Sales enablement plays a key role in scaling the sales organization beyond a handful of overachievers. It provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools and resources required to be successful. In short, it is a human resources optimization process.
Your sales team is currently wasting up to 40% of their time searching for or recreating sales documents to respond to inbound leads; those are documents that you already paid to have created. That's money, your money, down the drain because of a poorly implemented Customer Relationship Management System and poor content management system setup.
They’re doing this because they have to. That’s right – they have to.
Though there are any number of reasons for this to happen, most of it boils down to:
That’s why we have partnered with Pandadoc as well as Hubspot, to help us solve this problem for ourselves and for our customers, many of whom are also SAP Partners themselves. We've tasked our Sales Enablement Managers to reduce the time our Sales Team is spending developing Sales Enablement Content and increase the amount of time they spend selling.
Our experience indicates that each product and service we and our customers sell and service requires its own dedicated Sales Enablement Content Development program. That's why Pandadoc has proven to be such a Sales Force productivity booster. They now have supporting sales content ready to go for each stage of their sales funnel. It can be easily customized to meet the requirements of any individual sales opportunity.
It is a digital sales enablement software tool that provides everything you need to get the right message in the right hands at the right time as part of your sales enablement process.
These and many other capabilities make this a powerful sales tool which your sales enablement team will be able to put to immediate use. Your marketing team will appreciate the ability to gather feedback directly from your customers so they can refine the documents based on the analytics. Your IT department will appreciate the zero footprint of the system.
The sales and marketing team generally owns the Sales Enablement function. However, top performing organizations assign a professional sales enablement manager. The sales and marketing leadership team must work closely with the sales enablement manager to ensure all required resources are made available and effectively employed.
One of the proven ways sales enablement leaders can improve sales productivity is to create a 'content map', and to ensure that every salesperson has access to it as and when needed.
The HubspotCRM also provides extensive analytics about how sales productivity is being impacted by the content produced by the sales enablement team. This turns the whole exercise into a data driven exercise. Your sales process should include periodic examination of how and which content is most productive to achieving the goals of your sales strategy.
While sales needs to close the deal, marketing needs to provide sales enablement materials based on the agreed upon content strategy, that have a positive impact on measurable customer engagement metrics. This can include:
One great way to create this content map is to leverage the experience of your sales top performers. That means use their knowledge about how and when they use sales content to hit their targets, and map that to your new hire onboarding process, so they can ramp up quickly based on real world feedback.
While many companies have some great sales content, larger companies tend to have much greater quantities of often disorganized sales content on their website or within their CRM.
That's why it is imperative for marketing to periodically audit all of the sales enablement content make sure it matches your current offerings, is available in a central location to all sales reps, and is strategically aligned with the messaging you want the market to receive.
Your audited content library can be hosted in a variety of places using different technologies, each with advantages and disadvantages:
As you can see, there are quite a few issues to consider when establishing your sales enablement technology stack.
While sales enablement experts spend much of their time directly supporting each sales rep, sales operations also needs the support of the sales enablement team.
While the role of sales operations varies from one organization to the next, they all focus on some common business goals:
In this author's experience in setting one up, one of the major tasks of sales operations is to remove the time pressure from sales teams.
Sales enablement, in the form of standardized contract terms and conditions, response templates and insurance and banking instrument paperwork, are a key set of tools employed by sales operations to ensure a factory production line like response to what ultimately, are completely customized yet highly standardized responses.
Sales enablement planning, production and proper employment can be a major undertaking. However, when done consistently and correctly, it can help your sales team achieve ever higher goals with less effort.
By methodically designing and developing sales enablement material to support each stage of the sales process, you will make sales team much more productive. Ultimately, it means both they and your customers spend less time and money completing the sales process.
While we are capable and experienced at providing sales enablement services, via our pandadoc consulting practice, we are, by virtue of having decades of SAP experience, especially adept at providing SAP sales enablement.
SAP partners are typically overwhelmed with all the SAP marketing and sales enablement resources available. Yet they often find themselves expending inordinate amounts of time customizing content for every deal. We'll show the magic of the SAP sales briefcase approach.
Let us show you how we are using this approach in the Professional Services environment. Many sales management organizations struggle to produce the right materials and the right content. This leaves sales manager struggling to provide proactive sales coaching to their sales team. By putting forth the right sales enablement efforts, you can experience higher win rates, larger deal sizes with better overall outcomes.