Sales Enablement Strategy [+7 Tips for Earning More Sales]
Implementing a sales enablement strategy could help you strengthen your team, optimize your selling process, and earn more sales from high-value leads. A sales enablement plan will help you create a clearer path for your sales reps to close more leads.
On this page, we’ll address what sales enablement is, how to create a sales enablement strategy, and provide seven tips for small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) looking to get started with creating a sales enablement strategy.
If you want to learn more about how this tactic will help improve your sales process, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about maximizing your sales enablement tactics.
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What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement aims to produce an efficient and effective sales process, as well as a knowledgeable sales team using relevant content, knowledge, and tools that help you throughout the sales cycle.
With sales enablement, you ensure your sales team has easy access to all the information they need. Whether it’s content or tools, your sales team has the proper resources to sell more effectively.
A sales enablement plan ensures you provide everything your sales team needs to succeed. An effective sales enablement plan will help your team learn how to close more sales and connect with customers.
Sales enablement allows your sales team to engage buyers and increase sales results effectively. A good strategy will align with your marketing and product messages and make it easy for your sales reps to sell to prospects.
Why does sales enablement matter?
Sales enablement is crucial for your business’s success.
It’s rapidly becoming one of the essential parts of the selling process.
Without sales enablement, you’ll struggle to keep up with your competitors that use it. These competitors will deliver more relevant content at a faster pace, leaving your business in the dust.
With sales enablement, you can catch your audience’s attention early. You make an excellent first impression and a lasting impact on them. As a result, they’ll be more likely to engage with your brand than a competitor’s.
What are the benefits of sales enablement?
When you invest in sales enablement, you’ll experience numerous benefits for your business:
- You’ll provide sales reps with access to content at the right time. Having access to the right content results in more sales. Your sales team will work more effectively, which will improve your company’s close rates and profits.
- You’ll improve collaboration between marketing and sales. Sales enablement allows your teams to have the same information across the board. Your marketing team will have a more accurate idea of the types of customers to target. Likewise, your sales team will have access to more relevant, customer-focused content to get those leads to convert.
- You’ll have a more prepared team. Sales enablement provides you with the resources to create a well-trained staff. You’ll create more effective salespersons that feel confident in their sales role, which can have a short- and long-term impact on your business.
How do I create a sales enablement strategy?
A sales enablement plan will put you on the fast track to success. If you want to know how to get started with creating a sales enablement strategy for your business, check out these four simple steps.
1. Set your goals
Before you dive in too deep, you must set goals for your campaign. Goals are essential because they help set up and guide your strategy. If you don’t have goals in mind for your campaign, your sales team won’t have any direction.
First, determine what you want to achieve with your sales enablement strategy. You’ll want to set specific goals, like “Increase sales by 30% in the next 24 months.” Don’t set generic goals, like “Increase sales,” as they will be challenging to measure and mark as achieved.
Don’t set unrealistic goals, either.
If you have the goal, “Increase sales by 50% in six months,” and it’s not feasible, don’t set your sales team up for failure. It’s essential to set goals that offer a balance between helping you meet sales goals and setting achievable goals.
2. Think about the type of content your sales team needs
Content pieces play a crucial role in the sales process. When your sales team delivers the right material at the right time to your audience, it increases the likelihood that they’ll choose your business.
To know the type of content you need, you must audit your current content.
It’s essential to look at your current content plan and see how your content performs. You’ll want to know which content resonates well with your audience and focus on building more content like it.
Your content should engage and interest your audience. It should provide your audience with valuable information. Content helps establish you as an authority, but it also helps educate your audience.
When you’re creating your content strategy, ask yourself these questions:
- What content performs the best with our clients?
- What content currently exists?
- Where are there gaps in content?
These questions will help you create a better and more focused content strategy to integrate into your sales enablement plan.
3. Establish your resources
Your resources can make or break your sales team’s success. If your organization doesn’t have access to the proper resources, it can prevent them from closing valuable sales for your business.
Sales enablement tools help your sales team stay organized and work more efficiently. These tools can help automate emails, compile and pull content, schedule appointments, and keep information about a lead stored in one place.
Your team needs the right resources to be successful.
If you equip them with the tools and information to help them make sales, they’ll bring in more customers for your business.
4. Determine how you’ll measure success
Once you have your goals, content, and tools established, you’ll want to determine how you’ll measure success. If you’re going to help your sales team perform and grow, you must consistently review metrics to ensure you’re accomplishing the goals and results you desire.
You must establish key performance indicators (KPIs).
These KPIs are metrics that help you determine the success of your campaign.
Some metrics you can monitor include:
- Calls to your business
- Duration of time spent on a piece of content
- Number of pages visited after reading content
- Forms completed
- Conversions
These metrics help you monitor the success of your salespeople and digital marketing efforts.
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7 sales enablement tips for small-to-midsized businesses
If you’re ready to start creating an effective sales enablement strategy for your business, check out these seven tips.
1. Hire the right sales reps
To have a successful sales enablement strategy, you must start by hiring the right sales reps.
Your sales team plays a vital role in helping you be successful.
It’s essential to hire qualified sales reps to help you meet your goals. You’ll want to collaborate with your hiring department to find the right kind of people to sell your products and work alongside your current sales team with ease.
You want to hire people who are passionate about your brand and can actively sell your products to others. Your sales enablement strategy will help you determine the type of salesperson that will fit your company culture best.
