Introduction: Sales Enablement Strategies
Learn how to boost your inbound sales with these 10 sales enablement strategies. Here's a visual of the process.
As a Senior SAP Industry Principal, whose job it was and sometimes still is, to bring in SAP Net New License deals, at scale, I had a large team of Account Executives to help me.
I was often astounded and confounded about how I would see one of my AEs working on putting together all of the various parts of a proposal as I left the office late at night - and would often find that same AE still there in the AM trying to pull it all together.
As the Industry Principal for six industries, I was also the only person in the office with knowledge and skills to price out the software properly. Using a proprietary pricing tool, which allowed me to price out all of the required components to support the Business Process Requirements embodied within either the customer's provided RFP or the custom developed Solution Map, composed by me and my team for a specific customer, I was able to produced high-quality precise contract proposals.
As time went on, we eventually put together a proposal team to support the AEs, which meant they spent more time in front of customers - a good thing.
That process, of putting together all of the supporting documents for a winning proposal, including Case Studies, Business Cases, RFP Responses, Solution Presentations, as well as the Software License Proposal prepared by me using the quote tool, was all part of an ever evolving Sales Enablement Process. So just what is Sales Enablement and Why You Should Care.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the tools, resources, and training on new technology they need to effectively engage with prospects and close deals. By incorporating sales enablement into your sales strategy, you can improve productivity, increase revenue, and build better customer relationships. It's important to define sales enablement for your business and understand how it can help you achieve your goals. With a well-planned sales enablement strategy, you can equip your sales team with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed in a competitive marketplace. So, it's not just important to incorporate sales enablement into your strategy, but it's crucial for the growth and success of your business.
Benefits of Sales Enablement
The benefits of sales enablement are numerous, and incorporating it into your sales strategy can help your business thrive.
Here are some of the key benefits:
- Increased revenue: By providing your sales team with the tools and resources they need to effectively engage with prospects, you can increase the number of deals closed and the revenue generated.
- Better customer relationships: Sales enablement can help your sales team better understand your target audience and tailor their approach accordingly, leading to stronger relationships with customers.
With the right sales enablement content available, your sales teams can use social media to engage with prospects, especially earlier in the sales cycle, and then transition to more Middle of the Funnel style content as the your buyer's progress their own customer journey. - Increased productivity: Equipping your sales team with the knowledge and skills they need can help them work more efficiently, allowing them to focus on what they do best - selling.
To set your business up for success, it's crucial for sales management decision makers to develop a sales enablement plan that involves identifying your buyer persona, creating sales-focused content, providing effective sales training, utilizing the latest technology, and measuring the success of your plan. It makes sense to be continuously improving your plan which will ensure that you can keep growing and adapting to changing market conditions.
Creating a Sales Enablement Plan
When developing a sales enablement plan, make sure that it includes:
- Identifying your buyer persona.
- Creating customer facing sales content for your sales team such as:
- Case Studies
- Customer Testimonial Videos
- White Papers
- Providing sales training on your sales process and methodology.
- Using the appropriate sales enablement technology.
- A method of Measuring the success of your sales enablement plan, which provides the data you need to set your business up for exponential growth.
A sales enablement plan isn't supposed to be a static document. By continuously improving your plan to adapt to changing market conditions, you can ensure continued growth. One of the key elements of success is having the right sales enablement team onboard.
Identify Your Buyer Persona
To effectively engage with prospects and close deals, it's important to understand your target audience. This is where buyer personas and ideal customer profiles come into play.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customer, including their demographics, interests, pain points, and buying behaviour's. It isn't a general description of someone, but rather a very in depth specific description of someone who has a problem that you know how to solve. The more specific you can be, and the more often you can talk to a customer to drill down into that 'itch', the more effective both your marketing and sales content creation process will be.
An ideal customer profile (ICP), on the other hand, is a description of the type of customer who is most likely to benefit from your product or service. While similar, the main difference between the two is that a buyer persona is more specific and focuses on an individual, while an ideal customer profile is more general and focuses on a group.
The marketing team is responsible for providing sales enablement content based on both the buyer persona and the ideal customer profile. This content should be tailored to each stage of the buyer's journey and aligned with the customer's pain points and interests. It's as much an art as science, and continuously improving your sales enablement plan is key to achieving success in a competitive marketplace.
