Obviously, elevating sales performance is a key part of sales enablement. Selling is one of the toughest jobs out there, with sales reps dealing with constant rejection and always facing uphill climbs as they work to qualify leads and close deals.
There's a wide range of factors that make selling challenging, but as years go on sales departments have become increasingly more effective when it comes to tracking and measuring sales performance, finding patters, and using information like that to elevate sales reps' performances on a day-to-day basis.
As a sales enablement professional, you should be aiming to support reps as they sell and a major part of that is making them more effective sellers. Better sales performance leads to a more confident rep, and a more confident rep leads to better performance. It's a loop which any sales organization wants to end up in.
Sales analytics and metrics
Before you start to understand your organization's sales performance, and which reps do well in which situation, you need to have a way of analyzing the performance.
Sales metrics can be great, but they also have the potential to be overwhelming and distracting if you don't know what you're looking for. The best sales enablement professionals will focus on the metrics that matter, and base their decisions around those.
Those metrics may vary from organization to organization, however. Whether it's leading or lagging indicators (covered in the article below), there's pros to using most sales metrics. It's just a matter of deciding which fit your current needs best.
This goes for metrics analyzing sales enablement's performance as well. Positive sales performance can definitely indicate that your enablement efforts are working and making an impact, as ultimately sales enablement impact is measured in success.
Once you've decided on what metrics you're going to track and why, it's just a matter of analyzing them. Easy, right?
Not necessarily. It's one thing having the metrics in front of you and knowing what you want to do with them. It's another to actually extract tangible value out of the data that you've gathered.
Sales enablers are constantly re-evaluating how they track both the sales performane of their reps as well as the performance of the enablement department's initatives.
In our Measuring Sales Enablement report, we asked almost 300 people working in sales enablement how they tie actual, tangible sales results to their activities - onboarding, training, content - and how they can use this info to optimize what they deliver and continuously improve revenue.
Sales effectiveness, engagement, and development
As a sales enablement professional, your goal is to increase sales effectiveness from your reps. One of the best ways to do that is to develop your reps both as sellers and as people.
We're seeing a growing emphasis on things like personalization and social selling over the past few years. If you can develop your sellers in a way that allows them to form a connection with a prospect that goes beyond just a pitch you're likely to see greater effectiveness across the board.
When a rep interacts with a prospect on a deeper level, while possessing industry knowledge, it increases their motivation because their work feels valuable. They're not just trying to sell, they're also having important conversations and providing insights to the prospects that they contact.
That's just one way of many to motivate reps, but it's food for thought as reps look to become more independent and skilled year after year.
Of course, before any of that, you have to make sure that your reps are effective, comfortable, and confident on the phones and over emails. Being knowledgeable and friendly enough to develop a relationship with the prospect if the rep is confident in making contact in the first place.
The motivation and confidence to go out and engage with a prospect is a really key part of a sales reps development and you should aim to facilitate that as a sales enabler.
Beyond personal development, sales enablement does have a wide range of options for when it comes to increasing sales effectiveness through enablement initiatives and training and coaching.
Whether it's your playbooks, battlecards, demo coaching, or whatever else, there are always ways you can use enablement to maximize seller effectiveness.
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