What is Sales Enablement? another buzzword?

Sales Enablement: Is it just another buzzword?

If you work in sales, chances are you’ve recently heard the term sales enablement. Although it’s a hot topic, there seems to be some confusion around whether it’s just another vague buzzword or a specific field of practice that’s delivering real benefits to sales organizations.

Let’s try to answer four basic questions:

What is sales enablement?
Who owns sales enablement?
How is sales enablement practiced?

What is Sales Enablement?

If you give someone a task, and you provide that person with an array of resources to use and refer to while they work to get it done, it's probably safe to assume they're going to complete it more efficiently and effectively than someone without those resources. So the happen in sales organization, where the sales enablement is to provide sales people with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process. A big part of sales enablement involves equipping sales people with information they can use in sales cycles. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. Regardless of the form the information takes, it needs to be easy to consume and reusable across the sales organization.

There are few points to consider in this process:

Sales enablement is less about sales and more about the buyer. In fact in the end we need to engage with target buyers. As such, it’s important to provide sales with the resources the buyer wants and we need to understand when the buyer wants to leverage these resources.
What you provide usually takes the form of information. We can group this information into two categories. First, there are things like content that sales will provide to the buyer. Second, there are things like best practices, research, and tools that sales will consume internally.
Another defining attribute of enablement is that sales people must know how to use the resources you provide to them. That’s why training and development should be such a big part of most programs, integrating traditional training with the leverage of technologies like collaboration tools to make sales training continuous.
We need to make sure of the usability and quality of these tools, whether the sales team uses what you provide and the tracking of meaningful sales metrics like average sales cycle length; number of reps achieving quota; and average deal size.

One thing that most experts agree on is that sales enablement should start with a deep understanding of who the buyer is and what they want. In other words, effective sales enablement is customer-centric, this is why it allows a large number of sales people to achieve quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable fashion.

one critical sales enablement best practice is to designate over-achievers as leaders/teachers of the program.

“one critical sales enablement best practice is to designate over-achievers as leaders/teachers of the program.”

— Mauro Berno

Who Owns Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is owned jointly by sales and marketing.

Marketing provides reps with a variety of resources they need to effectively sell. These resources and materials often include videos, blogs, and conversation and product guides which support reps' interactions with potential customers. Reps share this content with leads and customers to help them make a decision about whether or not they want to convert.

Additionally, sales can communicate with marketing about which types of content and materials are missing that they can share with leads throughout their buyer’s journeys. This way, they can create and share those new materials with reps to allow them to reach customers and sell more effectively.

Since sales and marketing both own sales enablement, they both impact your business's overall sales enablement strategy

There is no separation between sales and marketing teams when it comes to sales enablement. Companies that understand that all employees are involved in helping improve sales performance are the ones that truly grasp the meaning of sales enablement.

“There is no separation between sales and marketing teams when it comes to sales enablement”

— Mauro Berno

How is Sales Enablement Practiced?

The modern seller’s world is driven by data. But a constant stream of information can overwhelm sales reps and hurt productivity. Sales enablement professionals create systems to make data a true asset.

There are a number of sales enablement best practices that can help you with your efforts, but in my opinion there are five that really matter:

Analyze your sales lifecycle and start providing sales people with everything they need to engage and convert buyers. But what do you focus on from there? Should you focus on detailed information about products and services? What about sharing best practices from top performers in the sales organization? How about the development of sales skills like delivering great presentations? These are all good options to consider and there’s no reason you just have to pick one.
Make the buyer’s experience the foundation of sales enablement. Given that sales enablement is about empowering sales people to engage the buyer, it makes sense that you would make the buying experience the cornerstone of your efforts. Make sure that sales people understand who the buyer is and the journey they’re on.
Create and use a lot of high quality content. Content is quickly becoming the “force multiplier” of most modern sales organizations. Things like blog posts, white papers, case studies, and webinars allow a large number of sales people to deliver a lot of valuable to buyers in a scalable, controllable way. In fact, good sales people are now using content as a crutch, preferring to let high quality content do the talking. So make sure your sales team has access to quality content that maps to the buying process. Content libraries can be hosted using tools such as Google Docs, an internal wiki, or a CRM, among other places. And remember while auditing and organizing your content: Times change and content that was once relevant to your target audience in recent years may not perform as well today. So, keep this document library up to date to enable your sales team to succeed.
Make sales training an always-on, continuous effort. Sales training is a big part of sales enablement. It’s where sales people learn how to sell more effectively. Most sales training programs suffer from a fatal flaw – they happen once a year. As a result, sales people are quick to forget what they’ve learned, as well as the information, content, and tools they’ve been provided with. To combat this, you need to make sales training a continuous effort. You should conduct at least one formal training a month and use tools like newsletters and collaboration platforms to keep sales enablement in front of the sales team.
Ensure that sales people are leveraging what you provide. Even the best sales enablement programs can die a quick death if no one is watching how sales uses what’s provided to them. It’s critical that sales management enforce the use of best practices, content, and tools in the sales organization.

Once you have organized your processes and trained the team, it is time to step

in the modern seller’s reality, leveraging the technology. In fact many processes that used to be entirely manual can now be automated for sales reps, enabling them to sell better and faster. Here are some examples of ways you can use technology and automation to positively impact your sales enablement process:

Create Email Sequences

Your sales are likely sending dozens of follow-up emails per day. So, automating the follow-up process with follow up email sequences which automatically trigger if a prospect hasn't responded to their rep within a set amount of time -will save them hours of unnecessary work.

Automate Prospecting

This will allow reps to simply open their calendars every day to find multiple meetings with qualified buyers already there saving them hours of prospecting time.

Implement Direct Messaging

There's no better time to chat with a prospect than when they're already on your website. Setting up live chat on your website allows reps the opportunity to engage with and close interested contacts in real time.

Use Sales Enablement Software

Sales enablement software allows your team to manage all of your materials and content from a central location. Sales enablement software solutions provide you with the ability to create, share, edit, and manage your materials and resources with ease. All of your reps can access the information here at any point in time and it allows your marketing team to easily collaborate with sales on the content they create and share with prospects and customers.

Yes Sales Enablement in not just another buzzword, but it is a modern way to approach the market, when you empower your sales team with the right resources, materials, and tools, they'll have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently. Meaning, your business will experience a boost in revenue and, therefore, an increase in your number of customers and brand advocates.

“it is a modern way to approach the market, when you empower your sales team with the right resources, materials, and tools, they’ll have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently.”

— Mauro Berno

Are your sales and marketing teams aligned? If so, how has your business benefits from it?

If not, Schedule a discussion with our expert and we’ll show you how to bridge your sales and marketing teams.