Today, we’re taking a look at how to grow your sales through better sales enablement. It’s something every company should continually focus on to maximize results—changing your strategy could mean turning things around when it comes to customer satisfaction and sales revenue. As part two of our sales enablement series, we’re taking sales enablement one step further. To get up to speed, here is part one of the series.
Sales enablement is the process of providing knowledge and tools to help improve the performance of the sales team. Sales enablement can be managed by one or multiple people on a team, depending on the company’s needs and budget. There are many types of sales enablement, such as training, coaching, content marketing, technical assistance, and even the adoption of new processes. Whichever type of sales enablement you implement, it should always focus on what will help your employees become more successful and achieve your business needs. So, how do you become more successful through sales enablement? Sit back, relax, and learn about some of the ways to improve your bottom line.
Sales Enablement
Sales enablement means providing the right tools, resources, and information your team needs to succeed. Whether the goal is to have more customer engagement or close more deals, well-thought-out sales enablement strategies can help you get there. They can help foster relationships between your company and your customers, helping you create lasting relationships that will drive your business forward. This happens when your sales team is better informed about your products, so they can cater to their customers’ needs and sell specifically to the benefits the customers will receive. It’s the best, most sustainable strategy for selling to customers long-term.
A lot of companies are jumping on the sales enablement bandwagon. For instance, in the last five years, the adoption of sales enablement practices has increased by 343%, which is likely because organizations have reported seeing a 20% increase in sales since implementing sales enablement practices. That’s a real impact! We’ve used these studies ourselves to create a sales enablement platform that will cater to the needs of sales teams everywhere. verbTEAMS provides a solution for your marketing team to house the company’s digital assets, enabling your team to find centralized content faster, ultimately leading to greater lead generation and increased sales conversions.
Sales Content and Training
As we mentioned in part one of this blog series, having the right content for your sales team can be a deal maker or a deal-breaker. Your outbound sales team has a lot to gain from high-quality content. It’s no wonder that 84% of sales executives said that utilizing content searches was the top area of improvement for their team. According to v9digital, “Good content is original, actionable, and answers a question. It's properly sourced, unique, concise, grammatically correct, and is formatted properly.”
Your content needs to resonate with your prospects AND you need to have enough of it. A lack of content is one of the main issues sales reps face, and 42% of sales reps say they don’t have enough shareable information about the product before calling a prospect. While companies might counteract inadequate content with new rep training, 84% of sales training is forgotten in the first three months. Therefore the training needs to be reinforced with corresponding content that sales reps can use to facilitate a successful sales call.
Sales-Marketing Alignment
One of the main jobs of sales enablement is to align sales and marketing departments, and their go-to-market efforts —it has to be a team effort. Maintaining alignment between sales and marketing departments will absolutely help your sales reps perform at their peak effectiveness while representing your product and brand appropriately. Being aligned means your company could get 67% better at closing deals, which shows marketing synchronization benefits your whole team and allows you to reach your business goals.
How do you achieve this alignment? Having a platform with centralized content and utilization metrics helps. 74% of businesses that use sales enablement can also boast a sales-marketing cohesiveness. It cannot be overstated how important it is that these two teams work together. With this all-hands-on-deck attitude, sales teams will have greater success reaching their quotas. With verbTEAMS, it’s easy to see what content is being shared the most and which is performing the best, so now, you can make data-driven decisions when creating new content.
Sales Productivity
Helping your sales team know which content and messaging perform the best and when prospects are looking at it empowers them with the right information to know how to follow up with each prospect to have the greatest impact, and become more successful, quicker. Sales effectiveness and ability to achieve their quotas are vital to the company’s trajectory as a whole. Sales reps will be more productive if they are armed with enablement tools that track prospect activity, allow for customized follow-up, and provide insights into what content drives the best results. With verbTEAMS, sales reps can see what content is trending and be immediately notified when prospects open their content, allowing them to follow up with the right message at the opportune time.
Prospect Experience
Did you know 80% of customers say their experience with a salesperson is as important as the actual products or services they offer? Read that again. It’s true, a sales team that considers the prospect experience during the sales process will always win more customers. You will also create a positive prospect experience if your salespeople can foster trust and confidence. This can be done by training your team to be respectful, consistent, knowledgeable, honest, and do the things they commit to... and do them on time.
Sales Enablement Strategy
With all these tips and ideas in mind, don’t forget that sales enablement is an ongoing process that will change often according to your needs, successes, failures, new product rollouts, and go-to-market strategy. It also streamlines cross-functional teams (like sales and marketing) to work together to drive sales revenue. For the future of sales in any company, it will be vital to have a well-documented sales strategy, and process that aligns how your sales team sells with the revenue goals of your company. We’ve found that 84% of sales reps achieve their quotas when their sales team leaders incorporate a sales-enablement strategy that is most conducive to their team. What are you waiting for? It’s time to start giving your sales reps the enablement they have been craving and need.
Sales enablement is a critical part of any sales and marketing plan. The right content, training, and alignment can help you close more deals faster. verbTEAMS provides ways for your team to do this because it’s tailored to their needs, so they can deliver the right content at the right time when the customer’s interest is at its peak.
Sources:
https://www.v9digital.com/insights/what-is-good-content/
https://learn.g2.com/sales-enablement-statistics