One of the hard truths of business is that your sales team is only as good as the environment allows them to be -- meaning the office culture, their training and tools, and so on. Without the right support, a sales team will always drift toward mediocrity. If your sales are in a slump -- or if they're simply not where you'd like them to be -- that's where sales enablement comes in. With the power of sales enablement, you can "power up" your sales team and start bringing in the revenue you want.
What Is Sales Enablement?
First, let's talk about what sales enablement actually is. It's not a single process or tool, but an overall strategy that includes coaching, training, technology, and processes that will support and empower your sales team. In short, it's about giving your sales team the support, training and tools to be the best they can be.
So what does that look like in practice? For starters, it means new team members get onboarded in a timely and efficient manner, with quality sales content and training on how best to use it. Your sales team's performance should be tracked so team members know where they could use improvement. There should also be strong communication between the marketing and sales teams, and a long-term enablement strategy to keep things moving in the right direction.
The Three Pillars
To make all this happen, sales enablement is usually broken down into what are called the Three Pillars.
Training
First and foremost, your sales team should be equipped with all the knowledge and skill you can impart on them -- not just in terms of sales, but also interpersonal skills, customer service, marketing strategy, and soft skills. They should also be conversant in the history, vision, strategy and goals of your company. When everyone's on the same page about what you're trying to accomplish, things get better for everyone.
Tools
Nothing can drag a sales team down so much as tools that do more harm than good -- outdated manual sales systems can slow things down and lead to lost opportunities, and older software is often subject to security issues and bugs. Having one centralized tool -- namely, customer service software -- can help your team be more efficient at acquiring and maintaining those valuable customers.
Resources
Much as your sales team needs a good tool for interacting with leads and clients, they also need access to as much relevant information as you can give them -- informational articles, video tutorials, case studies, workshops and more. It's important to remember that the world of sales isn't static. Industry trends change all the time, as do customer habits, patterns, and friction points. If you want your sales team to be truly effective, they need to be kept up-to-date on all of this.
How Sales Enablement Can Benefit Your Organization
So that's how you can start integrating a sales enablement strategy into your business -- but what exactly are the benefits? As it turns out, they're numerous. Among other things, a solid sales enablement strategy can:
- Empower your sales team by creating more autonomy and easing reliance on management.
- Boost your sales team's productivity.
- Improve cross-functional collaboration between different departments -- for example, your sales, marketing, and finance departments.
- Increase conversions and drive revenue.
- Improve customer satisfaction and customer service levels.
- Increase customer retention.
Developing a Sales Enablement Strategy
Now that we have a good idea of what a sales enablement strategy can do for your business, how can you best start integrating it into your daily operations? Here are a few pointers to help you get started.
First, make sure you align your sales enablement strategy with your organizational strategy. This means determining which KPI you're hoping to increase most with your enablement strategy, and emphasizing training and resources that will move you toward that goal.
Next, create a robust onboarding program for new sales employees. Having a standard process for getting new employees going fast will reduce wasted time and duplicated effort and avoid needless delays.
Develop a "sales playbook" so your team has a clearly established and uniform process for how to go about landing sales. This should be one of your foremost training tools and be referred to often.
Make sure your team is conversant with both their own sales tools and the ones customers might use, such as customer service apps. Implement an ongoing, continuous education / training policy, so that your team is always current on the relevant customer support software. This will avoid any awkward moments or delays should something in the software change.
Create support structures between management and your sales team, as well as opportunities and support for peer-to-peer learning.
Develop a coaching or mentoring program.
Integrating a sales enablement strategy into your business isn't likely to be an easy or fast proposition -- but the payoffs over time stand to be considerable as your newly empowered and informed sales team levels up and makes your sales stronger than ever.
