Sales Enablement refers to the process by which a sales team is equipped with specific soft and hard skills that ultimately help in effective sales enablement and, in turn, increase sales.

Many factors should be considered while making your team equipped with sales enablement skills that become a reason for high-performing companies ability to achieve success and a highly effective environment.

This article will explain ten sales enablement practices that will be of great help to sales enablement teams. We have gone through many case studies, looked at different prospects and customers, viewed sales enablement tools, and then made a comprehensive sales enablement plan for you. Following the tips mentioned in this list will help you a lot. Be sure to read the whole article, and don’t miss a single point that may be important.

Where does Sales Enablement Come in?

Surveys conducted by various companies show that sales enablement targets the sales department while also touching the marketing department. However, a small portion of it is spread across the whole team.

Sales play a leading role in the success of a firm. Due to this reason, the main target of sales enablement is the sales reps. However, marketing also goes shoulder to shoulder with sales when it comes to playing a part in the company’s growth.

You make sure that your company is a delight to work with through sales enablement. It helps bring new people who try out your products and makes them regular customers who come again and again.

What Should Your Goals Be?

Sales enablement is an essential part of your company’s leadership all the way up to the CEO. When strategic, targeted, and focused improvements and training can enable your team to yield great products, you realize that sales enablement is necessary.

With sales enablement, you aim to increase your team’s chemistry and increase your company’s opportunities for growth and learning. An added benefit is that a highly functional sales team attracts skilled sales people who want to provide you and your company with their services. You can achieve all of this through sales enablement.

It would help if you aimed to make your company grow and prosper with the help of sales enablement. However, it isn’t as easy as it seems. Implementing the sales enablement strategies would require you to be persistent and consistent. 

However, if you have a precise aim set in your mind, adopt the right sales enablement technologies and leverage valuable tips regarding sales enablement best practices, you can achieve MASSIVE Outcomes in sales enablement and sales velocity acceleration.

Making a Sales Enablement Plan

Now that you have learned everything you need to know about sales enablement and the importance of sales enablement practices in your company’s growth, you need to make a plan which you will follow throughout your training program.

You don’t need to worry as the tips we have prepared shall make it very easy for you to devise a sales enablement plan.     

1. Be Ready to Adapt and Work Accordingly 

If you want to run successful sales enablement programs, then be ready to adapt, as you must be ready to take on the role of a sales consultant. You must have an open approach and a friendly attitude towards the behavior of your staff.

You must have the ability to understand your sales representative and help them in boosting their performance. Research has shown that 80 to 90 percent of the time, underperformance is caused by the environment of the workspace.

A substantial part of a good working environment is derived from logical and easy to use processes, and often times a core component is teh technology stack a seller is required to use.

If you want your sales rep team to deliver excellence, then adapt on the go.  

2. Educate Your Sales Team

Your sales team is the backbone of your company. The way they perform will directly determine the future of your company. They are the top of the spear in customer interactions.

If you want to increase your chances of growing your company revenue, you need to equip your sales team with all the possible knowledge about your product. Conducting sessions once a month might be effective but keep in mind that retention of information fades quickly with other priorities.

It would help if you equipped your sales team with complete knowledge of your products, value, and other essential elements. This starts and ends with an effective sales enablement content strategy and a complementing technology to drive access to the right information at the right time.

When targeted sales training is given to your sales reps, you will eventually see a quick and steady boom in your company’s performance. Sales reps who are new to your company usually don’t know what and how to say things they want.It’s your job to give them the knowledge and means to articulate their value proposition and win new business. 

3. The Use of Sales Enablement Technology

Consider technology as your best friend in this journey. Think of all the customer experiences you have had and look at ways with which you could increase the overall performance of your company. Instead of making a seller spend 3 – 6 hours creating a single powerpoint presentation, or spending 30 minutes writing a sales email with commonly asked FAQs, you can use technology to automate and accelerate their selling effectiveness.

Imagine a sales rep could answer a series of five or six questions and then based on those answers a system would generate – fully automated – a perfectly tailored and personalized output or set of outputs specifically customized to that opportunity’s unique needs. In seconds instead of hours.

The integration of technologies in our lives has made things that much easier for us. If you want to devise successful sales enablement strategies, then equip your team with tech and tools that will help them.

4. Finding The Sales Enablement Sweet Spot

You can create a lot of excellent content through marketing. But the reality is that your sales rep never uses 90 to 95 percent of that content. This is because it is hard to keep track of all of the permutations and combinations of content for each deal in a traditional content management system. 

When it comes to critical moments such as securing deals with the customers, the sales reps don’t know what to do because they don’t have the content or lack the confidence to use the content needed.

This situation is why you need to embrace a next-generation Modular Component® system for managing content, and pair that system with an automated agile curation engine to ensure the seller can access the right information at the right time, without having to keep it all in memory.

By embracing a next generation system you’ll be able to find the sweet spot between marketing and sales and align them together if you want to increase your company’s sales. 

Both the marketing and sales teams want to boost your company’s sales, and adopting a Modular Component® system for managing content can establish better coordination between these two teams, and desilo critical information to accelerate sales velocity.

5. Choosing Your Team

It can be tough to find the right people for your team, as simple as it seems. With critical labor shortages globally this is now more of a challenge than ever before and the retention of existing talent is a valuable asset that cannot be overlooked. With a certain percentage of turnover being natural, the first thing you should look for in people you want to hire should have prior experience and a flexible mindset to adopt new sales enablement strategies that may not have been offered at their previous job.

