Knowledge, skill, helpfulness. These are just some of the traits possessed by a successful sales enablement professional.
Build a team of people who combine these elements with both traditional leadership skills and sales expertise and you're on your way to creating a killer sales enablement team.
It's about having evolving concept which acts a driving force for sales, operations, and marketing, helping them promote customer acquisition and ultimate revenue growth.
A poorly organized sales enablement team can stop your reps from reaching their revenue-generating potential. At worst? A not-fit-for-purpose sales enablement team can easily damage your customer acquisition efforts and ultimately result in a dip in sales conversion rate, and a decrease in revenue growth.
Obviously, that's an alarming situation for any business to find itself in.
Therefore, organizations need to be cautious and meticulous in building up an efficient, skillful, and reliable sales enablement team, which will help them to accelerate their business growth.
As time goes on, we continue to see countless companies deploying sales enablement functions with incredible results.
But how do you deploy this game-changing function?
Here are a few keys to remember when deploying an effective sales enablement function:
1. Know the objectives
Sales enablement must know the organization's desired goals and objectives. The team should collectively work towards achieving those goals and objectives in measurable, achievable ways.
The key is to be scientific and methodical in determining how sales enablement will contribute to those wider business objectives.
2. Know the customer
As important as it is for the sales team to be customer-focused, the sales enablement team equally needs to be customer-centric as well.
Oftentimes, sales enablement teams are focused solely on sales team’s requirements rather than the customer.
In my view, they must learn to be customer-focused alongside meeting the sales team’s requirements. This ensures the information provided to sales team is effective and is used efficiently throughout the entire sales cycle.
Since the ultimate goal is to deliver the best experience to a prospect or buyer, sales enablement must know them inside and out. They must understand customer’s pain points and challenges, and must be able to recognize buying signals and trigger events that are related to that prospect’s problems.
3. Define strategy and execution methods
Don't forget about how significant sales enablement is in the big-picture. While focusing on small, day-to-day pieces is important, sales enablement plays a vital role in defining broad, organization-wide strategies that help identify gaps and opportunities.
Ultimately, sales enablement is about putting plans in place that can deliver immediate and long-term results.
4. Practice strong communication
Sales enablement leaders are responsible for building strong communication between sales reps, sales managers, and sales leaders to ensure the growth and success of sales team. They establish a regular cadence for communication with different parties across the company in a variety of ways through one-on-one conversations, team meetings, email messages, or conference calls. Doing so, they promote opportunities for salespeople to get 360 evaluation and feedback, such as peer-to-peer learning and sales coaching.
5. Training and knowledge reinforcement
Sales enablement must invest a good amount of time and energy in providing training on a number of topics, including:
- Product training
- Sales training
- Tools/technology training
- Market and industry training
- Critical thinking and problem solving
You are the team that continuously checks for the reinforcement of knowledge and training in reps, thereby keeping them fresh and up-to-date on the latest product releases or service updates, and sales practices.
Last but not least is to help reps to understand the sales strategy of the organization.
6. Create quality content
It’s sales enablement's job to create the right type of content and make it easily available for reps to access and utilize to drive more deals.
By creating quality content, sales enablement helps reps stand out amongst the noise, as well as aiding them in establishing expertise and building trust with prospects.
The team should develop case studies that speak to every type of customer, whether it’s by industry, company size, or specific use case. Additionally, sales enablement must optimize content utilization by diversifying various content promotion channels as well.
7. Adopt the right tools and technology
It’s also sales enablement’s job to establish a process to find and then adopt tools and technology.
Leveraging the latest tools and technology to enhance your current sales strategy is essential, so it’s the duty of the sales enablement department to choose the relevant tools that streamlines processes, saves time and helps to deliver strong results.
Whether it's customer relationship management (CRM) systems, learning management systems (LMS), or something else, it's important to have the right tools to enhance your reps performance.
8. Streamlining and improving workflow
At its heart, sales enablement identifies and analyzes problems, introduces, and streamlines a process workflow that improves productivity.
Since the one of the key objectives of sales enablement is to increase a rep’s active selling time, workflow integrations are very important.
They make sure that reps spend less time going back and forth, from tool to tool. Having tools that automate and seamlessly integrate with all the other tools reduces time spent on admin-related tasks, like logging activity, transferring data, and finding the right content.
There you have it, a list of things to keep in mind as you deploy sales enablement in your organization. If you're new to enablement it might seem like a lot, but luckily SEC's membership is packed with 100s of hours of enablmenet video content to help you elevate your game.
