The consulting firm Gartner defines sales enablement as “the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.” It is increasingly becoming a key component of a company’s success metrics, as it aims to improve sales conversations, leading to higher sales, and higher ticket sizes for each sale. This blog discusses the evolution of sales enablement strategy and the measures that should be taken to maximise their effectiveness.
Forbes reports that sales representatives spend only 35% of their professional time doing their job - selling to the customer. The rest goes into CRM, training or making customized presentations for each customer from scratch. Sales enablement helps them with tools that optimize their time so that they can spend more time selling to new customers and upselling to old ones. The following measures can enable organizations to build a more robust sales enablement environment for customers.
- Commit to Sales Enablement Organization-wide
“Culture eats Strategy for breakfast” goes the old management saying. This is especially true of Sales Enablement - which needs to be an organization-wide commitment. Since strategy is a function of higher management, there has to be commitment from leaders to make the sales enablement programme a success. The best way to express this is in terms of a written strategy with clear roles defined for all stakeholders. However, there has to be a cultural understanding throughout the organization that everybody plays a role in the success of the sales team - from IT to marketing to training and development. Only then does the strategy trickle down to line managers and sales representatives.
- Hire Sales Enablers who Actually Enable
The ability to enable somebody requires empathy - not in the sense of emotional alignment, but the ability to think in another person’s shoes. A sales enabler should be able to think like a salesperson - and sales experience often helps. They must be able to predict situations that a salesperson might experience when pitching a new product or variant. Or be able to react to a salesperson’s need for guidance in case something unforeseen arises. It also helps that they know each representative’s strengths and limitations, and can devise training/mentorship accordingly. Lastly, communication skills - both verbal and written - help in both creating collateral and training salespersons to pitch it.
- Train Extensively - and Assess Frequently
As selling has shifted after the pandemic to an online-dominant model, sales training is still playing catch up. New techniques need to quickly replace the old ones - such as reading body language or verbal cues. However, training needs to go beyond that to offer a choice of pace for the learner. Apart from the usual model of lectures and workshops held by trainers (one-to-many), training videos and AI-based role-plays offer powerful one-to-one learning, at a pace the sales representative can choose.
Frequent assessment is critical as a strategy for sales enablement training - so that it can pick up who is picking up what skills at what pace. Interventions can then be tailored accordingly.
- Minimize “let me get back to you on this”
In spite of the best training, sales representatives encounter unexpected situations on the field. Customer objections come in diverse forms, such as “the competitor’s product has this feature”, “your product is too expensive”, “I have been a loyal customer, can I get a discount”, “I did not get good service for the last product I bought from the your company” and so on. In these situations, the sales representative expects live guidance from their managers.
A good sales enablement strategy war-games these situations in advance. Preparing easily retrievable FAQs and battlecards help a salesperson answer objections on the fly, even when in areas of poor network. Minimizing representatives’ response times needs to be a core objective of any sales enablement strategy.
- Integrate Intelligence across the Organization
Sales representatives who are distributed across geographies work solo, with little interaction with other teams. However, the sales enablement team, which exists to support them, must do the opposite. This is necessary if strategies #1 and #4 are to succeed. They need to sit down weekly for collective sessions with other key business functions - such as IT, HR, marketing, training, customer service and of course, the sales operations teams. Misaligned departments can cost as much as 10% of potential revenue.
Collecting and processing data is vital to understand the various bottlenecks involved in a sales representative’s day. These discussions enable greater integration of CRM and sales enablement platforms, as well as learning management systems.
- Map every Situation - And Make it Available to All
No two sales conversations are alike - and that provides a rich database for learning. Collecting and processing this tribal knowledge possessed by the sales representatives is equally critical. An ideal sales enablement platform will empower both representatives and managers to log each conversation, and the learnings from them - the kind of questions the customers ask, their mindset and attitude, and their probability of conversion. These allow the building of an FAQs database, which prepares sales representatives - the organizationng and old - to prepare for every situation and answer every question. It also enables managers to transfer learnings horizontally across the team through the LMS. This reduces the team’s reliance on anecdotal evidence in favour of experiential data.
- Make Sales Collateral Sales-First
The sales teams in most organizations are content to leave the creation of marketing collateral to marketing teams. The collateral being in a one-to-many format works well for marketing, but loses focus in a one-to-one communication format when it comes to sales. The brochures, flyers, explainers, videos and calculators created by the marketing department are useful for explaining the general features of the product - and useful in training. However, the sales representatives on the field, and their managers, have a better understanding of each customer's needs. They can provide them with personalised solutions like adding the name and designation of the prospect, making a better impression and eventually leading to a higher chance of conversion.
A good sales enablement strategy would therefore be to put in place measures that allow representatives to customize sales materials on the fly - such as rearranging presentations to highlight those features that a customer is more interested in (or would benefit from), making specific calculations. Providing the representative with ‘battlecards’ - that allows them to give faster and better answers for customer queries empowers them further. All of this implies that the sales team or department needs to take greater interest in the sales content being created, and insist on avenues for customizability.
- Deliver Sales Content in Real Time
A crucial part of the sales enablement strategy is to make sure that updated collateral is available instantly to sales representatives. In several industries like IT, finance, pharma and automobiles, products and services undergo constant updation. They also involve sales cycles that take multiple meetings over time - and customers expect some information at each stage. This can lead to multiple collaterals confusing the customer, if the latest material does not reach the sales representative in time.
Mobile-based content delivery, embedded within the sales enablement tool, is a simple and effective solution. It makes sure that every sales representative has only the latest collateral, which can be directly forwarded from the app to the customer. This makes sure that multiple variants have not been downloaded to the sales representative’s device, so they do not accidentally share outdated collateral.
- Devise the Right Metrics - and get Technology to Match
For a sales enablement platform to be able to help the organization implement the organization’s sales enablement strategy, the right metrics are necessary. These come from an organization-wide audit, not a standardized set. Some of the metrics that the organization needs to consider include effectiveness of training, time to closure of every customer, speed of accessibility of sales collateral, ratio of success:failure and cause of failure. Once the organization has closed on the metrics, the choice of a specific sales enablement platform becomes an informed decision.
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.
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