Sales enablement has fast become a must across many businesses worldwide. In fact, 77.1 percent of companies with a sales force exceeding 500 people have dedicated sales enablement.
Businesses are looking for fresh and captivating ways to grow their revenue, and sales enablement training can provide just that. So how does a good training strategy fit into it? Let’s look at how to establish a great sales enablement training program for your business.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is a strategy that combines resources, training, content, technology, and processes to support sales employees in their day-to-day sales roles. It aims to process sales opportunities to the next level through informed interactions to close the deal.
Essentially, it exists to help salespeople work smarter at their jobs, supporting and guiding them to enable them to be the best salespersons they can be. Some businesses employ a sales enablement department to make the most out of their sales team, and they typically work on areas such as onboarding, quality sales content, performance tracking, and coaching.
Sales enablement should be used to ultimately work towards the overall company goals, so any strategies created should be made with this in mind, with a primary focus on helping the sales team drive sales performance.
Why Is Sales Enablement Training Important for Businesses?
Sales enablement is important for businesses for several reasons. To start, it helps to shape, mold, and grow a strong team of sales staff who are working to make money for the business. When sales enablement training is done right, it can help salespeople sell goods or services more effectively and efficiently, even overcoming the fear of presenting.
MediaFly shares that over 80% of sales representatives report reaching their quotas when their employer incorporates a great sales enablement strategy. This speaks volumes about how effective great sales enablement training and strategy can be.
Good sales enablement programs will have steps in place to train and nurture the sales team, offering resources and tools they need to succeed. You want them to be able to drive revenue growth to the business, so it’s important they have all the necessary skills to do that. This also helps to bring the sales and marketing teams together.
Businesses need to have unison across all departments, so everyone is aware of what the other is doing. But nowhere more so than in sales and marketing, so the sales team can utilize the marketing resources to increase business growth.
What Are the Benefits of Sales Enablement?
Here are some of the key benefits of sales enablement.
Empowers Sales Teams
One of the main benefits of sales enablement is that it can empower the sales team. When they have sufficient sales enablement training, employees may feel more motivated and informed about their daily tasks. You may find looking into time management statistics helps you understand how well your sales team is managing their own time.
Sales enablement programs should be taught by sales leaders, who can then oversee the processes of their sales team. This allows sales representatives to follow the advice from their training, while getting support as they meet and greet new and existing clients.
More Effective Onboarding Process
Sales enablement also provides a more effective onboarding process. With sales enablement, you can catch new employees up to speed with courses and support tailored to their needs.
You can look at each new hire’s skillset to decide which courses and resources in your repertoire would benefit them most, instead of asking everyone to take the same courses when they join the business.
When there is a new hire, you can train them with the same training process as the other sales rep, so no stone is left unturned. This can only happen when you have an effective sales enablement training plan.
Helps To Scale the Organization
Scaling an organization means hiring more people to take on more customers. As sales enablement helps with the onboarding and training process, it means that the organization is naturally able to scale up.
New departments of sales onboarding teams are created. As more employees are hired, the business can expect to attract more clients thanks to the talented salespeople successfully doing their jobs. You may even need to look into new ecommerce platforms to scale up with you.
6 Steps in Establishing Great Sales Enablement Training
Here are six key steps in establishing great sales enablement training for businesses.
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Set Clear Objectives
Every company will have its own set of business goals and targets, whether monthly, yearly, or quarterly. With this in place, it can help when it comes to establishing sales goals and, therefore, can heavily influence sales enablement training.
This is because the business and sales goals can give the program direction, as it allows you to monitor and report any working techniques and alter those that are not.
To set your clear objectives, you need to look at where the business currently stands. It’s also a good idea to speak to your employees and get their feedback on anything they think you could do to attract more sales.
For instance, perhaps they think you should move your phone system online to be able to handle more incoming calls. Include the marketing team in this discussion, too, as they are the ones that work closely with the sales team.
Consider the following:
- What are your current business goals, and how are you working to achieve them?
- How does the business set goals and communicate them with various departments?
- Does everyone on the sales team feel they’d benefit from sales enablement training?
- What technology are you currently utilizing to help with the sales process?
Once you’ve completed an overview of where your business is currently at, it’ll be easier to create a strong guide and actionable goals for the sales enablement training program.
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Design a Lead Qualification Framework
To create a good sales enablement program, you need to look at your lead qualification framework. How many leads and customers will you need to turn your goals into a reality?
You may need to do a deeper data analysis with the help of delta lake architecture, delving into your target audience and their buying habits. This includes existing customers who will re-purchase and colder leads who have yet to make one.
Looking at your lead qualification tick list will help you create the best sales enablement training program, as you will better understand just how many prospects you need to turn into leads. This can then guide your strategy and technique regarding sales enablement training.
Think about:
- Who your ideal customer is
- The type of industry you are operating in
- The size of your sales team
- The typical process of buying one of your products or services for the customer
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Define Responsibilities for Sales and Marketing Teams
Sales teams that work closely with marketing see 41% greater growth in reaching their quotas. It’s important that both departments are working in sync to create a collaborative sales enablement process.
To make this happen, it can be useful to define responsibilities for the sales and marketing teams. You may wish to create an SLA (service level agreement) between the departments, as this also means that both sides are held accountable.
This can take into consideration the revenue goal, your lead generation framework, and previous data on the deals you have closed. You can look at data clean room providers to help you harvest and utilize this data.
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Keep the Buyer Journey at Its Core
Sales enablement should be a tailored strategy for your business. With this in mind, you need to keep the buyer journey and experience at its core.
That means still creating valuable content and tools for your customers, such as white papers, blog posts, and product explainer videos. You need to remember that buyers don’t want or need to be given the hard sell all the time, which may even put them off making that purchase. Assess your customer experience analytics to understand their journey and buying habits.
The content created by your sales enablement team needs to be informative and relevant to your target audience. Meanwhile, the business needs to create good content for the internal sales and marketing teams to ensure they can provide customers with the best service possible, this means performance insights and case studies.
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Create an Internal Content Strategy
It’s a good idea to perform a content audit and look at what materials you already have on hand and what you think needs making or replacing.
This content should be used internally as a resource for the sales enablement team to help them give the best training to the salespeople. It will allow for consistency across all departments, as the marketing team can also access this internal content, including a comprehensive knowledge base, to provide employees with in-depth information and resources for their sales enablement training.
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Utilize Tools
Technology and tools, such as web-based training platforms, can be a huge help for sales enablement training. Once you’ve established your processes and the content needed, look at some of the software and tools out there that may assist you.
Some platforms can accelerate your processes, for instance, if you want to look at forecasting supply chain management, you may wish to use the technology out there to help with this.
This can create an organized and accessible place for all your marketing and sales collateral that can be used by the sales and marketing teams wherever necessary. Some tools may even be able to integrate to make the process smoother.
Making Sales Enablement Training Work for Your Business
When done right, sales enablement can be an excellent asset for your business. Salespeople are supported to reach their full potential with sales enablement training, which can increase business revenue. Sales enablement needs to be tied in with the company’s goal and objectives to make an impact and be adopted as an approach company-wide.
