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 identifies 4 critical ways in which ‘enablement’ happens - through training, usability, measurement and customer centricity. In the last two decades, Sales Enablement has emerged as a critical paradigm that aims to overcome limitations in sales training and readiness. It’s objective is to create conditions that allow all members of the sales team to elevate their game. New paradigms of online-offline hybrid sales are becoming commonplace post-pandemic as physical interactions have stopped. Therefore, Sales Enablement has taken on a bigger role in helping organizations adapt to this emerging ecosystem. From a USD 1.7 billion market in 2020, it is projected to grow to USD 7.3 billion by 2028.

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Why is Sales Enablement important? 

Sales has long been seen as the job of a few gifted people, who could make a convincing pitch and ‘talk up’ new customers. However, as organizations scale and the product portfolio diversifies, it becomes humanly impossible to remember all products and their selling points. With a growing sales force, it becomes important that every member of the team should have the right tools to make effective pitches. That is where Sales Enablement comes in. It helps the organization train, align and improve the performance of it's distributed sales team. Here we present a few scenarios in which sales enablement has helped organizations in various industries.

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Insurance

Worldwide, 2020 was a challenging year for the insurance industry, with total insurance premiums shrinking by 1.3% from a high of USD 6.38 trillion. On the other hand, 2021 has been forecast to be a growth year, with premiums rising by 3.3%, accelerating to 3.9% in 2022. The pressure however, is always on the sales advisor to adapt, whether it is a year for growth or meeting challenges. In an industry that was experiencing a 30% attrition rate in 2019, sales enablement also helps to motivate and retain employees. 

This is an industry where no two customers have the same needs (life and non-life insurance) or are at the same life stage. Thus everyone needs a unique policy. The salesperson has to customize their pitch depending on the customer’s age, gender, medical history and family size. They have to make presentations and calculations on the go, for several prospects in a day. They also have to field innumerable questions on what is included and what is not. On an average, it takes about three weeks to close a sale, with about 8 conversations. These situations make it difficult for a sales representative to carry all the information at their fingertips or carry all the product brochures physically to all the meetings.

With a good Sales Enablement platform available on their mobile phones, insurance advisors can go beyond basic data or calculations, to create buyer-focused specific presentations that can be customized during sales conversations in less than a minute.

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Banking

As banks have evolved into branchless entities, selling banking products (loans, cards, deposits and more) has become more challenging. Bank sales staff, often distributed across several states, need different levels of training and mentorship. Old models of in situ training are not able to cope, especially with the pandemic driving all sales meetings online. In a people-driven industry which has seen an uptick in employee retention, Sales Enablement has played a role. A successful/useful good Sales Enablement platform helps sales trainers track each rep personally, and offer them mentorship at different intensities.

Pharma

As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, no industry has seen more turmoil than the pharma industry. With an expected CAGR of 11.34% in 2021-28 from a base of USD 405.52 billion, clearly the expectations from sales teams will grow. This requires them to be trained both efficiently and effectively, especially for remote interactions and hybrid sales approaches.

Yet, no industry has a greater diversity of products and customers than pharma, making the sales cycle highly variable, ranging from a week to several months. Doctors’ questions are very different from questions asked by procurement departments of hospitals. This makes it a challenge for sales advisors to shuffle between multiple stakeholders. A sales enablement tool will help advisors learn their products much better, and also to foresee and answer questions. It might also help stem the attrition rate, which was around 20-30% among junior sales advisors even before the pandemic hit.

In all, the needs of various industries differ in the weightage given to training, usability, measurement and customer centricity. Yet the importance of Sales Enablement cannot be overstated.

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Sales Enablement in 2022

The on-ground picture of sales is a very fast-evolving one from the pre-pandemic times. Although McKinsey reported back in 2018 that B2B digital sales could drive revenue growth fivefold, B2B has long trailed B2C. The pandemic left sales teams departments no choice but to go digital, leaving them unprepared. However, as McKinsey reported in 2020, B2B customers actually prefer remote interactions, and are comfortable with spending up to USD 500,000 online. Sales Enablement has helped reduce content costs and increase sales productivity in several organizations. With rising awareness of sales enablement among organizations, the industry is predicted to grow annually at a rate of 19.4%.

As 2022 will see greater emphasis on omni-channel marketing driven by digital as well as AI-enabled analytics, Sales Enablement platforms need to evolve their usability and customer-centricity.

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Sales Enablement for Indian Organizations

It is often argued that the Indian sales market is not as evolved as the Western markets, and hence Sales Enablement is a concept that is too evolved for India. However, our experience with leading Indian firms in several sectors including pharma, banking and insurance has shown that this is far from the truth. This is more so as the Indian economy has steadily integrated with the global one over the past three decades. As the complexity of the sales process has evolved, so have the expectations of sales representatives. This only makes Sales Enablement rise in importance to Indian firms, which are looking to restore their top line and bottom line in the post-pandemic recovery.

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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.