What is sales enablement? A (super) brief overview.
When it comes to growing your business, you already know that there are many more factors at play than just creating awareness of and selling your products and services. If you want your customers to turn into loyal fans that grow your sales numbers and boost your reputation, you need to invest in a long-term relationship with your most loyal buyers.
Part of that investment is taking care of the relationship between Sales and Marketing within your business – when these two power houses work together, they can achieve so much more for your business than working as separate entities. Both Marketing and Sales need to be actively involved in the process of sales enablement – the topic of today’s blog post – to ensure consistent and effective growth within your business.
Sales enablement refers to the process of providing your Sales team with the tools, strategies, guidance and support they need to guide a potential customer through the sales cycle.
Things every business manager should know about sales enablement
1. The buyer is the focus
The material given to the Sales team (such as content, best practice training or engagement tools) should be focused on your business’ ideal buyer. Sales enablement is about providing the Sales team with material they share with your target buyer – material your buyer wants at the time they want it.
2. Internal and external delivery are equally important
Sales enablement materials can be focused internally towards the Sales team (such as those that teach sales-ready best practices or outline customer care scripts) or externally towards the target buyer (content on the benefit of working with your business or free tools and tips that will delight the buyer and have them asking for more). Great team + great deliverables = better sales overall.
3. Sales content should be simple, accessible and repeatable
Whatever the information (in the forms of on-point sales content) you give to your Sales team, it should personify ease of use. The Sales team should find it easy to share with a new customer and the customer should want to look at or engage with the material. Also important – the information should be reusable in order to get the best mileage of the creative work needed to generate that content in the first place.
4. Your Sales team needs to be on board
It might seem obvious that your Sales team needs to use the materials they have been given. But this is a key point in effective sales enablement. The Sales team needs to be familiar, comfortable and confident with the materials and use them willingly and often as well as report back to the Marketing / creative teams to ensure they are getting (and using) materials that are relevant and useful.
5. Measurement counts
When you fail to measure any initiative in your business, you lose an opportunity to find out what works and what doesn’t and who it works for (and who it doesn’t). And the same goes for sales enablement. ‘Test and measure’ practices will help you understand how to refine sales enablement processes in your business and ultimately improve sales. Possible metrics include average sales cycle length, number of sales members achieving quota, and the average size of successfully closed deals.
Sales enablement is an ongoing and evolving part of any strong business strategy. With the buyer placed at the centre of its action plan, sales enablement requires input from a number of sales and marketing efforts in order to be truly effective. Want to empower your Sales team to achieve targets and go beyond? Talk to us – we’re passionate about business growth and using the right digital tools at the right time to help your business achieve sales and nurture true fans.
