The 2022 Definitive Guide To Sales enablement For Companies Of All Sizes
Businesses are always looking for new ways to solve today’s sales challenges. Increasingly, they see sales enablement as a long-term solution.
These are some of the many great matters around sales enablement. The good news? We put together this guide to paint a clear picture of sales enablement applies to modern businesses, and how yours can get started for you.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.
It is "a strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training and coaching services for salespeople and front-line sales managers along the entire customer’s buying journey, powered by technology."
Different companies have different views on what it means, how to approach it, and how the function is staffed – which leads us to another common question.
Why is sales enablement important?
Salespeople are incredibly busy. There are quotas to hit, new products to get familiar with, and plenty of different types of customers — and customer needs — to work with. Sales reps also have a lot of conversations: Conversations with customers, sales managers, product and marketing managers, and support teams. Sales enablement can help salespeople cut through the noise and prioritize what matters for their role and their leadership.
Sales enablement gone bad, on the other hand, can have negative consequences. At the least, poor enablement is a distraction and waste of resources. But bad enablement can negatively impact your bottom line by driving poor sales performance, whether through using the wrong training, delivering out-of-date content, or leaning on the wrong strategic vision.
Sales enablement is more than just teaching your sales teams about your products, your value proposition, or even how to sell. It’s about enabling salespeople to bring in more business. Enablement helps by accelerating your sales teams’ credibility with your customers and building relationships that will strengthen over time.
Sales Enablement Benefits
If we work under the base assumption that most salespeople are capable in their jobs, and that what they’re selling is valuable, then sales enablement offers the clearest avenue for teams to gain competitive advantage and tap unseen opportunities.
Here are some primary benefits yielded by adopting a sales enablement platform and sales enablement automation:
Scaling Success
By uniformly equipping its sales reps with proven sales enablement tools, an organization becomes less reliant on traditional top performers to carry the load. This support helps laggards reach quotas, and propels middling sellers into the next tier.
Stronger Sales Data
With so much B2B commerce now taking place online, sales enablement technology has rapidly gained prominence, and many of these solutions specialize in data — collecting it, organizing it, and activating it for the sales team. Insights around buyer preferences, pain points, and personas help sellers reach prospects with a more tailored approach, which is crucial at a time where 64% of B2B decision-makers say they won’t engage a salesperson if the communication is not personalized.
Faster Deals
From some perspectives, this is the foremost objective for sales enablement initiatives, and it is certainly a desirable outcome. With better data and tools at their disposal, sales reps tend to have snappier access to what they need, and superior intel leads to more purposeful conversations. Sales reps were spending up to 43 hours per month researching, pointing to a widespread room for improvement.
Better Alignment with Marketing
The optimal use of supporting content in the sales process is often a key component in the enablement equation. Salespeople are more successful when they can provide prospects and leads with the right materials at the right time. As such, strengthening the relationship and collaboration between sales and marketing is a major aspect of sales enablement — one with many branching benefits of its own.
Improved Company Reputation
Each time a rep interacts with an outside party, they’re representing the business and making a lasting impression on its behalf. When salespeople are informed, responsive, and helpful, it reflects well on their organization.
Final Words:
As you read this, sales enablement is on the minds of sales managers and executives everywhere. In competitive markets, smoother sales enablement processes can be one of the single biggest differentiators when it comes to edging out alternative solutions and winning business. Identifying the right sales enablement platform can be a pivotal difference-maker, and new technologies are continually transforming the landscape.
