Sales Enablement is increasingly becoming popular across industries. The growing popularity is due to the simple reason: increased sales efficiently boosting revenues.
With stiff competition making lives more and more difficult for marketers, there arises a growing need for a more effective sales mechanism to maintain competitiveness. ‘Sales enablement’ is one of such practical approaches which have seen a steady increase in implementation during the last few years.
Statistics show that by 2019 around 61% of the global organizations have implemented sales enablement. So, the rest of the companies should not miss out on implementing sales enablement in 2021 to restrict erosion of their revenue streams.
Sales Enablement definition
Despite its effectiveness, a concrete sales enablement definition is hard to find. Say, you ask six people what is their sales enablement definition; you will get six different variants as each of them will define it his way.
In spite of the differences in sales enablement definitions, you will find one element in common—empowering the salespeople with strategies and processes.
An important thing to keep in mind is that sales enablement is more or less a strategic approach rather than a step-by-step process.
Although a clear-cut sales enablement definition is hard to find, yet a characteristic description is always possible. You can best describe sales enablement as a process of providing salespeople with content, information, and tools to help them to engage the buyers in the entire buying process so that they can sell more effectively.
The effectiveness of any sales enablement strategy arises from empowering the salespeople with information such as customer-centric content, best practices, and the necessary tools, which are comfortable in implementation and reusable across different departments.
In essence, the implementation of sales enablement solutions will increase the effectiveness of salespeople by:
- Providing sellers with the most relevant content concerning each buyer
- Providing impactful ways of presenting content to prospects as well as customers
- Providing real-time information on whether customers and prospects are finding content engaging
- Enabling constructing customized pitches using advanced analytics
- Allowing the sellers to get tailored training and measuring the effectiveness of the instruction on the bottom-line results
What Sales Enablement definition analysts offer?
Well-known analysts have studied the dynamics as well as the growth prospects of the sales enablement industry, and they have their own version of a sales enablement definition.
Although each of the sales enablement definitions is different from the other, yet the basic premise is the same: to enable the salespeople to have impactful interactions with prospects as well as customers by providing the right content and information. The following are some of those:
Garter—“The activities, systems, processes, and information that support as well as promote knowledge-based sales interactions with client and prospects.”
IDC—“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”
CSO Insights—“A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training, and coaching services for salespeople and frontline sales managers along the entire customer’s journey powered by technology.”
Forrester—“Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process. It equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return on investment of the selling system.”
Sales Enablement Content
One of its most essential features is sales enablement content management, which encompasses the processes, technologies, and people to create content specifically for your sales team needs.
Sales enablement content is different from the generic sales content designed to attract leads and convert into prospects. It is the content created for the conversion and closing stages of the sales funnel. Thus there is a clear difference between sales enablement content management and sales content management.
To enable effective sales enablement content in your company, you should have one of the available Content Management Systems (CMS) to publish, organize, update, and remove content. The key to effective content management is to educate your marketing team of the various roles of the sales team members.
As the marketing team is responsible for content creation, it is thus pertinent for them to properly understand what tactics the sales team adopts in selling. Moreover, the marketing team must also understand what the sales team focuses upon while selling and what content is necessary for them in the various stages of their selling process.
By transmitting the right content at the right time, the marketing team can expose the salespeople to the most relevant as well as valuable content for the prospect or the customer with whom they are trying to establish a relationship.
The following are some of the content types; you can regard as impactful sales enablement solutions:
- Competitor research and analysis
- Case studies
- Blog posts
- eBooks and Whitepapers
- Sales scripts
- Social Media messages
- Training and onboarding materials
Sales Enablement Tools and Platforms
To implement sales enablement for enhancing the productivity of salespeople and push up revenue, you need one of the sales enablement tools, which will align processes across departments to empower your sales team with the requisite content. And that will enable the sales team to execute the sales function productively.
Blending several functions, such as business intelligence, sales analytics, content analytics, CRM, and other processes, the tools or sales enablement platforms enable salespeople to get the impetus to analyze the key sales strategies and thus successfully close deals.
To win, especially in competitive markets, you need to implement an efficient sales enablement process. And to actuate that you need to firstly identify the right as well as the best sales enablement platform that would fit in with the requirements of your organization. Keep in mind that a platform that fits well for one organization might not be the best fit for the other organization.
You have to assess the unique needs as well as the workflows to decide upon the most appropriate platform for your organization. But what characteristics define the best platforms from the rest. Here are some hints:
- Provides a fast way to find the most impactful materials for specific needs
- Streamlines the process of information sharing across departments
- Enables usages of approved and up-to-date materials
- Automates the entire lifecycle of content—from creation to storing
- Ensure that your content is stored securely and only the right people can have access to it
- Reduces the risk of weakening the brand value by enabling tailoring marketing materials in accordance with the needs of the prospects and customers
- Eliminates the dependence on humans by providing round-the-clock access to materials as per necessity
- Increases efficiency in workflows by integrating the key marketing and sales tools
- Provides insights into the usages of content by who, when, where and how
There are not only several such platforms in the market today, but also newer platforms are frequently evolving. You can choose 'Crescendo,' which is endowed with all the typical features of the best sales enablement platform to enable you to implement the most effective sales enablement strategy.
Sales Enablement Resources
To be successful in implementing impactful sales enablement, you should keep yourself abreast of the latest sales enablement marketing strategies, tips, and tools to keep your sales team updated with the latest trends.
There are numerous sales enablement resources available freely, such as Salesforce blog, MarketingTech Sales Enablement blog, Forrester B2B Marketing blog, Stratascope Sales Enablement blog, Garter blog, and so on. You should make it a point to go through most of the resources for the apparent reason.
How to Build an Effective Sales Enablement Program?
Implementing the right approach is the key for you to encounter success in implementing your sales enablement strategy. So, you need to structure your strategy that fits the best with your organization. Here are a few tips for a successful sales enablement program:
- Identify and spell out the fundamental objective of implementing sales enablement in your organization
- Educate your marketing and sales team on the roles to be performed which will include sales enablement content creation, onboarding new hires, imparting training and other such activities
- Find out the challenges your sales team is facing
- Encourage cross-functional collaboration
- Apprise the top management of your plan and also let them know what kind of help you need from them to achieve success
- Perform some research on what challenges companies face in implementing sales enablement, and what technologies are available that would fit the best in your company
- Communicate across all the departments and ensure your support, when needed
- Choose the right sales enablement platform
- Deploy a dedicated team to oversee the daily functioning of your sales enablement team
- Foster a data-driven culture in your organization
Conclusion
Now, check it out if buyers no longer respond to your existing content or productivity of your sales team is decreasing. Regardless of your sales enablement definition, if these symptoms are present, you must be undergoing revenue erosion. It is time for you to think of a countermeasure.
So, wait no further, get the Crescendo App immediately, and implement smart sales enablement not only to restrict erosion in your revenues but also to boost your revenues.
