As organizations grow in scale, the sales department finds itself handling an increasingly complex task. The complexity of the product portfolio also rises. Personalized coaching at scale therefore becomes important, especially for a distributed sales force. As the geographical area of operations increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to share updated marketing collateral simultaneously.

Especially after the pandemic, sales channels have diversified, from the traditional door-to-door model, to digital and remote models. Meetings are now held via video conference, where old skills, such as reading body language are being replaced by new ones like making customized presentations.

With these challenges in mind, organizations are establishing sales enablement teams to provide support for the customer-facing distributed sales force. This is usually a smaller team that liaises across multiple departments, such as marketing, IT, HR and CRM. Its remit is to assist sales managers in mentoring sales reps to become product experts. Sales enablement works indirectly to deliver more effective sales pitches. The following table enumerates the salient differences:

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The sales enablement team takes over the task of analyzing industry sales trends, best-in-class techniques for pitching in a remote environment, and most importantly, learning and development. In effect, the sales enablement team frees up the sales operation team to focus more on sales strategy and analytics as well as on new business. 

What are the direct benefits of sales enablement?

For sales enablement within an organization to succeed, the management must consider the following five outcomes.

Optimizing sales rep’s time. Analysis by sharpsell has shown that over 80% of sales reps’ time goes into preparing customized presentations and answering questions. This leaves them less time for core KRAs such as approaching new customers, pitching the product and convincing them to make a purchase. A sales enablement paradigm solves this by offering them preloaded templates, that can be customized in three quick and simple ways

1. Shuffling slides based on the customer’s outlook
2. Making rapid calculations
3. Adding the customer’s name and designation before sharing

Presenting sales reps as SMEs. A successful learning program allows the sales rep to become a product expert in a short time. This involves not only training material and sessions, but also self-assessment and managerial assessment, and the ability to handle different kinds of sales situations.

Consistent communication of brand and product. A sales enablement platform that is easily accessible to field force, however remotely they may be located, will make sure that all of them have the latest brand collateral, and are speaking in the same language. Companies have deployed mobile-based sales enablement platforms that enable them to ensure this across all geographies.

Real-time access to relevant content. The sales force also needs to be able to access content that will enable them to answer customer queries within minutes, not hours. A good sales platform makes sure that they have the content at their fingertips.

Personalized coaching to field sales. Sales reps often encounter questions from customers, or certain unprecedented situations. Ideal sales enablement gives them the tools to learn to handle new situations quickly, and also be mentored by their managers. In addition, these tools help them learn at their own pace.

What are the key components of sales enablement?

Gartner identifies four critical components every sales enablement platform should have - training and development (including all requisite content), usability, metrics and customer focus - to which we have added sales content as the fifth.

• Sales content: This includes both external and internal content. External content, like brochures, presentations and calculations are aimed at customers, and should be easy to customize and share via email or WhatsApp. Internal content, like FAQs, explanations and notes allow a salesperson to answer customer questions and appear as a subject matter expert.
• Sales coaching and training: This is the most critical part of the sales enablement process. It should ideally have three components:

• Self-paced learning content such as product features, training videos and tests;
• Interactive role play which enables the salesperson to learn how to deal with different kinds of customers; and
• Tools that allow them to reach out to their mentors and receive specific guidance.

• Easy access to key metrics: Assessments allow both reps and their managers to know at what pace the learning is progressing, and what remedial steps are needed. Other metrics include knowing the time taken to complete a sale, the ratio of successful conversions to fails, reasons for failure etc, that feed back into the training/mentorship process.
• Usability: The platform should be easy and intuitive to use and integrate seamlessly with other platforms the sales rep uses. It should be easy to deploy on mobile phones and not dependent on high-speed networks.
• Customer-first approach. Ultimately the customer should be the real beneficiary of sales enablement, allowing them to get clear explanations of the product benefits, fast answers to their questions and easy ability to make the purchase.

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sharpsell equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using sharpsell have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.