Sales enablement is equipping your sales teams to have more valuable conversations with qualified leads. It is a strategic and ongoing process that helps sales professionals improve their productivity and enhance targeting capabilities.
Sales enablement increases the productivity and effectiveness of sales professionals so that they have a better success rate at making sales calls, targeting prospects, pursuing new sales opportunities, and managing top accounts.
In case of B2B marketing sales enablement involves providing sales teams with high-level content, training, analytics, feedback, buyer personas, insights, industry data, email workflow, integration between marketing and sales, understanding the needs and pain points of buyers, and providing resources to successful sales conversations with prospects.
Hiring the right sales professionals
A successful sales enablement program can be implemented only if you have the right salespeople in your team.
Therefore, you need to hire results-oriented sales professionals who are focused on driving revenue and building lasting client relationships.
Creation of high-quality content, resources, and training for the sales teams
Sales enablement is essentially a collection of resources, training, and content that is designed to enhance the productivity of the sales teams.
The resources provided to the sales professionals should be such that they are aligned with the conversation that they are having with their prospects. This will equip them to provide the specific information that the prospects require.
Equipping the sales teams with the right content, resources, and training helps them in better sales nurturing.
Alignment of sales and marketing teams
One of the basic requirements for sales enablement is that the sales and marketing teams should work in cohesion. The sales teams will provide insights to the marketing team concerning the conversation they are having with their prospects. The marketing team will then create content that answers questions of the prospects at every stage of the buying cycle.
The content should be created to address various customer personas and challenges faced by different industries. The marketing team should create content that highlights the most popular features of your product/service.
Communicating with sales teams about the resources available to them
It is necessary to ensure that the sales team uses the content created by the marketing team. To achieve this, the marketing team can send regular newsletters to the sales teams to alert them as and when new content is available. Also, the marketing team can advise the sales professionals about the importance of the new content and how it can be leveraged.
Maintaining the content in a centralized database
The sales enablement content should be maintained in a centralized database that is easy to access and consume. This will ensure that the sales team uses the content as often as possible.
The content should be organized according to
Type of content (videos, product demos, datasheets, client testimonials, etc.)
The product or service it references.
The specific industry or type of consumer it was designed for.
Measure the effectiveness of your sales enablement
It is necessary to measure the effectiveness of the sales enablement efforts. This will enable you to assess what is working and what is not in your sales enablement efforts. You can make the necessary modifications to achieve the results you desire.
You can measure the completion of sales training, content utilization, and revenue You can also track your sales team to check which content they use most often and why.
All this data will provide you insights on how you can improve your sales enablement program for better results.
Wrapping up
To sum up, sales enablement entails creating high-quality content, resources, and training for your sales teams so that they have easy access to any type of resource for convincing a lead to make a purchase decision. It also includes adding the right tools, data-driven processes, feedback loops, support, and integration with marketing functions. If sales enablement is implemented effectively in an organization, it can provide several benefits.
