What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is about giving your salespeople the information, content, and tools they need to sell more effectively: to increase pipeline, win rates, and deal sizes. And it is an ongoing process that can include guidance and training to help sales teams better engage customers and prospects.

The Sales Enablement Strategy Basics:

A basic sales enablement strategy should include the following components, which will have a direct impact on the performance of your sales team.
 

Intelligence:

If your salespeople don’t know what they need (or should) know, they’re dead in the water. It’s up to you to make sure they have access to the information on your products, the competition, new customers, updated pricing, etc.-they need to plot their course to the win.
 

Content & Sharing:

As the saying goes, content is king. In order for your salespeople to make their mark in the mind of a prospective buyer, they need to share content that connects with that buyer’s interests. They also need to tools to share that content, and that doesn’t just mean email. Social sharing tools are critical as well.
 

Prospecting:

There’s more data out there on whoever it is you need to reach than ever before. The world of prospecting tools and databases is rapidly evolving, which means it’s critically important that you stay on top of and provide your people with whatever the best-of-breed solutions are at that point.
 

Training & Coaching:

Teach a man to fish… The whole world of sales is in a state of flux. Strategies, tactics, channels, tools, etc. are changing every month. Providing your salespeople with continuing training and coaching is the only way you’re going to ensure they stay ahead of the pack.
 

Tracking & Reporting:

In many ways, sales enablement has similar responsibilities to marketing when it comes to tracking and reporting. To really understand what’s working (and what isn’t), and how to improve you need to have data and it needs to be as holistic as possible. It should also tie back to basic, core objectives, most commonly pipeline, win rates, and deal sizes.

So, why is sales enablement so important for sales teams and your company?.

Research by Aberdeen has shown that 84% of sales reps at companies with best-in-class sales enablement strategies achieve their quotas, compared with 55% at companies with average strategies and 15% for companies with weak strategies. And that’s one important stat, we’ll dive into some more further down.

By focusing on sales enablement, it allows a large number of salespeople to achieve and exceed quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable way.

Essentially, it helps the entire sales organization work together as there is no dependence on a handful of sales members who are high achievers.

Sales enablement provides all sales people with the best practices, knowledge, tools, and resources required to be successful as a whole. The high achievers of the sales team can then be the go-to and leaders of a sales enablement strategy and program to help others in the sales department grow.

Who is responsible for sales enablement?

The responsibilities of sales enablement will typically fall on the collection of marketing and sales teams where they will work together to better enable overall sales results. However, there could be a dedicated person to sales enablement, someone who facilitates and coordinates all the needs between sales and marketing teams.

Sales and marketing need to work together on content and resource need to ensure sales is armed with all the content needed in the various stages of the buyer’s journey.

Marketing will also be able to provide guidance and training to sales when it comes to social and marketing more efficiently. This doesn’t mean sales teams are clueless by any means, but marketing can help lead the charge.

Yet, sales leaders also play an important role in ensuring marketing is creating what they need and that the sales enablement program is being practiced by other sales members.

Social media networks are a goldmine for salespeople.

It’s where prospects, customers, and potential buyers are doing research and are highly active, especially on LinkedIn and Twitter. This is typically known as social selling, which you might be quite familiar with as well.

Salespeople need to be on social media to connect and build relationships with prospects, but in order to succeed and build a rapport, they also need to be armed with the right type of content.

If you aren’t sharing the right type of content or interacting consistently, you very well could be leaving opportunities on the table. But not even just opportunities, the chance to even build more awareness for your company.

Here is some of the content your sales teams should be armed with for sharing. This is where sales and marketing will need to work closely together on sales enablement needs.

• Third-party industry related content
• Step-by-step or how-to content
• Statistics and research data related to your industry
• Visual Content (Videos, infographics, slides)
• Company culture content
• Company product info, news, reviews
• Specific content that revolves around your buyer’s journey

We go more in-depth on the above in this blog post, 7 Types of Content B2B Salespeople Should Be Sharing to Their Social Networks.

What is sales enablement technology?

