
- Standard Reporting & Analysis
- Sales Content
- Task Automation
- Hiring a full-time employee to manage the process
#1 Use reporting and analysis
Every professional team should have a way to report their personal performance stats. Doing this will provide solid numbers for your team’s performance and what reps are good or bad at.
Some of these standard reports should include:
- Activities logged by salespeople
- Number of product demos performed
- Deals won and lost
- Leads generated / worked
- Status of leads
- Stats from conversation intelligence tools like Gong.io.
These are some basic reporting stats every sales team should already be doing. If these seems overwhelming, our leaderboards feature is a great way to track all of these stats with a convenient ranking of your top performing to underperforming rep.
#2 Make great sales content
You probably already have plenty of sales content if you’re an established company. If you don’t, here is a list of content you should have readily available for your team:
- Email templates
- Case studies
- Presentation decks
- Product demo decks
- Pricing information
Some of the content needs for your team may vary but this is a good list of content to get you started. If you already have some of these resources, consider revising them if you haven’t done so recently.
#3 Automate your tasks
Nobody likes busy work. If this is especially true for you and your team, automating mindless tasks is the quickest way to success. Using tools like live chat bots to help capture leads on your website, CRM integrations, Linkedin automation to scrape search results and email sequences will severely cut down the time it takes you to warm up a lead giving you time to prospect more.
Start using sales enablement now
Hopefully you’re beginning to see the importance of sales enablement. If you and your team haven’t started 3 of the elements of a sales enablement process and feel a bit overwhelmed, feel free to reach out to us and we can show you where to get started! We offer lots of team management tools, integrations, and sales deck software to ensure your team has all the tools they need to close more deals.
Thanks for sharing. your content is very attractive and knowledgeable. Jalynn A. Jones is an award-winning Sales Enablement Strategist who has been helping companies build their sales teams since 2005. She specializes in developing strategies that drive revenue growth through sales enablement. Her work includes creating sales enablement programs, training salespeople, and coaching sales leaders.