Making it easier to sell

As you can find out in our article 'What is sales enablement?', the definition of this term is "An iterative process providing a company's sales organisation and salespeople with resources they need to become more relevant to buyers and close more deals. These resources can include content, software tools, and training that assist in the effective selling of products, solutions, or services."

Your company can't survive without generating business.

Sales enablement is essential because it focuses on increasing the number of deals you win. By providing sales reps with the tools, coaching, and materials they need to convince and get closer to customers, they will sign more deals, and your business will grow.

Even though customers' buying behaviours have changed significantly in the last few decades, the basics are still the same as they always were. People want to get relevant, valuable information that answers their buying questions. They want to feel that the sales rep understands and has solutions to their challenges. And they certainly don't want to feel like just another contact in a colossal database.

If you work with sales enablement effectively, your sales reps will find it easier to build trust with their contacts and convince them that your company is the right partner. And over time, this will lead to tangible results for your bottom line. 

Look at our article 'Why is sales enablement important?' for more reasons to invest time in developing your sales enablement strategy.

Sales enablement has many sides, but the main parts of your organisation involved are marketing and sales. This brings us to a commonly asked question: Who owns sales enablement?

IT, marketing, or sales can own every company's sales enablement.

Marketing can provide sales reps with various resources to promote and sell effectively. These resources could be content like videos, articles, content offers, or product guides that can help reps interact with potential and existing customers. Sales reps share this content with their contacts to help them decide whether they want to convert or purchase.

Additionally, your sales reps can alert marketing about the types of content they feel they lack. Buyer journeys can be long and complex, and a shortage of relevant content for each stage is a common issue. By receiving feedback from sales, marketing can evolve existing content and create new resources that help sales reps reach their target customers and sell more effectively.

A sales enablement approach is vital if you want your sales team to have the resources they require to sell effectively. Your approach should be tailored to the unique needs of your sales team and target groups. When developing a strategy, you should ensure your sales enablement stack includes the content, tools, and information that can help sales convert more leads into customers.

When you get started, keep these sales enablement best practices in mind:

• Align your approach around your CRM and its capabilities - knowing what you must work with before developing a plan is good.
• Work aligned with marketing - the marketing department has the best understanding of which pieces of content perform best, so their feedback is essential when creating a library of sales enablement content.
• Invest in continuous training - guiding your sales team in new tools and approaches will help them close more deals.
• Replicate high-performance best practises - there's no need to reinvent the wheel. If you're aware of a successful sales enablement approach from another company or have been the target of one yourself, try it and build on it. 
• Formalise the process - there's no point in presenting sales with a bank of content and expecting them to use it immediately. There should be a straightforward, defined process of how the content can be used and at which stages of the buyer journey.

There are various aspects of sales enablement, and your approach must include reporting and analysis, sales content optimisation, technology and automation, and sales enablement software. 

Using specific software in your sales enablement plan is not essential, but it does make things easier. A sales enablement platform is more than just a place to store content - a good one should also offer analytics tools, automation features that allow for scalability, and an intuitive interface for organising and assigning content.

To get insight into the practical implementation of your strategy, look at this article - 'How to manage a sales enablement implementation in your organisation.

Data drives the modern sales rep's daily work. However, endless information can overwhelm sales reps and hurt their productivity. That's why all companies need someone who can design a standardised approach that turns this constant stream of data into something usable and understandable.

Standardise reporting

The best way to derive valuable insights from business data is to agree on standardised sales reports. Reporting needs differ from company to company, but standardised sales reports must include the following:

• Activities logged by salespeople 
• Performed demos 
• Won and lost deals 
• Generated/worked leads 

Often, sales leadership will have a rough idea of what these figures are and what reports are relevant to the business. However, they are unlikely to have the technical knowledge to build these reports in the CRM. Sales enablement professionals usually bridge this gap.

These reports can often highlight problems in the sales process that leadership needs to address. For example, if the reports show reps have booked a lot of demos but haven't closed many deals, you need to review your demo process.

Making these types of observations can be done in a sales process audit. This in-depth, data-backed sales process analysis reveals areas where you can improve. Our advice is that you conduct an audit before designing a sales enablement approach so that your decisions are based on sales methods that work.

Marketers might not be the only people in your company who produce content. In fact, at some companies, sales reps and sales support employees create much more content than marketing.

But every minute a sales rep spends creating content is a minute they're not selling, so you don't need to turn your sales team into full-time content creators. However, reps do have a good understanding of the customer and their challenges - which means they can help create personalised, relevant content. When developing sales enablement content, ensure the marketing team works closely with sales to ensure that what they produce is valuable to your potential customers.