Sales enablement technology refers to software or systems that allow sales teams to easily access and utilize content that is relevant to driving attention to the product or services and better positioning their sales funnels. Beyond content being accessible, it helps marketing and sales teams coordinate and communicates needs so everyone is on the same page.

While there are many sales enablement technologies to embrace, one way to boost sales and marketing results is to enable everyone at your organization to share, create, and distribute content to social channels. This is the process of employee advocacy.

Utilizing a program like EveryoneSocial, allows sales to do a few things:

• Que and schedule the latest content to their social channels
• Have other employees contribute to sharing content to drive sales opportunities
• Organize content by groups and their importance for easy access
• Drive conversations with marketing and other teams about wins and content needs
• Keep everyone on the same page about sales results and goals
• Social listening to monitor competitors, prospects, or other social and content feeds

Regardless of the types of sales enablement technology you utilize, the goal should be to ensure your sales team is more efficient and have what they need when they need it.

Salesforce highlighted the top four sales enablement priorities used by high-performing sales teams in their State of Sales report:

• High-performing sales teams are 3.5x more likely than underperforming teams to use sales analytics, which is defined as basic data and insights, prospect and customer feedback.
• High performers are 2x more likely as underperformers to use or have plans to use a mobile sales app. It’s projected that use of mobile apps by sales people will more than double in the next two years.
• Organizations that are rising to the top are those that have mastered a holistic customer approach – they know that today’s sophisticated buyer has an equally unique relationship with your business that includes sales, marketing, and customer success.
• High performing team maximize technology to meet the demands of today’s sophisticated customers; high performing teams use nearly 3x more sales technology than underperforming teams.

And here are some other interesting stats:

• Sales enablement technology is currently a $780M market, and it is expected to be worth $5B by 2021 (Aragon Research).
• 59.9% of companies plan to increase their sales force over the next 12 months (CSO Insights).
• 80% of marketers in companies with good sales and marketing alignment show sellers both how and when to use content.
• Quota attainment is correlated with investment in sales enablement. SiriusDecisions found that 28% of companies employ seven or more full-time sales enablement staff. This figure rises to 43% for top-performing organizations.
• 59.2% of companies now have a dedicated sales enablement function (up from 32.7%), while 8.5% of companies have plans to create one in the coming year (CSO Insights).
• Only 30% of sales enablement efforts meet expectations (Miller Heiman).

If you are interested in learning how EveryoneSocial is used for sales enablement like managing content, easy social sharing, feedback, and tracking results our team is ready to show you more.

Learn why leading sales teams at ADP, Genesys, Dell, and others leverage EveryoneSocial in their sales stack. Schedule your demo here.

• Sales Enablement: Don’t Forget About The Content!
• Why Social Listening Should Be A Top Priority for Sales Teams
• 7 Types of Content B2B Salespeople Should Be Sharing to Their Social Networks

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is about giving your salespeople the information, content, and tools they need to sell more effectively: to increase pipeline, win rates, and deal sizes. The goal of sales enablement is then to successfully engage the buyer throughout the entire buying process.

What is a sales enablement strategy?

The framework of a sales enablement strategy should include the following components, which will have a direct impact on the performance of your sales team.

• Intelligence
• Content Sharing
• Prospecting
• Training & Coaching
• Tracking & Reporting

Why is sales enablement important?

By focusing on sales enablement, it allows a large number of salespeople to achieve and exceed quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable way. Essentially, it helps the entire sales organization work together, instead of relying on just a handful of sales members who are extremely high achievers.

What is sales enablement content?

Sales enablement content is content created for various stages of the buyer’s journey that sales reps can then use throughout their selling process. This means there must be a great alignment between marketing and sales to ensure all the necessary content is accessible and ready for sales to use on social media or email.

Is sales enablement a part of marketing?

Sales enablement is its own operational department and not a part of marketing. However, sales teams should work with marketing and content marketing teams to ensure they are armed with the assets they need for digital prospecting. This means sales enablement should be aligned with marketing for true long-term success.