What is Sales Enablement?

Interest in sales enablement is steadily increasing worldwide. After all, what sales manager wouldn’t like to enable their team to increase sales?

Despite the intrigue, however, there is still some confusion around the term ‘sales enablement’, which can seem like something of a buzzword.

In this article, we look to demystify this vital sales process so you can empower your sales force with the skills, training and resources they need to close the deal. With practical advice on improving productivity, you’ll be ready to integrate sales enablement into your everyday sales management strategy.

Understanding sales enablement

At its heart, sales enablement is about providing your sales team with the resources they need to effectively engage buyers and move them towards a sale.

These resources could include content, tools, knowledge and information gathered from across your organisation. With such a broad remit, involving input from both marketing and sales, it’s true that sales enablement can be hard to pin down, however, focusing on it can facilitate the following benefits:

• provide sales staff with useful content
• offer real-time insight into customer engagement
• improve your sales process
• enhance your sales team through training
• measure results and increase ROI

By taking a data-driven approach to sales enablement, you can break free of the age-old Pareto principle whereby 80% of sales result from just 20% of the sales force. Multi-faceted sales enablement can help to increase productivity through best practice.

But just what are those best practice gems that form the basis of an effective sales enablement strategy?

Work collaboratively

Providing reps with appropriate materials to convert leads ensures they are enabled to drive revenue for your organisation. But who generates the resources on which your sales team rely?

The answer, of course, is marketing. That’s why an effective sales process involves both sales and marketing, working together collaboratively.

By creating a variety of useful content such as blogs, videos or white papers, your marketing team helps to support reps as they encourage buyers to convert. Sales staff should also flag any content gaps and identify which types of content work best for them, feeding this information back to the marketing department.

In order to achieve the best results, this dialogue between sales and marketing should be structured, utilising a sales enablement framework to find, organise, customise and share content.

 The final, and most important, aspect of any content optimisation strategy is analysis. With a focus on data-driven improvement for both sales and marketing, you will be able to create a flexible sales enablement strategy. This will help you to respond swiftly to market dynamics and changing buyer requirements. So you stay one step ahead of the competition.

Improve productivity

Any effective sales enablement strategy should be tailored to your organisation’s needs. It should include an analysis of the resources, tools and training provided to your sales team to ensure it is helping them convert more leads into customers.

A detailed examination of team performance can also identify any areas of inefficiency as well as highlighting which resources are the most helpful in driving conversions, and which staff are the most adept at closing a deal.

Training will inevitably form part of your sales enablement strategy as you seek to implement best practice across the sales team. Effective coaching can enhance the productivity of individual reps, while careful recruitment and onboarding will help you select those candidates most likely to feed company growth.

By working strategically and consistently, applying best practice in the areas of content management, training and sales operations, sales enablement can drive impressive results.

Focus on growth

As with any sales strategy, a laser focus on results is imperative. An effective sales enablement programme should be measured and monitored with a view to gauging and improving its impact on your bottom line.

Most often, sales enablement facilitates growth by focussing on return on investment (ROI); monitoring key data that impacts ROI on an individual and organisational level.

 Productivity tools have an important role to play here. An overview of your team’s daily productivity can help to direct coaching to enhance how reps use content for maximum sales productivity.

On an organisational level, sales enablement works to enhance the productivity of the overall sales process rather than addressing day to day activities. That means it optimises the entire sales pipeline in an on-going process that equips everyone in the team to add value and drive profitable growth.

Ready to enable your team?

When you equip your sales team with the right training, tools and resources, they’ll have the ability to sell more successfully.

By implementing best practice and encouraging disparate teams to work in collaboration, effective sales enablement enhances both the buyer and seller experience, improving productivity across the entire sales process to benefit both your team and your bottom line.

Interested in seeing how Strenstone can support your sales strategy? Request a Discovery & Demo call with a senior consultant. They will explain and demonstrate how you can layer productivity intelligence over your cloud-based systems.