Here’s a buzz phrase in sales and marketing these days: sales enablement. But what, exactly, does it mean?
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is a system that provides sales teams with strategies, processes, tools, technology, and other resources to help them sell more effectively.
Pam Didner, author of the book Effective Sales Enablement, explains it further: “Sales enablement is to equip sales with knowledge, skill sets, and tools they need so that they can do their jobs: selling. With the acceleration of technology development, new innovative products and services are created to better manage our jobs and lives efficiently and effectively.
Sales enablement should no longer [be just] about training your sales team. We should look at sales enablement holistically and understand what marketers and other functions within the company can do to better support our sales teams.
With people, process and technologies constantly changing, the function of sales enablement will likely continue to morph for some time.”
A usual question is: who will do sales enablement within the organization?
Didner explains, “In terms of collaboration, it comes down to how the sales enablement is organized and structured. Sales enablement is a group of people with content, tools and processes to make your sales team productive and efficient. It can be sales onboarding; it can be sales training; it can be the product marketing team developing content for the sales team to use; it can be a marketing team working on account-based marketing with the sales team directly. It comes in different forms.”
So it can be one department formally tasked to do it. In most organizations that’s usually the marketing team (the reason some companies do not even separate the two, with a sales and marketing department). Or it can be more. It would all greatly depend on how the company is structured.
But at its core, sales enablement involves the strategic and collaborative alignment between the sales team and the rest of the organization. Every employee contributes to the success of the sales team—this is the whole idea behind sales enablement. From the social media and blog posts to the advertising campaign and the customer service delivered by CS agents, these actions can help make or break your sales team’s performance.
It is this sales culture of collaboration and coordination within the organization that will “enable” sales enablement. So in a way, everyone does it.
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Why Do You Need Sales Enablement?
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It helps establish a smoother selling process. Sales enablement helps gather, organize, and activate data for the sales team to use.
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With a separate team assisting them, sales representatives become more productive. They can now just focus on what they should really be dong: selling.
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Sales cycles become shorter. Sales teams have immediate access to relevant data, tools, and knowledge.
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Clients are getting more customized servicing. The content they receive and the information or data passed on to them are based on their journey—and this cultivates a more active customer engagement.
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With all the aforementioned benefits, the effect is inevitable: your organization will sell better, faster, and have increased win rates.
How Can You Successfully Implement Sales Enablement?
- Define the sales culture in your organization. As previously noted: sales enablement involves the strategic and collaborative alignment between the sales team and the whole organization. This is the sales culture you need, and this is the first step to the successful implementation of sales enablement.
- Have a dedicated team implementing the system. It should be clear within the organization who does what, and the same is true for sales enablement. There should be a sales enablement manager to oversee the whole process within the sales enablement team and within the company. This will make the system more efficient. How big or small that team is will depend on the company. Needless to say, deliverables per member and per department must be clear.
- Be relevant to your buyer. How? Have the buyer’s journey as the focus. The buyer’s journey is more important than the sales cycle: “Sales enablement recognizes that effective selling requires identifying key moments in the buyer’s journey, and building a strategy to reach the consumer with the right content at the right time. A best in class enablement solution helps organizations achieve this via targeted content with personalized sales messages.”
- Have the right tools. Having the right sales culture, right team, and the right message won’t matter if they’re not equipped with the right tools to align, strategize, communicate, and collaborate effectively.
A sales acceleration CRM like Lucrativ is one such tool. It is a an AI-powered engagement hub for automation, productivity, messaging, and gathering operational data, analytics, and sales intelligence. Teams across your organization can collaborate through custom workflows and dashboards, and sales representatives can access all the data they need seamlessly.
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