Why is sales enablement valuable?
Let’s start with the sales cycle.
The two most important stakeholders in the sales cycle are the seller and the buyer. The buyer is curious about a product or service, and the seller’s responsibility is to cultivate the buyer’s curiosity until a sale is made.
As the buyer experience becomes increasingly personalized and complex, the seller must learn to be adaptable, flexible, and ready to serve the buyer in any way possible.
How does the seller achieve all this?
Sales enablement.
Imagine equipping salespeople with the exact resources any buyer would need to close a sale at any moment.
This is why sales enablement is valuable.
What is sales enablement, and how does it help?
Sales enablement is an umbrella term that describes any tool, platform, or process that helps salespeople sell more efficiently and effectively.
Sales enablement achieves this by using data and people to win more deals.
There are three central pillars of sales enablement:
1. Data analytics & reporting
The first pillar of sales enablement is data analytics and reporting.
Sales enablement helps sales reps organize, manage, and deploy valuable sales data. Sales enablement tools streamline the creation of sales reports on various sales metrics.
Reporting and analytics vary depending on the sales organization. Creating data analytics and reporting intends to consolidate all the data in one place. Sales enablement managers are often on track to develop the right KPIs for the sales teams.
Sales data metrics and KPIs play a key role in helping sales teams grow rapidly in an adaptable and repeatable way, regardless of an organization’s number of sales reps.
Sales enablement tracks sales value, performance, and activity to improve sales teams’ accountability. Many sales enablement platforms incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their data management systems.
As machine learning and AI evolve, sales enablement will incorporate suggestive, smart, and creative ways to advance sales effectiveness.
Instead of manually creating sales enablement dashboards showing key metrics, we will see a growing trend where AI assists sales managers in automating the KPIs for their sales teams.
2. Sales & marketing integration
The second pillar of sales enablement is about integrating sales and marketing functions.
Sales enablement is buyer-focused selling. It specifically aims to influence the buyer to make a decision at specific stages of the buyer’s journey. How does sales enablement achieve this?
Integrating sales strategies and marketing data can help sellers leverage buyer insights.
As the sales enablement industry evolves, integration methods between sales and marketing will change. However, the key purpose of sales and marketing integration is clear: to provide sellers with customer marketing data.
Key elements to a successful sales enablement integration
1. Content management
The first key element of a successful sales enablement integration is content management.
Sales reps leverage sales and marketing content to increase MQL to SQL conversion rates and, in turn, close more deals. Content management consists of linking the following marketing data into the hands of sales teams:
Sales enablement platforms organize, manage, and help sales teams deploy the most valuable content so buyers feel empowered to purchase. Marketing content and buyer insights are important elements of sales enablement because they allow sellers to customize their strategies to the buyer’s journey.
Another form of valuable content management is creating personalized marketing data. Sales enablement achieves this through video messages. Sales enablement enhances the seller-buyer relationship by allowing sellers to market themselves using video engagement features to personalize their relationship with the buyer.
The goal is not to make the buyer feel like they are being sold to but to create an informal relationship based on solving a problem.
Ultimately, the purpose of content management is to save time. Seller efficiency is the leading opportunity cost for using sales enablement.
Without strong marketing and sales alignment, sales reps struggle to find relevant, reliable, and consistent data on potential buyers. Sales enablement improves seller efficiency by allowing reps to quickly access buyer information in one place. This is the power of sales content management.
A good sales enablement content management system requires consistent updates and proper leadership. Content managers should always try to maintain the most up-to-date marketing information. The strength of a good content management system is directly correlated to a strong sales enablement process.
2. CRM and Sales Technology
The second key element of successful sales enablement integration involves CRMs and sales technologies.
Successful sales enablement software will smoothly and effectively integrate customer relationship management systems (CRMs) into their sales process.
Sales enablement platforms use CRMs to better align sales and marketing resources in a wholesome process. Depending on the type of sales enablement, CRMs can be:
Operational: Combines sales, marketing, and customer service automation (operational CRMs and sales enablement have overlapping functions)
Analytical: Customer database management by analyzing patterns in buyer behavior
Collaborative: Integrates customer service information with various internal and external stakeholders
In addition to CRM integrations, sales technology integrations are important in sales enablement solutions.