They should have the ability to access situations, and they should have the ability to solve problems on the go, and provide feedback on your sales enablement strategy in realtime. 

Be sure to handpick the people you want to be a part of your team, as it would be of great help later on. You don’t want to choose such people that will drag you and your company down due to preconceived notions or keeping to the status quo. You must have a team that embraces your newly implemented sales enablement technology vision. 

6. Bring Your Whole Team Together

Sales enablement programs should not only be confined to your sales or marketing team. You should run this program across the board. Every department of your company is essential. It cannot be stressed enough that consistency is the key to running a successful program.

You should have such sales enablement content to ensure that your team members can benefit. Your team should properly understand how sales work and what approach should be considered when thinking of sales. 

Having other departments, such as research and development, training, and marketing contribute Modular Component® of content into the same standardized system will greatly benefit the sellers because now they have better access to higher quality content in an easily accessible format.

Each part of the customer experience, whether the sales department, marketing, customer care, or the general staff, should all provide an excellent experience to your customers. For this reason, you should equip your team with a good sales enablement plan. Keep all of your team members in the loop. Don’t think of anyone as unimportant. It is essential to move together as a team if you want to succeed and increase your sale.

A happy team member brings in a satisfied customer. The primary purpose of sales enablement is to ensure that every team member gets equipped with the proper knowledge of using technology and skills that would help the company out.

You don’t want to build a team that lacks chemistry. If you want to avoid this, be sure to take every member into account. Yes, your primary focus as a sales enablement leader should be the sales and marketing team, but you should also focus on other team members.

7. Train All Team-members in Sales Enablement Solutions 

Studies have shown that constant training is required to successfully train people to be equipped with such skills and knowledge that will help them grow and make them more valuable to the company.

Consistency is the key. You should constantly keep your team in the loop throughout your sales cycle by organizing regular training sessions. You must also keep your Modular Components® of content up to date.

You can even have simple discussions with your team and get constructive criticism on ways with which you can increase the overall creativity of your company.

It might seem complex and tiring at first, but is it a crucial part of sales enablement. Constancy is the key to success. Never give up and keep on working hard. Be sure to take every team member on board on this sales enablement journey. A single left-out person can be the difference between good and bad companies. Remember that you aim to increase your companies’ sales by constantly iterating on the strategy and process.

8. Consider your Customer

The foundation of a great business is built on the success of its customers. 

Have you ever thought about who is the most critical part of your company? While everyone might have a different answer to this, the fact is that your customer is the most crucial part of your company. It is your customer on whom your whole company is reliant.

While making a sales enablement plan, ensure that you provide your team with comprehensive data on how to deal with the customer properly. Think of yourself as the customer, and then think of what you expect from a company whose products you will buy. This simple thinking will help you and your team a lot.

Make appropriate Modular Components® of sales content that should provide solutions to your customers’ problems and questions. Be sure to let your team, especially the marketing and sales leader, know that the company’s main priority is the success of its customers.

Increasing your customer service would give you outstanding results in returning customers and acquiring new customers.

Customer satisfaction should be your top priority for the company’s goals. Nothing is more damaging to the company than an angry and unsatisfied customer. Sales enablement primarily focuses on equipping your team with such skills so that they can quickly provide the customer with the right information at the right time, building trust, and leading to a higher win rate.

9. Coordinate between Teams

Another thing which is very important and is to be kept in mind when performing sales enablement is that it makes your team members talk to their peers more often. A good sales rep will always communicate with his peers very often. 

He will be more than happy to share tips with his peers based on his personal experience, and he will also be open to new recommendations from his coworkers. You, from the start, must shape the minds of your team members such that they think of each other as a family and work accordingly.

Providing your team members with the confidence that they can openly talk to each other on different matters is very important and is a crucial part of a sales-enablement plan.

Research has proved that chemistry among the team members of a cooperative firm plays a vital role in its success. Be sure to talk to your team about this and let them know the importance of talking and conversation.

10. Use the Ideal Simple Sales Enablement Platform

To realize and achieve success on your sales enablement strategy requires the effective implementation of a technology solution that can drive the forward thinking change required for success. You will require a platform that delivers the right information, to the right person, at the right time. 

Additionally the platform must be flexible enough to balance the need for specific features and minimizing complexity so the seller can focus on what they do best, selling.

By creating an ideal platform, we are referring to providing your team with all the assets and tools you can get so that they can work together in ways never seen before. Having a place that delivers and enables data-driven analysis regarding the type of content, different strategies, and different things that might be effective in certain situations will boost your sales by an incredible number.

Iternal’s Enablement app has been designed to drive functionality, and simplicity – while ensuring the seller receives the right information, at the right time.

A Final Word

All of the departments of your organization should be interlinked, and regular sessions of all of your team members talking and sharing experiences should be made commonplace.

In the end, it is all about making a family. Always think of your team members as part of your family. Doing so would make them trust you even more, and they will make work even more challenging for you, giving you a boost to your sales and company performance. 

Congratulations, as you have now equipped yourself with the knowledge to pave the way for your success. Be sure to note down the points you thought were essential or related to you more, or you can bookmark this page so that whenever you feel like forgetting something, you can quickly refresh your memory.

In this list, we have stated the principles and foundations of sales enablement, and we have given you such practices to follow that will make you a favorite of your team members. 

The final advice before starting your epic journey is to always stay true to your goal and be honest and humble with your team members. They are the backbone of your company, especially the sales and marketing team.

Always think of ways with which you can enable your team to bring the best out of themselves forward, in turn driving growth for your company. With this, we wish you the best of luck as you begin to implement your sales enablement strategy!