Sales enablement has progressed from being a “good-to-have” to a “must-have” for large organizations with distributed sales forces. As more organizations are looking towards sales enablement to drive higher sales for post-pandemic recovery in 2022, the goal now is to transform sellers into subject matter experts and trusted advisors. However, sales enablement has to follow some industry best practices for it to really deliver on its potential, beyond just drafting strategy that looks good on paper.

Here are a few we list out, on the basis of our experiences, especially after shadowing hundreds of sales representatives and understanding their daily pain points.

1. Make content your biggest asset

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is said to have quoted, “Content is King”. However as digital marketer Gary Vaynerchuk has added, “Context is God”. In most organizations, the creation of content is the sole prerogative of the marketing team. The team’s involvement stops once the leads have been generated and handed over to sales.

But sales needs content at every step of the sales cycle. With the complexity of products increasing in many sectors, from pharma to IT to automobiles, it takes longer to close deals, with more meetings and more questions/objections from customers. It is critical for the sales representative to have content for each step - in the form of handouts, blogs, battlecards, FAQs and a lot more. It helps when the customer sees that the sales rep not only has verbal answers, but can direct them to a blog or send them a pdf where they can read more if they want to. Sales and content creation teams really have to work together on this.

2. Make content your representative’s ally

Sales reps should find the right content at the right time - even during the live customer interaction. Sales battlecards help - easily retrievable, bite-sized information that is instantly shareable with customers. They cover two major issues - product features, and how to answer customer objections.

This is where the operative part of content, “Context is God” becomes important. A good salesperson will be able to highlight the benefits of the product to the customer, read their reactions (verbal and nonverbal), and modify their pitch accordingly. All this works only if the content is actually available to them when they want it.

3. Make one rep’s win everybody else’s lesson

It takes years of experience to be able to handle any and all objections without having to say, “Let me get back to you on this”. This experience needn’t be learned on the street - it can be institutionalized. One way is to leverage your best salespersons, who by their own merit, become ‘institutions’ in their own right. Have them record videos for every win they have - citing the things that worked in their favour, and what the ‘tipping point’ for the customer was. This is knowledge that is instantly useful to all sales reps - even if not immediately applicable. But this becomes part of the tribal knowledge shared by the organization - overt, instead of tacit.

4. Learn from every call

Customer service organizations record calls and train the teams on them - calls with easy customers, tough ones, calls that went brutally wrong. Sales teams can do that as well - because the most important lessons to be learned are the right behaviours for how to

1. approach a customer (on a cold or hot call)
2. gauge whether the call is going uphill or downhill (and whether there’s a chance to sell or upsell)
3. close the call or schedule the next meeting

This is vital ‘emotional intelligence’ that every sales representative needs to assess in each call they make. Calls may not have to be recorded, but each call experience can be shared horizontally, to identify a list of do’s and don’ts.

5. Let your reps stay ahead of the learning curve

‘Just in time’ is an old concept in the supply chain, but can work in learning and development as well. In essence, it takes the latest insights from the market, both macro trends as well as the field experiences of every sales reps’ win, and delivers them to sales reps in ‘snackable’ format, such as a 2 minute video. Instead of flooding them with long-form content which might induce procrastination, this ‘just in time’ content means they learn as quickly as the organization wants them to. It’s also a great way to provide continuous learning to beat the ‘forgetting curve’ - the rate at which lessons are forgotten. Research shows that 87% of training is lost within the first month.

6. Make friends with technology

A terrible business practice is to keep introducing new technology to the organization because it suits the management. Multiple program suites only increase non-revenue-generating administrative tasks, instead of saving labour (which is the purpose of technology). For technology to be useful, it must aid the sales rep - the person who is actually bringing in revenue. For example, CRM, when integrated with communications and sales enablement, is a powerful input for both reps and managers in deciding which customers are worth allocating time to, and which ones can be let go. Integrating metrics with each technology also gives the organization a clear picture of whether a tech solution is working or is counterproductive. For this, the sales operations and enablement teams should meet regularly with customer service and IT frequently. Organizations report shorter sales cycles when technology is integrated.

7. Measure, don’t manage time

Chaotic organizations manage time; a successful organization measures it. It pays to assess weekly or monthly each representative on the time they spent on each task. Over 35% of their time is wasted on admin tasks (that don’t generate any revenue), such as updating the CRM or reporting to managers, which can, with some intelligent effort, be automated. More is wasted on customizing collateral for customers, which, with a platform like sharpsell, can be minimized. Rigorous assessment can help managers provide solutions to reps to focus more time on the one task that actually makes money - selling.

8. Go mobile first

Your sales rep is out on the field, or selling online - and in both cases, depending most on their mobile phone. They may be connecting to a cold call, following up on a lead or reference, making an appointment or closing a sale. They need to share content mid-call or after it. Any content that can be shared with a customer within minutes of ending the call is a winner. Content that cannot be read or customized on the phone screen is deadweight - and research shows that 90% of content made for sales is unusable because it is not accessible to the reps, or cumbersome to share.

9. Make sales enablement part of organization culture

This is the best of the best practices. Organizations that make a product or offer a service, rely on sales more than anything to generate revenue. Making the selling process easier by the minute thus needs to be ingrained throughout the organization, and not just the task of sales operations or sales enablement. Regularly asking the following questions helps achieve this:

1. Is the collateral sales-oriented or marketing oriented? Is there collateral for each stage of the sales cycle?
2. Is it easily customizable?
3. Is it easy for the sales rep to find?
4. Are the technologies used in the organization hindering or super-powering the sales force?
5. Is the tribal knowledge being shared equitably?
6. Is the learning and development process beating the forgetting curve?
7. Do the sales representatives believe the organization has their back, wherever they are, dealing with whatever kind of client?

Lastly, following best practices works only if the sales enablement team updates them as the market evolves. For this, not only must there be a clear strategy for success, but also enough robustness and flexibility built into it.

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.