What is Sale Enablement? Everything Your Company Should Know

Want to give your salespeople the best chance to win? Then you need to take sales enablement seriously and provide them with the most relevant information, content, tools and training to both match the buyer’s journey and outmaneuver the competition.

Let’s Get Started! No matter if you’re new to sales enablement or…

…if you’re in the process of organizing a proper sales enablement program at your company, this guide will cover all the essentials you need to know about sales enablement and why it’s so valuable for your sales team and company.

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Introduction: What is Sales Enablement?

Ready to explore the power of sales enablement? Dive into the journey below.

While the definition of sales enablement might sound a bit fancy or complicated, it’s actually a really simple concept.

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 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 with 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.

II. Why Is Sales Enablement Important?

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.

III. Who Owns Sales Enablement?

With the word “sales” in the term, it’s pretty safe to say that sales owns the sales enablement process and strategy, right? Well yes and no.

For sales enablement to truly work and be the most effective as possible, both sales and marketing should own it. Many companies also have their own sales enablement specific team, which these folks should also work with general sales and marketing as well.

Sales and marketing need to work together on content and resource needs 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 and important role in ensuring marketing is creating what they need and that the sales enablement program is being practiced by other sales members.

IV. Sales Enablement Content + Social Media

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.

V. Sales Enablement Statistics

Nothing convinces people more as to the value of sales enablement than with some data. Below we’ve pulled out some of the interesting stats we think you’ll benefit from knowing.

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).

VI. Additional Sales Enablement Resources

Congratulations for making it this far in this guide on sales enablement! Hopefully, you have learned a lot of the essentials and why it’s so valuable to sales and your company.

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.

VII. Frequently Asked Questions

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.