Creating Content for Your Sales Team
Developing content that aligns with your buyer personas and creating content for each stage of the buyer's journey is essential for effective sales enablement. By understanding your target audience, you can craft content that speaks directly to their pain points and interests. This will enable your sales team to engage with prospects at a deeper level and build stronger relationships with customers.
Creating content for each stage of the buyer's journey is also critical. By tailoring your content to each stage, you can guide prospects through the buying process and provide the information they need to make informed decisions. This can include educational content at the awareness stage, solution-focused content at the consideration stage, and product-specific content at the decision stage.
Moreover, content can enable your sales team by providing them with the resources they need to engage with prospects effectively.
This can include:
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Product demos
- Product Configurators and Recommendations
- And other materials that demonstrate your product or service's value proposition.
By providing your sales team with high-quality content, you can also ensure that they are delivering a consistent message to prospects and customers alike.
In summary, developing content that aligns with your buyer personas, creating content for each stage of the buyer's journey, and leveraging content to enable your sales team are all critical components of a successful sales enablement strategy. By focusing on these areas, you can better engage with prospects, build stronger relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Providing Sales Training
Training your sales team is essential to enable them to sell effectively
Sales Training Best Practices
Identifying skill gaps is one of the critical components of a successful sales enablement strategy. Once skill gaps are identified, sales training programs can be created to address them. Sales training best practices should be implemented to ensure that the training programs are effective. One of the best practices is to provide ongoing training and coaching to your sales team. This will help them stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in sales.
Measure Sales Training Effectiveness
Measuring the effectiveness of your training is also crucial to ensure that it is achieving its intended goals. Creating a culture of continuous learning is essential to keep your team motivated and engaged. By focusing on these areas, you can better equip your sales team with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a competitive marketplace.
Ongoing Training and Coaching
Ongoing sales coaching and mentoring is one of the key tasks of a sales manager to ensure that their sales team is equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed. It involves providing continuous guidance and feedback to salespeople, especially during critical moments when they need it the most. Effective coaching and mentoring can help sales teams close more deals, build better relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more revenue for the business. By focusing on this aspect of sales enablement, sales managers can help their teams reach their full potential and stay ahead of the competition.
It's no secret that salespeople are busy, and often skip training, but it's important to remember that the responsibility for delivering sales coaching and mentoring lies with the sales manager. However, salespeople bear equal responsibility to take the time to really listen and absorb this training. Without it, they may miss out on valuable skills and knowledge that could help them close more deals and build stronger relationships with customers. By actively engaging in sales training and coaching, salespeople can stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in sales, and ultimately drive more revenue for their business. So, while it may be tempting to skip training, it's crucial for salespeople to make the time to listen and absorb the knowledge shared by their sales manager.
Using Technology for Sales Enablement
Technology plays a crucial role in helping you streamline your sales process and enabling your sales team. The challenge is selecting, paying for and learning to effectively use the technology.
Sales Enablement Technology
Identifying the right sales tools for your sales enablement strategy can be overwhelming, but it's essential to choose tools that align with your business' goals and support your sales team. Sales enablement leaders must be able to streamline all the content and tools a seller needs throughout the sales process to help them find, connect, and engage with buyers. This way, all the sales tools that a rep needs are readily available to them. Consequently, they can spend more time having sales conversations and increasing their sales productivity.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
There are many software solutions available, from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to sales enablement platforms, and it's important to carefully evaluate each one to determine which will be the most effective for your team.
When selecting technology tools, consider the features that are most important to your business, such as integration with other systems, customization options, and ease of use. It's also important to choose tools that are scalable and can grow with your business.
Once you've identified the right tools for your business, it's crucial to integrate them seamlessly into your sales enablement strategy. This can involve connecting your CRM with your sales enablement platform, integrating your email marketing software with your sales enablement content, and ensuring that all tools work together to support your sales team.
Sales enablement technology can help your business in many ways, including:
- Streamlining your sales process: Technology tools can automate many aspects of the sales process, such as lead management and follow-up, freeing up your sales team to focus on building relationships with prospects and closing deals.
- Providing valuable insights: Sales enablement technology can provide real-time data and analytics on your sales process, giving you valuable insights into what's working and what's not. This can help you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions. Hubspot's CMS (Content Management System), serving as a repository of Sales Content as well as marketing content, provides highly granular engagement tracking capability of every presentation.
