To enhance buyer engagement and boost revenue, sales reps need access to the right content, training, and resources to capture buyers’ interest and excel in their roles. This guide provides an overview of sales enablement strategies, including best practices, practical examples, and tips for building a top-performing sales team. Use this as your essential resource for designing and implementing an effective Sales and Marketing Intelligence strategy for your business.
Here’s a preview of what this section of the guide will cover:
- What is Sales Enablement?
- Defining Principles of Sales Enablement
- Sales Enablement Strategy
- Why is Sales Enablement Important?
- Who Owns Sales Enablement?
- What is a Sales Enablement Tool?
- How is Sales Enablement Practiced?
- Sales Enablement Best Practices
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the ongoing strategic process of equipping sales teams with the necessary content, guidance, and training to effectively engage with buyers. It requires seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams, both internally and externally, to boost revenue, shorten sales cycles, and enhance conversion rates and forecast accuracy.
Often, sales enablement can be a manual and time-consuming process that hinders performance. However, with the right platform, people, processes, and technology, companies can create a more dynamic and proactive sales team. The result is improved sales performance and a more successful, satisfied sales organization.
Focusing on sales enablement enhances the effectiveness of sales teams by:
- Connecting sellers to relevant content
- Providing flexible methods to present content
- Offering real-time visibility into customer engagement
- Utilizing advanced analytics to optimize pitches
- Equipping sellers with training and guidance
- Measuring outcomes and aligning with bottom-line results
3 Defining Principles of Sales Enablement
Principle 1: Commit to a Sales Enablement Process
Implementing a sales enablement process establishes a structured approach to organizing, finding, sharing, customizing, and analyzing content. This requires input from various teams, clear expectations, and a solid plan to achieve sales enablement goals.
Principle 2: Know and Involve Your Sales Team
Consider the sales process as a funnel divided into two main stages. The upper part, including “Awareness” and “Consideration,” is managed by marketing to generate interest in the company’s products and services. The lower part, focused on closing deals and generating revenue, is managed by sales. Sales enablement software plays a crucial role in transforming this part of the sales cycle by providing sales reps with the tools, skills, and resources needed to effectively engage with buyers and drive revenue.
Principle 3: Engagement Equals Revenue
Sales enablement enhances performance by enabling reps to consistently engage with prospects and customers throughout the buying process.
Salespeople understand that engagement translates to opportunity. Without robust processes, focus, and clear intentions, the benefits of sales enablement technologies are limited. Strategic thinking and best practices in areas such as content management, sales coaching/training, playbooks, and sales operations can lead to remarkable results and significantly improve sales effectiveness.
Sales Enablement Strategy
A sales enablement strategy outlines how your business will provide sales teams with the resources needed for effective selling. Follow these 9 guidelines to develop a robust sales enablement strategy:
- Evaluate Your Current Marketing and Sales Process: Assess where improvements can be made, areas for expansion, or parts where scaling back is needed. Document everything in a sales enablement charter to create a clear roadmap for advancing your company.
- Define Roles and Responsibilities: After completing your charter, define the roles and responsibilities for each stakeholder involved in enablement (e.g., leadership, management, and operations).
- Understand Your Target Market: Gain a deep understanding of your ideal customers as you build your sales enablement strategy. This knowledge will form the foundation of your sales enablement program.
- Map Content to the Customer Journey: Once you’ve developed your ideal buyer personas, outline each profile’s buyer journey. Use these outlines to align content (e.g., case studies) with specific stages and pain points of the consumer journey.
- Get to Know Your Top Performers: Familiarize yourself with your top sales performers by observing their daily operations, meeting with reps, and consulting with sales managers to identify who excels and who needs support.
- Provide Sales Onboarding, Training Programs, and Support: Offer customized training paths, templates, content recommendations, and roleplay scenarios. Ensure your strategy remains adaptable, giving reps the tools and information needed to stay current with market trends.
- Establish Metrics to Measure Success: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and criteria for “good” performance to evaluate the success of your sales enablement strategy once implemented.
- Select the Right Sales Enablement Tool: Choose tools that streamline communication, integrate with your existing systems, automate routine tasks, and deliver content to sellers at the optimal time.
- Implement, Optimize, Repeat: Continuously refine your policies and initiatives based on challenges and feedback to improve effectiveness.
Why Is Sales Enablement Important?
Sales enablement is crucial because it aligns your sales and marketing teams while providing salespeople with the information, content, and tools needed for more effective and efficient selling. Here are five key benefits of sales enablement:
- Sales Enablement Helps Scale Success for Sales and Beyond: By equipping your sales reps with proven tools, the reliance on top performers decreases, allowing lower or middle-tier performers to reach their potential. Additionally, sales enablement benefits other departments that interact with buyers, such as sales engineering, customer success, and support teams.
- Sales Enablement Creates Stronger Sales Data: Tools designed for B2B sales focus on collecting, organizing, and utilizing data effectively. Insights into buyer preferences, pain points, and personas enable sellers to approach prospects with tailored strategies.
- Sales Enablement Increases Deal Velocity: With access to better data and tools, sales reps can act more quickly and be more “sales ready,” leading to more effective conversations, a smoother buying process, and higher win rates.