2. Align your sales strategy with your customer’s journey
The customer journey is essential to your sales strategy.
You need to understand how your prospects go from being leads to clients. When you follow and understand the customer’s journey, you can create a better sales strategy for your sales and marketing teams.
Research how your audience becomes familiar with your brand. Look at how they discover your brand, engage with it, and ultimately choose your brand. See how they interact with your brand afterwards too.
Learn what influences your audience to make purchases and which factors they consider when making a purchase. Uncover what matters to them so you can provide them with the right information when they need it.
When your sales team understands the customer’s journey, they can provide them with the proper information at the right time. They can share content that helps them in the right part of the sales cycle.
Someone at the beginning of the customer’s journey may only want preliminary information about your business. Someone at the end of the customer’s journey will want more in-depth information about your products that convinces them to convert.
For example, a bride looking for a florist may want initial information about choosing flowers. A bride that is further in the sales cycle may need a portfolio of examples of the florist’s work for a wedding theme similar to their own.
If you were a florist, you’d want to cater to both these brides.
When you align your sales strategy with your customer’s journey, you’ll create a more effective sales enablement strategy for your business.
3. Focus on collaboration and communication
If you want to be successful in creating a sales enablement strategy, you need to foster an environment of communication and collaboration. Your sales and marketing teams need to work together to help you earn more sales.
When there’s a lack of communication between departments, it can make it difficult for your teams to succeed. Sales enablement will allow you to create better communication between team members.
Everyone should be on the same page about your business and brand. You want to establish strong communication between your teams to ensure they’re spreading the same message about your business, products, or services.
When you have open communication between your sales and marketing teams, you can engage prospects more effectively.
Sales enablement tools will allow you to keep a single database of information that both your sales and marketing team can access. You create consistency among departments so they can spread the same message about your brand.
If you make changes in your process, you can quickly notify both teams about the changes. It keeps your brand and messages cohesive. If you want to create a sales enablement strategy that works, align your sales and marketing teams.
4. Use sales enablement tools to make selling easier
Sales enablement tools will help make the entire sales process easier for your sales team.
These tools allow your team to work efficiently on making sales for your company.
With sales enablement tools, your team can stay organized with the sales process. They can easily keep track of leads and where they’re at in the sales process. These programs help your team compile information about your leads in one place.
Other sales enablement tools help you automate processes. You can easily send emails, appointment reminders, and schedule call times with clients. It enables you to simplify basic tasks so your sales team can spend more time serving potential clients.
As an example, MarketingCloudFX is an excellent sales enablement tool.
It allows you to automate different sales processes to help you focus more on selling. You can record calls, nurture leads, and send emails. When you can do all these actions in one place, it makes it easier for your team to be efficient with your sales process.
If you want to have an effective sales process, sales enablement tools will help you do it.
5. Make improvements to your initial sales enablement plan
If you want to have a successful sales enablement strategy, you must continuously optimize your strategy. The market, technology, processes, and people change. Your plan must adapt to these changes so it can stay relevant.
When you’re running your sales enablement strategy, monitor critical metrics for your campaign.
You want to track your efforts to ensure they’re still useful for your audience.
Metrics, like conversions and calls to your business, can hint at and reveal the effectiveness of your tactics. You can also use metrics for sales goals, like achieving a specific close rate or increasing conversions for calling or contacting your company.
By monitoring your strategy, you’ll see what works and what doesn’t. You can see if some techniques are no longer effective in your market. It’s a great way to help you adapt and change your approach as necessary, as well as stay ahead of competitors.
If you want to succeed with your sales enablement strategy, monitor and optimize your efforts. This proactive step will help you create a better campaign for your business, which means a strong sales team and better sales numbers.
6. Get feedback from your sales team
If you want to improve your sales enablement strategy, go straight to the source of your sales: your sales team. They will provide you with valuable insight into your sales enablement strategy and how you can improve it.
You can use your sales team to get feedback on your current process. They can provide you with information on what you’re missing in your current plan.
When you implement a new sales enablement strategy, rely on your sales team for feedback about the changes.
Asking for feedback will help you refine your sales plan. You can improve your tactics by providing your sales team with the resources they need or enhancing parts of the process that aren’t working.
Your sales team is one of the most valuable tools for helping you create a better sales enablement strategy. By relying on their insight, you can create a plan that improves the sales process and helps you earn more sales.
7. Hire a consultant
If you want to get the most out of your sales enablement strategy, hire a sales enablement consultant. A consultant can help you analyze your current tactics and improve those strategies to drive more sales. They’ll help guide you towards the right tools to use for your plan.
A consultant will help you analyze your tactics to see where you can make changes to drive better results. You may have gaps in your sales enablement strategy, for example. A sales enablement consultant can help spot those gaps and tell you how to fix them.
When you’re revamping your plan, it can be challenging to spot any flaws in it. Hiring an outside consultant gives you a fresh set of eyes that can analyze your strategy better and help you improve it.
It’s also great to hire a sales consultant if you haven’t created a sales enablement strategy previously. A consultant will help guide you in the right direction towards developing a plan that works for your business.
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Invest in a sales enablement strategy today
A sales enablement strategy will help your sales team work more efficiently to drive results for your company. By creating a sales enablement plan, you’ll earn more clients and revenue for your business.
If you want to learn more about sales enablement, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about making MarketingCloudFX a part of your sales enablement strategy and business.