If you’re constantly wondering why you have so many prospects that just aren’t closing or why you have a whole sales team but such a low lead conversion ratio, you might want to reconsider your current sales enablement process. Using sales enablement, you can improve your sales team’s productivity and start driving more revenue. You might be thinking:
“What is sales enablement?”
Companies are increasingly spending more and more money on sales enablement as sales technology and processes grow more complex. Annual spending has risen past $66 billion. Research by Aberdeen has shown that sales reps at companies with best-in-class sales enablement strategies achieve 84% of their quotas, compared to 55% at companies with average strategies, and only 15% for laggard companies. Sales enablement can provide your salespeople with the tools they need to successfully engage buyers throughout the buying process. So what exactly is sales enablement?
It’s everything you need to help your salespeople sell more efficiently via the strategic use of people, processes, content, and technology. It might sound complicated but it’s actually pretty simple – it’s marketing and sales aligned to strategically work alongside one another.
You can have a whole dedicated sales team but without content, you’re not maximizing your efforts. Message consistency is vital to your organization and brand and sales enablement can power your sales team with high-quality, always on-brand content.
Examples of sales content include:
- Customer case studies
- Landing pages
- Product demo decks
- Lead magnets
- Competitive intelligence briefs
Though technology can be a great asset to sales, driving sales growth can’t be accomplished with a single technology or process. Data, knowledge and understanding are the backbone of sales growth. Which message influences which purchase? How much influence does each message have? A great deal of sales enablement has to do with tracking, measuring and reporting. If you don’t understand the links between your input and your results, your marketing will go to waste. Though sales teams often understand the significance of reporting the data they have, they don’t always possess the technical ability to create the reports they need.
Reporting needs vary from company to company but some common reporting needs are:
- Activities logged by salespeople
- Messaging delivered / generated leads
- Reporting forecasting
- Google Analytics + Adwords
- Qualifying prospects
Another composing factor of sales enablement is lead identifying and closing. Are your leads a fit for your company? No matter how amazing your product and messaging are, leads just aren’t going to close if they’re not a good fit. Oftentimes, companies have a host of leads but not nearly enough closes because they spend too much time trying to close leads that just aren’t a fit for their business. With sales enablement, leads are assessed and targeted based on how good of a fit they are.
A big offering of sales enablement is automation of your sales pipeline. This technology can include email automation, prospect automation via links to salespeople’s calendars in emails, and social content automation.
Lastly, sales enablement requires and encourages training. Sales people must know how to use the resources provided to them. Training is not a once and done kind of thing. It’s a process and strategy that will have to continuously occur in order for your business to scale. Sales enablement encourages your sales team to stay on top as products are bound to grow, messaging is bound to evolve and competitors are bound to enter your market.
It’s a lot to take in but once you begin tackling sales enablement from all angles, you can start accelerating sales productivity in ways you never have before and 10x your leads.
