How to Create a Sales Enablement Strategy that Leads to Success?
Apr 20, 2023
While sales training can improve your sales team's skills, it may not be enough to compete for enterprise sales. To truly make your sales reps experts in selling your products, you need a sales enablement strategy. This comprehensive plan provides resources to support your sales team in understanding and executing your sales processes, resulting in increased revenue. In this article, we'll explore the importance of sales enablement processes for organizations and outline essential features of an effective sales enablement strategy.
Sales enablement strategy
Sales enablement strategy is the combination of content, sales tools, and software that companies provide to their sales teams to boost their selling abilities. At Aviso AI, we view sales enablement strategy as a vital function that assists sales reps in improving their effectiveness, starting from their initial onboarding until they leave the organization. While sales enablement offers these resources, the strategy entails delivering and educating reps on how to utilize them throughout the entire sales cycle.
Having a sales enablement strategy is crucial for every sales department, as it goes beyond a mere nice-to-have feature. The following reasons explain why it is a vital component:
Benefits of a Sales Enablement Strategy
Improved Understanding of the Sales Process: Sales processes are often complex and can be difficult to grasp, with more than half of the sales reps believing that their company's sales process has become more challenging. By implementing strong sales enablement practices, reps gain the necessary clarity to sell more effectively.
Streamlined Sales and Increased Revenue: Sales enablement software provides sales reps with the tools they need to close more deals in less time and achieve their quotas. This is achieved not just by providing sales training and support, but also by helping reps deliver a valuable buyer experience that today's decision-makers demand.
Retaining Sales Talent: A strong sales enablement strategy is not just critical to the success of a revenue organization, but also plays a vital role in retaining sales talent. According to statistics, the majority of sales professionals are currently seeking a new role. To retain top-performing sales reps, organizations need to provide comprehensive support. An effective sales enablement strategy offers the necessary tools for sales reps to close more deals, thus boosting their commission and incentivizing them to stay.
How to Create a Sales Enablement Strategy?
To create a winning sales enablement strategy for your company, it is essential to incorporating the below key components, to support your sales team and drive revenue growth.
Clearly defined sales goals: A sales enablement strategy must be aligned with your overall business objectives. This means setting clear, measurable sales goals that reflect your company's priorities. By defining specific sales targets and KPIs, you can help your sales team focus their efforts and track their progress toward achieving those goals.
A best-in-class onboarding program: A successful sales enablement strategy starts with a comprehensive onboarding program for new sales reps. This program should provide new hires with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their role, including a deep understanding of your products or services, the sales process, and your target customers.
Mechanisms to boost sales effectiveness: Sales enablement involves providing your sales team with the tools and resources they need to sell more effectively. This includes everything from sales training and coaching to access to sales enablement tools like CRM systems, sales automation software, and content libraries.
The ability to accelerate strategic initiatives: Your sales enablement strategy should be flexible and agile enough to respond quickly to changes in your industry, your customers' needs, and your competition. You should be able to quickly adjust your sales enablement resources and tools to support new product launches, marketing campaigns, or sales tactics. Sales enablement can also help your company achieve strategic objectives, such as launching a new product or entering a new market. By aligning your sales enablement efforts with your overall business strategy, you can help your sales team execute on these initiatives more effectively.
Levers to grow a peer-to-peer learning culture: Sales enablement should not be a top-down process. Sales reps can learn a lot from each other, so your sales enablement strategy should include mechanisms to foster a culture of peer-to-peer learning. This could involve creating a mentorship program, hosting regular team meetings or workshops, or using collaboration tools to share best practices and success stories. This continuous learning and knowledge sharing can help your sales team to improve and stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices.
Data analysis to uncover pockets of growth: Data analysis is a critical component of any sales enablement strategy. Likewise, your sales enablement strategy should be data-driven, meaning you should regularly collect and analyze data to identify areas for improvement and growth. This could include analyzing sales metrics like win rates, conversion rates, and average deal size, as well as conducting customer research to better understand their pain points and preferences.
Regular reporting and evaluation: Finally, your sales enablement strategy should include a system for regular reporting and evaluation. This could involve creating dashboards to track key sales metrics and KPIs, conducting regular performance reviews with your sales reps, or soliciting feedback from customers to assess the effectiveness of your sales enablement resources and tools. By regularly reviewing and evaluating your sales enablement strategy, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure that you are meeting your sales goals. Finally, a winning sales enablement strategy requires ongoing evaluation and reporting. By regularly measuring the effectiveness of your sales enablement efforts, you can make data-driven decisions and adjust your strategy as needed to ensure continued success.
Ownership of Sales Enablement
Determining who is responsible for sales enablement can be a bit tricky. Industry experts suggest that it should not be solely the responsibility of either marketing or sales, but rather should be managed by dedicated teams within the sales organization.
At Aviso AI, we agree that sales enablement should be a joint effort between sales and marketing. Marketing is responsible for content creation and management, including producing blog posts, case studies, and product demos. Sales, on the other hand, is responsible for acquiring sales enablement tools such as CRMs and advising reps on how to use marketing content effectively during the buyer's journey.
Having dedicated sales enablement leaders is important because it requires a significant amount of collaboration between sales and marketing. Sales leaders need to provide input on the kinds of materials they need, while marketing leaders need to establish clear deadlines for content creation and delivery.
Conclusion
At Aviso AI, we offer revenue intelligence technology that simplifies sales enablement efforts. Our software can speed up onboarding, monitor talk track adoption, identify teachable moments, and increase sales productivity. See a demo with Aviso AI to discover an easy and efficient way to manage your sales enablement strategy.
