What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is a term that can encompass the use of technology, team collaboration, content creation, and strategic planning to help your team improve the efficiency of the selling process. While its meaning is broad, if its definition had to be boiled down to one or two words, a fitting pair might be “sales support”. How can the entire team come together to support sellers and buyers? What kind of content would help the team reach its sales goals? How can we better support prospects throughout the buying experience? A strong sales enablement strategy will adequately address these questions and enable the team to perform at increasingly high productivity levels. Remember, sales enablement is all about aligning different organizational efforts toward the shared goal of increasing revenue.

1. Convey the value of sales enablement to your team

With answers just a short search away, buyers are taking a more proactive, independent approach to resolving their problems and looking for remedies online. Ask yourself whether your sales team is doing everything it can to help buyers find your company’s solution on the Internet. Remember, catering to a contemporary audience will require engaging with prospects through diverse social media channels. Using search engine optimization tools can also help draw attention to your organization and its products and services amidst a sea of comparable offerings. To have productive interactions on and offline with prospects, you also want to make sure you have the content you need to facilitate sales conversations throughout the sales process. Your team will need access to more and more content as time goes on in order to be effective social sellers, which leads to our next piece of advice.

2. Generate consistent output

To reach your perfect buyer, you will need to work together with your entire team to create relevant content. Content will include internal materials to assist your sales reps with sales communication, shareable content to assist buyers and their organizations with purchasing decisions, as well as public content to draw in future buyers.

What types of sales enablement content are most important? Sales enablement content that addresses buyer needs for proof of product quality and highlights your company’s reliability and professionalism should be front and center.

When it comes to content, timing really does matter. Be sure to adjust to the evolving needs of your market. Having updated and factually-consistent materials will help convey a unified message to prospects and give sellers the confidence they need to lead sales conversations.

3. Enlist the help of different departments

But who should be in charge of these efforts? Your sales reps can’t take on the full responsibility of content creation. To reach their targets, sales reps need to spend the majority of their time working on outreach and cultivating their relationship with leads. Marketing can’t shoulder the burden alone either. A successful sales enablement strategy will require the input of a well-rounded set of perspectives spanning departments and experience levels.

In addition to different kinds of sales-related content, sales enablement will involve training support such as coaching, clips, and instructional documents. Human resources can be very useful for onboarding and training efforts. You may also need to involve the legal department, which can assist with language clarification questions on key documents during the sales process. As you can see, sales enablement is truly a team-wide effort.

4. Collaborate with executives

Don’t forget to engage with your company executives. Without the support of your organization’s leadership in the early stages of developing your sales enablement strategy, it will be difficult to procure the tools and resources needed for sales enablement implementation later on. Be organized and methodical in your presentation, and be sure to emphasize how your sales enablement approach will address specific shortcomings in your organization’s current sales process.

5. Identify gaps in the sales cycle

Now that you have the attention, support, and commitment of your team and leadership, work together to identify gaps in the sales cycle. Take a look at the sales process from start to finish. Are there any steps that could use some streamlining? Create a sales enablement strategy that incorporates information about sources of inefficiency to boost your company’s productivity and hold team members accountable. Be sure to communicate how key responsibilities may change for each department under the new sales enablement plan.

6. Use technology to take your sales enablement to the next level

Leverage technology to support your diverse sales enablement functions. Technological solutions will be especially useful for the storage and retrieval of materials, training and onboarding purposes, content distribution, as well as to track progress internally.

Having the right sales enablement toolkit will make all the difference during the implementation phase, so invest time in researching which sales enablement software is right for your team’s needs.

Are there any resources that could be put to better use through technology? For example, sales battlecards are one useful type of sales enablement content that can help your sales reps smoothly sail through difficult conversations with detail-oriented buyers. But a common problem faced by sales teams is that battlecards remain under-utilised because they are difficult to retrieve. Attention employs AI technology to empower sales reps to lead informative sales conversations with prospects through the use of voice-activated battlecards. Verbal cues will pull up the relevant battlecard on your sales representative’s screen, so there’s no need to worry about rushed searches for information during calls with Attention.

Another issue encountered when carrying out sales enablement is the trade-off between providing personalized feedback and scaling lessons quickly throughout a team. Training software like Attention provides immediate commentary on your sales reps’ performance and tracks their advancement over time.

Now that you know more about how to approach the development of a strong sales enablement strategy at your organization, be sure you are prepared to successfully implement your sales enablement strategy at the team level. To help you get there, try Attention today.