In short, sales enablement is empowering your people to sell more effectively. It’s about giving your salespeople the tools they need to increase pipeline, improve win rates, and grow deal sizes. An ongoing process, sales enablement can also include guidance or training to help your sales teams better engage customers and prospects.

The Basics Of A Sales Enablement Strategy

Every sales enablement strategy should include all of the following components, each of which can directly impact a sales team’s performance.

Intelligence

If your salespeople don’t know what they need to (or should) know, they’re dead in the water already. It’s up to you to make sure they have access to the most current information on your products, competition, customers, pricing, etc. They need to be able 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 on the mind of a prospective buyer, they need to share content that connects with that buyer’s interests. They also need tools to share that content, which doesn’t just mean email – social sharing platforms are crucial.

Prospecting

Whoever it is you need to reach, there’s likely tons of data out there on them: more than ever before, in fact. The world of prospecting tools and databases is continually evolving, so it’s critically important that you stay on top of it and provide your people with the best-of-breed solutions.

Training & Coaching

Teach a man to fish… The entire sales world is constantly in flux and you see strategies, channels, tools, etc. change every month. Providing your salespeople with continuing training and coaching is the only way to ensure that they stay ahead of the pack.

Tracking & Reporting

In many ways, sales enablement shares some similarities with marketing when it comes to tracking and reporting. To really understand what is or isn’t working and how to improve, you need to have holistic data that you can tie back to core objectives like pipeline, win rates, and deal sizes.

So, why is sales enablement so important for sales teams and your company as a whole?

Research by Aberdeen shows that 84% of sales reps at companies with “best-in-class” sales enablement strategies achieve their quotas, compared to 55% at companies with “average” strategies and 15% for companies with “weak” strategies. That’s just one stat, but it’s pretty significant, right? We’ll dive into some more further down.

Sales enablement allows more of your salespeople to achieve or exceed quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable way. It helps the entire sales organization work together and reduces dependence on a handful of high-performing sales members.

By providing the entire sales team with the best knowledge, tools, and resources required to be successful as a whole, high achievers can instead serve as examples within a sales enablement strategy and help others in the department grow.

Who is responsible for sales enablement?

Marketing and sales teams are typically jointly responsible for overall results. However, there’s often a dedicated person (or team) responsible for sales enablement, who coordinates needs between teams.

Your teams should absolutely work together on producing the content and resources needed to address prospects in various stages of the buyer’s journey. Marketing can provide guidance to sales when it comes to social media usage and optimization, and sales leaders play an important role in ensuring marketing understands what sales needs.

Social media networks are a goldmine for salespeople. They’re where prospects, customers, and potential buyers are actively doing research, especially LinkedIn and Twitter. Leveraging this opportunity is typically known as social selling, a term you might already be familiar with.

Salespeople need to be on social media to build relationships with prospects, but to successfully build rapport, they also need to be armed with the right type of content.

If you aren’t regularly sharing good content or interacting with others consistently, you very well could be leaving opportunities on the table!

Creating a solid content repository is where sales and marketing will need to work closely together. You’ll want:

• Industry-related content
• Step-by-step instructional or how-to content
• Statistics and research data
• Videos, infographics, and slide decks
• Company culture content
• Product info, news, and customer reviews
• Content that’s specific to your buyer’s journey

We go into more detail on this here: 7 Types of Content B2B Salespeople Should Be Sharing to Their Social Networks.

What is sales enablement technology?

Sales enablement technology is software and/or systems that allows sales teams to easily leverage content that drives attention to the product or services.

There are many options to choose from when it comes to sales enablement tech, but one surefire way to boost results is to enable everyone at your organization to create and share content on their social channels. Also, that’s essentially a simplified definition for employee influencing.

Utilizing a program like EveryoneSocial allows sales to:

• Queue up content for social sharing
• Enlist other employees in sharing content that drives sales opportunities
• Organize content by groups or importance
• Drive conversations with marketing and other teams about wins or needs
• Keep everyone in the loop on sales results and goals
• Monitor competitors, prospects, or other feeds

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

Nothing talks quite like data does, so we’ll just let the numbers below speak for themselves. 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 use sales analytics – basic data, insights, and prospect or customer feedback – than low-performing teams.
• High performers are 2x more likely to use, or have plans to use, a mobile sales app. It’s projected that use of mobile apps by salespeople will more than double in the next two years.
• The organizations that rise to the top 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:

Congratulations on making it this far into such an in-depth guide! Hopefully, you’ve got a solid grasp of the sales enablement essentials now. If you’re interested in learning why sales teams at ADP, Genesys, and Dell leverage EveryoneSocial in their sales stack, our team is more than happy to discuss your goals! Schedule your demo here.

In the meantime, here are some additional resources you can check out:

• 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 tools they need to sell effectively: to increase pipeline, improve win rates, and grow deal sizes. An ongoing process, sales enablement aims to help your sales teams better engage customers and prospects.

What is a sales enablement strategy?

Every sales enablement strategy should include the following components, each which can directly impact your team’s performance:

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

Why is sales enablement important?

Sales enablement allows salespeople to achieve and exceed quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable way. It helps the entire sales organization work together and reduces dependence a handful of high-achieving sales members.

What is sales enablement content?

Sales enablement content is tailored to various stages of the buyer’s journey so that sales reps can use it throughout their selling process.

Is sales enablement a part of marketing?

Sales enablement isn’t usually part of marketing. However, sales teams should work with marketing and content teams to ensure they have assets they need for digital prospecting.