1. What is Sales Enablement?

According to the consulting firm Gartner, sales enablement is “the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.”  It helps the organization train, align and improve the performance of it's distributed sales team. It also helps sales managers understand customer-specific challenges reported by advisors, track every sales conversation and suggest corrective interventions. Its objective is to create an environment that aligns all members of the sales team to elevate their game, especially when new paradigms of online-offline hybrid sales are becoming commonplace in the post-pandemic era.

Read more about sales enablement here.

2. What is the difference between Sales Enablement and Sales Operations?

The following table explains the chief differences between sales operations (focussed on actual sales) and sales enablement (making the former more effective):

Read more about the differences here.

3. How does Sales Enablement help Sales Representatives?

While sales has long been seen as the job of a few ‘gifted’ people, as organizations scale up, it becomes important that every member of the team should be as effective. Sales enablement provides all sales representatives the right tools to make convincing pitches and converse effectively with new customers. It works through training of sellers in making pitches and handling objections, creation of customer-centric collateral focussed on their needs and interests, measurement of sales effectiveness and raising the readiness of salespersons to face new challenges. Instead of having to remember all products and their selling points, a sales enablement platform helps representatives retrieve information on the go, and customize it to customer needs.

4. What are the Direct benefits of Sales Enablement?

Sales Enablement helps either by increasing revenue or reducing costs. In most cases, it does both. Sales enablement offers the following benefits:

- It optimises the sales rep’s time, by letting them focus on core KRAs (approaching new customers, pitching the product and convincing them to make a purchase), and speeding up non-core KRAs like preparing customized presentations and answering questions.

- It superpowers sales reps to come across as experts, through extensive training for handling different kinds of sales situations, and providing real-time access to content for overcoming objections.

- It enables timely access to the latest product collateral, so that there is consistent communication of the brand’s message. It makes sure that all sales representatives have the latest brand collateral, and are speaking in the same language.

5. What are the key components of Sales Enablement?

Gartner identifies four critical components that every sales enablement platform should have to which we have added a fifth.

1. Sales content like brochures, presentations and calculations that are easily customizable for different customers, easily shareable. And also FAQs, explanations and notes that allow a salesperson to answer customer questions on the fly.
2. Sales coaching and training that is self-paced (allowing sellers to learn in their own time and at their own speed), interactive (such as role plays) and lets them reach out mentors when needed.
3. Metrics that can measure the effectiveness of learning and eventual effectiveness in selling, such as the time taken to complete a sale, ratio of successful conversions to failures, reasons for failure etc.
4. The platform should be easy and intuitive to use and integrate seamlessly with other platforms the sales rep uses. Customer-first approach.
5. Ultimately the customer should be the real beneficiary of sales enablement, allowing them to get clear explanations of the product benefits and fast answers to their questions.

6. How does Sales Enablement help in the Indian Business Environment?

Although sales enablement is a well-established paradigm in the West, it is still a nascent concept in India. However, leading Indian firms in several sectors including pharma, banking and insurance are adopting it. With large sales forces distributed over a wide geographical area that have to deal with increasing complexity of products and processes, sales enablement becomes important. The post-pandemic era has made physical training sessions obsolete. Another widespread problem has been the preference to train representatives for product specifications rather than skills of pitching, networking, overcoming objections and asking for references. Sales enablement is helpful by:

1. Delivering the latest sales collateral to all representatives as fast as possible
2. Training all sales representatives to be equally effective
3. Sharing the tribal, tacit knowledge of salespeople horizontally across the organization
   

7. Which companies will benefit the most from sales enablement?

Simply put, any large enterprise with a distributed sales team will benefit. Sales enablement is useful for organizations with:

1. Salespeople spread over several towns and cities, such as insurance, automobiles, banking, and medtech among others. If it becomes difficult for the staff to travel to headquarters for meetings and training each time, or keep track of all new products and updates.
2. Multiple products and frequent product updates, such as in IT-based services, telecom, CPG and pharmaceuticals. Sales enablement avoids confusion because of different individuals having different levels of awareness.
3. Products customized for individuals based on their age, gender, health, risk appetite etc, such as edutech, fintech and mutual funds. Here, it is important to empower the salesperson to customize the product according to unique customer needs within minutes.

8. How is Sales Enablement Useful in Insurance?

Insurance is an industry where no two customers have the same needs (life and non-life) or are at the same life stage; thus everyone needs a unique policy. The salesperson has to customize their presentations and calculations on the go, depending on the customer’s age, gender, medical history and family size. They also have to field unexpected questions. With a good sales enablement platform, insurance advisors can go beyond basic data or calculations, to create buyer-focussed specific presentations that can be customized during sales conversations. Read how Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance and Kotak Life Insurance have enabled their teams here and here, respectively.

9. How is Sales Enablement Useful in Banking?

Banks have undergone a lot of transformation in the past decade due to digitization and virtualization, making the selling of banking products such as loans, cards and deposits more challenging. Bank sales staff distributed across several states, not only need different levels of training and mentorship for each product, but also sensitization for different cultures. In a people-driven industry facing upto to virtual sales, enablement can play a role in managing the transition. It also helps sales trainers track and mentor each rep personally. Read how IDFC First Bank has deployed sales enablement here.

10. How is Sales Enablement Useful in the Automobile Industry?

Sales in the automotive industry is both B2B (vendors to manufacturers; manufacturers to dealers) as well as B2C (dealers to customers), with high buyer involvement at all stages. There is a great diversity of products and specifications - and it is difficult for any representative to humanely memorize them. Sales enablement covers all of these aspects by creating platforms that assist with soft-skill training (e.g. roleplays) and battlecards for reference during remote sales. Read how automotive parts maker UnoMinda has improved seller learning outcomes here.