Although sales enablement platforms help manage the entire sales lifecycle, almost all enablement solutions require integration with other sales technologies to compensate for their shortcomings. These integrations are designed to support different sales verticals.
3. Sales training and education
The third pillar and most undervalued element of sales enablement is training and education in the sales process.
How valuable is sales data if sales reps don’t know how to use it? What good is a sales team if the best salesperson has to do all the work? The success of sales enablement critically depends on sales leadership and management.
From pillars 1 and 2 above, sales reps must be consistently updated, trained, and educated on sales enablement operations. Successful sales enablement platforms will incorporate sales training into the enablement process. Sales enablement also educates sales reps on data analytics and reporting, ensuring a company-wide understanding of which metrics are measured.
Additionally, sales teams must know how to efficiently access the correct buyer information from the content management and CRM integration systems. If sellers do not know how to access the right information efficiently, their effectiveness will be reduced.
Educating all sales reps on the sales enablement process and tools means there is no need to rely on the best sellers to win deals. Therefore, training and education are necessary to improve the sales cycle’s effectiveness.
Sales enablement training is often linked to sales operations and change management. Education is key to maintaining an adaptable, flexible, and reliable sales process as companies rapidly grow. A strong link between sales enablement and sales operations will benefit all future organizational change management projects. Properly educating sales teams will improve employee retention and, therefore, create a stronger sales force.
How to choose the right sales enablement solution?
Successfully using sales enablement inside your organization is just as challenging as choosing the right tool.
From the early sales stages of discovery and prospecting to the final stages of closing a deal, sales enablement drastically speeds up each stage in the sales process to shorten sales cycles.
Sales enablement and technology solutions exist in each funnel stage; however, most sales platforms can provide solutions for multiple stages. Sales enablement tools rarely successfully capture the entire sales cycle. Therefore, choose a sales enablement platform that aligns with the organization’s sales strengths. CRMs and other sales technology integrations can be used to supplement the platform.
For example, if a sales team specializes in lead management and prospecting, connecting, and engaging, it would be best to select an end-of-the-sales-cycle sales enablement solution.
Considerations when choosing sales enablement technology
Here are 3 key tips to consider when implementing sales enablement:
- Implement sales enablement when sales teams reach 10-15 reps or a sales organization operates in multiple locations.
- Create a sales enablement manager role to establish ownership. Sales enablement is a wholesome process that requires iteration and development. Creating a managerial role in the implementation will help mitigate risk as sales enablement adoption grows.
- Design a content management strategy to maintain and develop consistent content. Sales enablement platforms require the creation and management of sales content. Without a dedicated content strategy, sales reps are abandoned.
Choosing the right sales enablement tool is about working smarter, not harder.
The future of sales enablement: No touch enablement
Current sales enablement platforms require sales reps to manually access buyer insights, content resources, and sales analytics to determine the urgency of contacting the prospect.
Sellers are forced to “touch“ their sales enablement platform to decide on the buyer experience. They must locate relevant content personalized to their prospect and enable the potential customer to buy.
AI currently plays an important role in sales enablement services. However, it is also heavily used in process automation. Specifically, AI helps with automated lead ranking, targeted content generation, business intelligence, data management, and more. Nonetheless, after sellers touch their sales enablement platforms, artificial intelligence works with buyer data.
For example, sales teams don’t have accurate information after they send a proposal or contract to their prospects. Sales reps have to wait in the dark. Most sales reps have to set automated reminders to reach out at frequent, best-practice intervals.
This leads to what is commonly called the “Valley of Death,” where 60% of proposals die without any understanding or feedback.
What if there was a different way?
The future of sales enablement is “no touch” designing platforms that actively gain buyer insights during the selling process and then notify the seller if there is an opportunity to create a sense of urgency. No touch enablement is predicated upon passive information gathering, specifically, customer behavior data.
As a seller, imagine being notified when it’s the right time to contact a prospect because the sales enablement software actively monitors the prospect.
Imagine sales reps sitting at the office and letting an enablement platform enable the prospect for you.
Incorporating AI into no-touch enablement will drastically save time and shorten sales cycles. By removing the time wasted investigating all leads, sales reps can use their time more effectively.