You should conduct a content audit alongside the content creation process. Even if your company hasn't explicitly worked with content before, you likely already have lots of it available—for example, brochures, product guides, and price lists. By assessing what you already have and gathering it in one place, you can discover what you need to work on and make it easier for reps to find relevant content.

Examples of relevant sales content that must be audited and organised are:

• Customer case studies
• Whitepapers and eBooks
• Product demo decks
• Pricing and discount information
• Competitive intelligence briefs

You can host your content library using Google Docs or Sharepoint, an internal wiki, your CRM, or a sales enablement platform.

While you audit and organise your sales content, it's essential to remember that times change and that content that was relevant in the past might not be today. You must keep the content library current to enable your sales team to fulfil the target audience's expectations. 

However, some types of sales content can have much longer lifecycles. Here are a couple of examples:

Case studies

Case studies are the most critical content in the sales rep's sales asset library. Most prospects need proof before buying, and case studies provide this.

So, within six months of launching a new product, solution, or service, you should aim to have one or two case studies explaining the offering, the challenges it resolves, and the results for your customer. Use your CRM system to find customers who could potentially be exemplary case study subjects during this period.

Create email templates

Email is the most effective way for sales reps to connect with potential and existing customers. However, many sales reps spend hours agonising over their email copy. They need standardised email templates, directly accessible from their inbox, that can be adjusted depending on the recipient and sent quickly. Templates like these will dramatically increase sales reps' productivity and satisfaction.

If you're just starting with sales enablement, find out what content you should focus on in our article, The best sales enablement content to prioritise.

Ten years ago, sales were a manual business. Today, the reality is very different. Once manual processes can be automated, sales reps can reach more prospects and speed up the sales cycle.

These are a few examples of ways you can use automation to impact your sales process positively:

Create email sequences

Sales enablement professionals, reps, and other team members can use sequences effectively. These are sets of emails that are sent automatically based on a particular set of conditions. For example, a sequence could send a follow-up email to a lead a couple of days after receiving an initial sales email.

Sequences are a form of automation but require manual sales reps' involvement. They enrol contacts in sequences manually based on the contact's interests and past interactions. They can also remove contacts from sequences while running, for example, if a contact wasn't interested in the first email. As with typical marketing automation flows, they only needed to keep running through a list of scheduled actions once they reached the finish line.

Your sales reps likely send many follow-up emails, so automating sequences will save them many hours of unnecessary work in the long run.

Automate prospecting

With this approach, you can partially automate booking sales meetings. When a sales rep sends an email, they can include a link the lead can use to book a meeting with them. Most sales enablement tools have a feature like this - the rep connects their calendar with the tool, and the lead can choose a time for a meeting that suits both of them. The rep is then alerted that the meeting is booked. With a tool like this, reps don't need to email back and forth with a prospect to find a suitable time.

Implement direct messaging

There's no better time to interact and chat with potential and existing customers than when they're on your .com/.xx. Providing a live chat on your website allows sales reps to interact with and guide interested contacts in real-time. However, to avoid wasting sales reps' time with poorly fitting contacts, the sales enablement team should use filtering criteria to ensure that the live chat boxes are only shown to high-quality leads.  

You can invest in sales enablement software to assist with this automation and keep your sales enablement materials and work organised. 

Sales enablement tools allow your sales department and reps to manage all content from a central location. These software solutions enable you to create quickly, share, edit, and manage your materials and resources. All your sales reps can access the information and data they need at any point in time, and your marketing team can stay aligned with sales on what content is best.

Some commonly used sales enablement software solutions are:

HubSpot

HubSpot's various packages and hubs contain many tools, but they offer everything mentioned in this guide: a CRM system, a CMS, automation tools, and sequence tools. HubSpot connects your sales and marketing efforts, and cross-team sales enablement collaboration becomes very easy.

Zendesk

Zendesk allows your sales reps to keep track of all interactions with prospects throughout their entire buyer's journey. Zendesk makes it easier to track which sales enablement tools and resources they use and which they could incorporate in future interactions to close deals.

Highspot

Highspot allows your sales reps to customise different guided experiences and conversations for customers to provide valuable and relevant information that suits their needs. The software integrates all your marketing content, information, and other sales tools to make all aspects of the sales enablement process effective and easy.

Outreach

Outreach gathers your marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to share insights and content across teams efficiently. The software allows you to optimise your customer life cycle to focus on collaboration at scale and engagement to nurture and close sales deals effectively. 

Seismic

Seismic makes it easier for your sales and marketing teams to work seamlessly;  they can share and create different content to reach and convert leads into customers.  Their software uses artificial intelligence to simplify the entire sales cycle as much as possible for your sales organisation and sales reps.