- Sales Enablement Creates Better Alignment with Marketing: Sales reps achieve greater success by providing prospects and leads with the right materials and messaging at the right time. Strengthening the collaboration between sales and marketing is a key aspect of sales enablement.
- Sales Enablement Improves Company Reputation: Informed, responsive, and helpful sales reps positively impact the company’s image and enhance the customer experience each time they interact with external parties
Who Owns Sales Enablement?
In sales enablement, clarity in roles and responsibilities is crucial for success. Sales enablement leaders must ensure the implementation of platforms that provide necessary content management, customer engagement, analytics, and sales training. Sales teams need to embrace the processes and technologies that support their efforts, while marketing must focus on achieving high engagement and exceeding ROI benchmarks.
Ownership and responsibilities in sales enablement can differ based on company size, sales and distribution models, and the markets served. For those new to defining ownership, the RACI framework can be useful:
- Responsible: Sales enablement lead
- Accountable: VP of Sales Enablement or VP of Marketing
- Consulted: VP of Sales, content creators, sales operations
- Informed: The broader sales enablement team, sales reps, and other senior marketers
Using the RACI framework clarifies roles and expectations for executive, sales, and marketing stakeholders, facilitating the collaboration necessary for effective sales enablement.
What Is a Sales Enablement Manager?
A sales enablement manager supports the sales team by developing sales content, sharing best practices, and providing training. They often manage systems such as the content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) system, or sales enablement platform.
Typically, sales enablement managers:
- Know the location of content for marketing and sales
- Bridge the gap between marketing and sales functions
- Understand the structure of content, including the “content map”
- Implement changes or new processes, tools, and strategies for sales
- Have expertise in the sales team’s CRM usage
- Rely on sales productivity and performance analytics
- Enhance learning styles, sales strategies, and methods of approach
- Provide feedback from sales to marketing
- Collaborate with marketing and sales to identify decision-makers and blockers
The role may vary across companies and industries, but sales enablement managers generally share common traits and aim to enable the sales team to sell more effectively.
Sales Enablement vs Sales Operations
In companies with both sales operations and sales enablement teams, it’s important to define roles and collaboration opportunities clearly to avoid overlap and redundant work. While both functions aim to enhance sales team effectiveness and efficiency, they differ in their specific roles.
What Is a Sales Enablement Tool?
A sales enablement tool is a platform that offers visibility into sales content, training, and coaching. It integrates content management, playbooks, sales training, onboarding, coaching, and analytics, bridging the gap between marketing, sales, and customers. This integration optimizes strategies for revenue growth and facilitates better engagement and deal closure by salespeople.
Sales enablement platforms have evolved from basic sales portals to comprehensive systems that offer all the content, guidance, workflows, and training needed for successful sales. Modern platforms provide detailed analytics on content effectiveness and sales performance, helping reps make data-driven decisions.
Characteristics of a Modern Sales Enablement Tool
- Search That Works: Advanced search capabilities allow reps to quickly find needed content across all company information, similar to how search engines like Google work.
- Scoring and Recommendations: The system scores and recommends content based on past successes. It considers factors like region, industry, company size, and sales cycle stage to suggest the most effective materials.
- Similarity Analysis: Modern analytics track modifications and repackaging of content, providing accurate data on content usage and performance, even when content is customized.
- Sales Guidance: Sales enablement tools organize essential context and content for various selling scenarios, including new product launches and addressing objections.
- Reinforce Knowledge Retention: Effective training and coaching are supported by sales enablement platforms, which help build, certify, and reinforce sales knowledge and skills. Sales managers can provide valuable feedback and improve performance through these platforms.
How Is Sales Enablement Practiced?
The role of a sales enablement professional is more strategic and demanding than ever. It requires a unique blend of flexibility, empathy, and strategic thinking to manage sales content, track engagement, and adapt quickly. To effectively practice sales enablement, consider these seven essential steps:
As you implement sales enablement within your company, remember these key points:
- Build a strong sales enablement foundation: Understand your audience, charter, priorities, team, and resources, and execute with determination.
- Focus on the gaps contributing to your biggest challenges: Identify these gaps using data-driven insights, document your findings, and share them across teams to enhance accountability and showcase effective sales enablement leadership.
- Use technology as a catalyst for sales enablement success: Leverage technology to achieve significant results, ensuring that the platform and processes align with your business’s specific needs.
Typically, sales enablement evolves in stages, beginning with reactive support and advancing to a fully optimized solution. This progression reflects the shift from legacy to modern sales enablement technology as a company’s needs grow.
Sales Enablement Best Practices
Here are some essential sales enablement best practices to follow:
- Embrace new selling strategies: Prioritize sales training and onboarding to stay current with evolving methods.
- Understand the sales team’s needs: Identify what the team requires to better address customer questions and pain points.
- Integrate marketing and sales efforts: Collaborate to develop content that aligns with both marketing analytics and sales insights.
- Create relevant content: Combine marketing data with the sales team’s direct experience to produce content that addresses customer needs.
- Invest in technology: Focus on acquiring tools that provide data access, automate tasks, and offer a comprehensive view of customer interactions.
