Sales enablement is a beneficial strategy for any organization employing salespeople or customer-facing departments, providing teams with information they require to communicate value, understand buyer preferences and customize their approach.
Key indicators of sales enablement success include completion rates for sales training courses, content usage rates and conversion rates, as well as average deal size. A full content management platform is an integral component of an effective sales enablement strategy.
1. Create a Buyer-Focused Culture
Integrating sales enablement best practices into the culture of your organization is integral to its success, and requires creating a roadmap and plan of attack to reach that goal, with ongoing measurement and analysis as part of this effort.
Aligning your sales and marketing departments is essential to this process. By encouraging better communication between these teams, you can equip sales representatives with all of the content and tools necessary to serve buyers effectively while overcoming objections.
2. Create a Buyer-Focused Content Strategy
Industrial marketers know the value of developing content tailored specifically towards meeting buyers at every point in their buying journey.
White papers and ebooks can help potential customers understand their own problems more clearly, while case studies showcase how other businesses have achieved results from your solution.
3. Create a Buyer-Focused Training Strategy
Sales enablement requires equipping your team with in-depth information about products and services; this could include providing case studies, product demos, or datasheets to aid them.
Be sure to collaborate with marketing, customer service, and product teams in order to align your sales enablement strategy with the buyer journey – this will ensure consistent messaging and increase your win rate.
4. Create a Buyer-Focused Sales Process
Standardizing sales methods throughout your organization helps ensure that sales reps use buyer-oriented approaches when qualifying opportunities and allows management to use conversion metrics as a basis for prioritizing tools that support sales stages based on what buyers need to accomplish at each step.
Increase your odds of customer acquisition and referrals by prioritizing buyers first – they’ll thank you!
5. Create a Buyer-Focused Onboarding Strategy
Make sure you have a dedicated team managing sales enablement, with regular meetings and feedback opportunities, so as to ensure a focused, effective strategy in line with business goals.
Scale the methods that work: Assess your data to identify what sets apart your top performers from others, then adapt their techniques for use by everyone on your team.
6. Create a Buyer-Focused Communication Strategy
Equip your sales teams with content tailored specifically to different buyer personas and stages in the sales journey. Assess and update this material regularly so it remains up-to-date with new products, market trends, and sales techniques.
Establish a team to oversee this communication strategy to ensure consistency and effective use of resources. A charter detailing goals, roles, and expectations can encourage stakeholder buy-in and promote collaborative working arrangements.
7. Create a Buyer-Focused Marketing Strategy
Sales enablement is an integral component of sales success. By adopting an approach focused on engaging customers efficiently, your team will have all of the tools required to do just that.
Implement a successful sales enablement strategy by setting metrics for success and communicating regularly to make sure everyone is on the same page, thus eliminating miscommunication and aligning everyone. It will also allow you to monitor progress and optimize the process.
8. Create a Buyer-Focused Marketing Content Strategy
Your sales enablement team should collaborate closely with marketing and other departments, to allow your teams to share successful customer stories and relevant content with prospects.
Guarantee that your content is buyer-centric by understanding buyers’ pain points and needs in depth, and regularly adapting as market trends change – this will allow your team to engage with prospects more directly.
9. Create a Buyer-Focused Marketing Training Strategy
Your sales enablement team should join your reps’ calls regularly in order to identify what kind of questions and challenges they face on an everyday basis. They can use this data to customize marketing content such as case studies and testimonials specifically targeted towards each prospect’s unique requirements.
By taking note of what works and scaling successful methods, your team’s performance can be greatly increased. This could involve formalizing certain techniques into training sessions, or adapting sales processes according to those practiced by top performers on your team.
10. Create a Buyer-Focused Communication Strategy
Develop sales enablement goals that align with business goals such as increasing conversion rates or decreasing sales cycles to ensure that this strategy has the support of senior stakeholders.
Make sure to set leading indicators of success, such as training completion rate and skills improvement scores post-training, so as to identify areas for improvement and optimize sales enablement programs and tools.