11. How is Sales Enablement Useful in the Pharmaceutical Industry?

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered turmoil in the pharma industry, which has a great diversity of products and customers, making the sales cycle highly variable. This requires sales representatives to be trained both efficiently and effectively, especially for remote interactions and hybrid sales approaches. A sales enablement platform helps advisors learn their products much better, and also to foresee and answer questions. Read how Torrent Pharma is deploying sales enablement to improve learning outcomes among representatives here.

12. Who will own Sales Enablement in large and complex enterprises?

The rising complexity of sales has led to sales readiness and enablement becoming a collaborative effort of product, sales, IT, L&D, and marketing teams. 

1. Product R&D teams create product briefings as well as updated collateral, such as technical specifications, calculations etc.
2. Sales managers and trainers help individuals deal with specific cases, through one-to-one interactions.
3. The IT team helps with the integration of the enablement platform with existing apps like CRM, LMS, internal and external communications etc.
4. The learning & development teams create multiple training content modules, which can be accessed by the sales team as per their needs.
5. The marketing team creates the core product pitch. Using these as pointers, the salesperson then customizes the talking points for each customer.

13. I am a SVP/Head of Sales in a large organization, what will be the key Sales Enablement benefits for me?

For the VP/Head of Sales, introducing the sales enablement paradigm brings in personal and organizational benefits at three levels:

1. Organizational growth: Sales enablement counts highly among the new ideas and initiatives that organizations have targeted for success in a post-pandemic era. It superpowers greater integration among teams, by making processes better and bringing in new technology and partners.
2. Team growth: Sales enablement allows the reduction of inefficiencies and waste through instituting a structure of improved sales conversations. It boosts team morale by increasing the individual representatives’ success rate.
3. Personal growth: Transforming the sales operation, and bringing about both reduction in costs as well as greater sales conversions, allows you to be seen as a change maker, who can make a visible impact in a short span of time. Eventually, the perception is of being reliable big-picture managers by the stakeholders.
   

14. What is the right Sales Enablement Strategy for my organization?

We identify four main points that make a complete strategy for success with sales enablement throughout the organization:

1. Make everyone in the organization commit to Sales Enablement, from the board to the field force. Then hire people who can make Sales Enablement a reality by analyzing problems and devising solutions, including evaluating platforms like sharpsell.
2. Train sales representatives extensively on soft skills and product features, and assess them frequently to know the areas of improvement - for trainee and trainer. Make it a goal to minimize “let me get back to you on this”, by providing easily accessible collateral for answering customer objections. 
3. Integrate intelligence across the organization by making sure that learnings from each sales rep’s field experiences are available to all reps and their managers. Devise the right metrics to gauge how effective your sellers are learning and performing. Get the technology to track such metrics.
4. Make all sales collateral sales-first, i.e. bite-sized for both seller and buyer to understand during a conversation, and also easy to customize for each customer’s expectations. Deliver all the content in real time so that no sales rep is using outdated material, and all reps speak in a consistent brand voice.

15. What are the Global Sales Enablement Best Practices?

The following practices have been identified as superpowering the sales representatives to elevate their game:

1. Delivering meaningful, bite-sized content at every stage that satisfies the customer.
2. Making content easily accessible to sales reps and available to them in a mobile-friendly format.
3. Sharing tribal knowledge in easily digestible 'snackable' formats, so that all reps can learn from the best ones.
4. Sharing the do's and don'ts for every type of sales call based on experiences, from cold calls to follow-ups to references. This builds up the 'emotional intelligence' of the sales force.
5. Making learning happen 'just in time', so that the sales team is ahead of the forgetting curve. Lessons, when accessible 'just in time', help a salesperson have the right answers/attitudes ready before calls.
6. Assessing various technology solutions from a sales representative's point of view, so that they empower the sales process, rather than adding to administrative complexity.
7. Making an organization-wide commitment to sales enablement, so that every employee stays invested in improving sales.
   

16. What are the right Sales Enablement Metrics?

The choice of the right metrics determine whether sales enablement will bring visible change in the organization’s culture and profits. They can be classed into 4 groups:

1. Revenue metrics: These measure things like the percentage of sales quota achieved by individual sales reps; value and volume of products or services sold; and percentage of leads closing into deals.
2. Cost metrics: These measure the time to the first closed deal of a newly hired sales rep; cost of training and content creation (including printing & distribution); time spent by sales reps on non-core KRAs like content personalization; and attrition rate of employees.
3. Activity metrics: These include a rep’s learning journey completion rate, assessment score on what they learn; number of meetings with customers and product collateral shared by reps during the sales cycle; number and value of proposals made to prospective buyers.
   

17. What are some examples of Sales Enablement in India?

Sales enablement has been employed by Indian organizations operating in a diverse number of sectors. Here are a few success stories:

1. Kotak Life Insurance: Increasing prospecting visibility by 6 times while reducing content costs by 90%.
2. Torrent Pharma: Digitizing Learning & Assessments, and achieving near universal adoption of practice role plays.
3. IDFC First Bank: Training officers virtually and achieving near total completion for the learning modules.
4. Automotive parts maker Uno Minda: Leveraging sales enablement to digitize learning & assessments to achieve a high completion rate.
5. Aditya Birla Capital Life Insurance: Using sales enablement to help insurance agents increase sales productivity by 56%.
6. Axis Mutual Fund: Creating a platform that enables 98% of its sales people to make compelling sales presentations.

Read more about these organizations’ success strategies here.

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.