Sales enablement is the process of supporting your organization’s sales team with the information and tools they need to be successful. While this is a fairly broad statement, it involves careful planning and coordination to ensure your company has a proper sales enablement program in place.
Why Do It?
Why do you need sales enablement at all? You might presume that your top sales personnel are all go-getters with strong personalities and have the ability to convince your prospects to go for your product or service. However, there’s more to the profession than that. The benefit of implementing sales enablement in your company is that it allows the sharing of best practices with your entire team, which raises the level of everyone’s game.
“The benefit of implementing sales enablement in your company is that it allows the sharing of best practices with your entire team, which raises the level of everyone’s game.”
A well-composed sales enablement program will help your sales team achieve positive, predictable and repeatable results. And there’s data to back this claim. According to a Highspot research report,1 more than 63% of the respondents who use sales enablement tools have achieved their sales goals, while the figure is 48% for those who don’t use any sales enablement tool.
What Does It Look Like?
A good sales enablement program is designed to focus on improving the buyer’s experience, and training your sales personnel is a big part of that. Sales training should be an ongoing, continuous concern, leveraging only the highest-quality content that is available in an easy-to-consume, reusable basis. No matter which stage of sales training any salesperson is in, there should always be knowledge to absorb, practice and pass on.
How Do You Do It?
The goal of sales enablement is to provide sales personnel with resources to help them sell the company’s products or services more effectively. In most cases, this means understanding the goal of the buyer, or the problem the buyer is trying to solve, and when. Timing can be just as important as the actual sales messaging. And when it is time to engage with the buyer, you need to prepare the sales team with answers the buyer will want to know. Extensive research provides the sales team with the kind of content the buyer will want to consume to put them in the right frame of mind for a purchase.
“The training phase should include resources that are easy to find and consume.”
The training phase should include resources that are easy to find and consume. Tools should be provided that enhance the learning experience and make it simple for learners to share what they’ve learned with each other. A good internal forum or message board provides a valuable environment for people to converse on sales-related topics, both with their peers and those they directly report to. An atmosphere of collaboration goes a long way in making the entire process a success.
An important aspect of any sales enablement process is tracking your company’s resources to know what’s being used and what isn’t. This will help optimize the resources over time by weeding out what doesn’t work and, in the long run, benefit future trainee sales personnel.
And finally, it’s critical to measure the efficacy of training to demonstrate its value. The metrics most in demand are common deal size, average length of the sales cycle and number of sales personnel who achieve their quotas. These metrics help plan for future sales enablement goals and improve the quality of sales overall.
Sales enablement is a vital ongoing process for a company and is continuously evolving. There is always more to learn, always more refining that can be accomplished. You need to focus on your company’s goals, but also be prepared to pivot when necessary. If you’re able to do that, sales success is guaranteed.
References:
https://www.highspot.com/blog/new-research-2018-state-of-sales-enablement/
