Sales enablement is a new business practice in the marketing world that is fast becoming an integral part of management teams marketing, sales strategy and audience sales funnel improvement. The research company IDC (International Data Corporation) defines sales enablement as “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” This means that sales enablement is about providing a sales team or organisation with data, content, tools and training that helps salespeople sell more efficiently and effectively.
Essentially, sales enablement gives sellers the tools and resources needed to better engage with buyers on a more personal level leading them further down the sales funnel in the process. For example, if a car dealership has implemented a fantastic digital marketing strategy that has educated consumers, segmented them and turned them into highly qualified leads – this work will be wasted if the sales team doesn’t use the refined data and insights about this audience, that have been acquired through the marketing strategy, to tailor the sales experience accordingly.
This sales team needs enablement and training tailored towards audience specific insight and highly targeted/segmented audience which improves conversion rate at the bottom of the sales funnel through better-trained sales personnel.
Sale enablement is one the fastest growing areas of business skills improvement with HubSpot stating that “Annual spending on sales enablement and sales training has risen past $66 billion”. The reason for this is because “According to more than 2,000 B2B sales reps, internal complexity causes 20% of stalled and lost deals. And as a company moves from low to high internal complexity, Seller Burden increases by as much as 62%.” This leads to a massive loss of productivity, this is why sales enablement is increasingly becoming more important to ensure that brands decrease the number of potential customers lost and increase the number of customers converted to purchase.
Before you implement a sales enablement strategy there are certain things you need to do. It starts with a review of your sales team’s reporting processes, internal structure, behaviours and how they collect and use consumer data to improve sales.
Research, Report, and Review
A review starts with gathering information which is dependant on two types of information, firstly content that the salesperson will provide to the buyer and secondly the internal information like best practices, coaching tools that the sales team has at their disposal. Sales enablement always starts with a deep understanding of what the buyer wants because effective sales enablement is always customer centric.
When analysing your sales team’s reporting processes, you need to have a system in place that collects accurate and insightful target audience data, and create reports with strategy purpose – these reports should clearly show how this data can be used to improve customer sales experiences.
You also need to collect data and create strategic reports based on what leads are generated, what leads were lost and what converted others to buying your product and what behaviours of your sales team to discover what influences these things. Anything that can be used as a sales enablement resource should be. It’s also important to do a sales content audit i.e what information or content is your sales team using to move prospects further down the sales funnel? A sales process audit helps to discover where a sales team performance can be improved.
Since you’ve collected all this information, what does it mean and how will it help in terms of implementing a sales enablement strategy.
Analysis
Now let’s look at what this information means and what are the problems that could be revealed. As mentioned above, we want to use all data collected to drive strategic sales team improvements. According to a recent survey “, 41% of sales and marketing executives said there is a lack of insight into which campaigns are most effective. But that’s not the only problem: 62% of the respondents said too many deals are getting stuck in the sales process.” This is one of the major issues the sales team faces, that there is a disconnect between sales and marketing goals.
A shortcoming that could be identified is that your company has all the assets needed to help the sales team but managers or marketing reps don’t know how their sales team are using these assets. These two departments need to work together on achieving the overall company goals and sales targets. Aligning marketing content with sales and measuring the success of that content is a major issue many companies that have.
Part of analysing the sales process is looking into the types of leads sales teams generate and breaking down whether each lead is a good fit. This means lead scoring, implementing a system of scoring assigning positive or negative values to leads that the sales team acquire. For example, a company that only sells to large corporations will give leads generated from businesses with less than 10-20 employees a lower score.
An internal and external analysis of the sale process can reveal the areas where your team needs to improve and there is a myriad of options available to you to achieve your sales enablement objectives.
Optimisation and Technology
Once you understand where your pitfalls are in terms of sales then it’s time to start implementing possible solutions that will help your companies salespeople to operate at their best. One thing companies underestimate is how important a CRM system is to a company’s sales team. Prospects spend so much time interacting with your content and website long before they ever see or even speak to a salesperson.
New technology captures everything people do, their interests, their profile and their problem before the first point of contact. This data is invaluable to a company. Think of a company like Google, they gather a lot of information on its users and then use that data to predict what they’d want to see when using their search engine. They use the data they collect to make a more intuitive platform, creating a CRM system that helps you predict what a prospect’s needs are will enable you to create automated communications to send them and tailor make all communications to best fit varying target audiences groups.
Investing in sales training is another crucial aspect of the process. Many sales personnel do not receive the training that they need to collaborate better with, for example, the CRM systems in place, to improve sales techniques. Sales training is a constant process because the environment is constantly changing. Investing in training that is continuous is important because “Studies indicate that participants in traditional curriculum-based training forget more than 80 percent of the information they were taught within 90 days.” This is because most training sessions are one-off where sales personnel are expected to absorb a large amount of information in a limited amount of time.
Even if training is consistent and continuous, sales personnel aren’t given performance metrics to measure the success of the training. Train your sales team but give them specific targets and goals that you can use to evaluate how effective the training is and what areas your team needs more training in.
Invest in AI (Artificial Intelligence) to automate some systems that your sales team do manually. This gives the sales team more time to focus on closing more deals. AI can automate email sequences that are tailored to specific prospects. Chatbots can answer simple questions, trigger follow-up emails, evaluate responses, and make simple decisions. Your salespeople won’t need to engage with prospects until they are qualified. The lead qualification process will also become more accurate, guaranteeing your sales team only receives the most promising leads. Sales teams waste a lot of time doing things that can be automated.
Sales enablement will decrease prospective leads lost and increase the quality of leads generated. Higher lead quality means leads are more likely to purchase products and see an increase in product sales. Another fantastic result of sales enablement is happier, less pressured and more productive employees as a whole.