- Improving collaboration: Technology tools can help your sales team collaborate more effectively, whether they're working remotely or in the office. Tools like video conferencing, chat, and file sharing can help your team stay connected and work together more efficiently.
In summary, selecting the right technology tools and integrating them seamlessly into your sales enablement strategy can help your business thrive. By streamlining your sales process, providing valuable insights, and improving collaboration, technology can help your sales team work more efficiently and close more deals, ultimately driving revenue growth for your business.
Using Data to Optimize Sales Enablement
Data plays a crucial role in optimizing your sales enablement plan. By collecting and analyzing data, you can gain valuable insights into your sales process, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to improve your sales strategy.
One of the most important aspects of using data to optimize your sales enablement plan is tracking sales metrics. These metrics can include things like lead conversion rates, deal size, time to close, and more. By tracking these metrics over time, you can identify trends and patterns in your sales process and make adjustments as needed.
Another key element of using data to optimize your sales enablement plan is using analytics to improve your sales strategy. This can involve analyzing data from your CRM, website, and other sources to gain insights into your target audience, their interests and pain points, and their buying behaviors. By using this information to further tailor your sales enablement content and strategy, you can better engage with prospects and close more deals.
Continuous Improvement
In addition to tracking sales metrics and using analytics, it's also important to continuously monitor and evaluate your sales enablement plan to ensure that it's achieving its intended goals. This can involve conducting regular performance reviews, soliciting feedback from your sales team, and making adjustments as needed to improve your strategy over time.
In summary, using data to optimize your sales enablement plan is a critical component of achieving success in a competitive marketplace. By tracking sales metrics, using analytics to improve your sales strategy, and continuously monitoring and evaluating your plan, you can better engage with prospects, build stronger relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Measuring the Success of Your Sales Enablement Plan
Measuring the success of your plan is essential to ensure that you are achieving your business goals
Key Metrics to Measure
Identifying key metrics to measure is crucial to determining the success of your sales enablement plan. Some key metrics to consider include:
- Lead conversion rates
- Pipeline Coverage
- Sales cycle length
- Deal size
- Win/loss rates.
By tracking and analyzing these metrics, you can gain insights into the effectiveness of your sales enablement strategy and areas that may require improvement.
Once you have identified the key metrics to measure, it's important to track and analyze them regularly. This can involve setting up a dashboard in Hubspot, Salesforce or SAP or report that provides real-time updates on your metrics, allowing you to quickly identify any changes or trends that may require attention.
Analyzing your metrics can also help you more effectively use your data to improve your sales enablement plan. For example, if you notice that your win/loss rate is low, you may want to focus on improving your sales messaging or providing additional sales training to your team. Alternatively, if you notice that your sales cycle length is longer than average, you may want to consider providing more targeted content to prospects at each stage of the buying journey.
In short, identifying key metrics, tracking and analyzing your metrics, and using your data to improve your sales enablement plan are all critical components of achieving success in a competitive marketplace. By continuously evaluating and refining your strategy based on your data, you can better engage with prospects, build stronger relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Continuously Improving Your Plan
Creating a plan for continuous improvement is essential for staying ahead of the competition and achieving success in a constantly changing marketplace. This involves regularly evaluating and refining your sales enablement strategy based on data and feedback from your sales team.
To create a plan for continuous improvement, start by setting clear goals and metrics for your sales enablement strategy. This will help you measure your progress and identify areas that may require improvement. Next, regularly analyze your data and solicit feedback from your sales team to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to refine your strategy.
It's also important to adapt your plan to changing market conditions. This can involve keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in sales, and regularly evaluating and adjusting your strategy to stay ahead of the competition. By continuously improving your sales enablement plan, you can better engage with prospects, build stronger relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Conclusion
Boosting your inbound sales with sales enablement strategies can help your business grow and achieve success. Start implementing these strategies today to see the results for yourself!
Inbound Sales Consulting
Sales Enablement is a critical element for any type of sales. SAP BW Consulting, Inc. a Certified Hubspot Inbound Sales Agency, can help you with both Sales Enablement Strategy, Sales Enablement Content Development and Sales Team Training, as part of their Inbound Sales Consulting Service Offering. Just click the button to find out more.
