Sales Enablement Implementation Strategies
As we’re quickly sliding into Q4, many clients are examining what’s needed to put their pipelines into hyperdrive and achieve year-end goals. For some, it means digging into the effectiveness of their client-facing and sales-facing materials to make strategic or incremental improvements. For others, it means initiating a formal sales enablement process. Regardless of which camp you’re in, I’ll share my experience and ideas on important components often overlooked and how to ensure sales enablement is implemented successfully.
What is Sales Enablement, Really?
A good place to start in answering this question is Forrester’s definition. They define sales enablement as:
A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.
While helpful, I’ve found that sales enablement captures, contains, and solidifies institutional knowledge (experiences, processes, data, expertise, values, and information possessed by company employees). If you’ve ever lost a long-time employee, especially one that helped build stuff across an organization for a period of time, you know first-hand how painful it can be to lose this valuable resource. My working definition of sales enablement:
To create sales efficiencies and disseminate cohesive information and correct messaging across an organization where you’ve streamlined helpful and effective guidance through the purchasing journey.
Ok. Now in English.
Sales enablement is in the service of both the customer and sales helping them have meaningful and productive conversations.
What Sales Enablement Isn’t
Understanding what isn’t included can be even more illuminating than a definition. Sales enablement isn’t:
A catch-all repository of all content. While sales enablement does hold content, that’s not the only thing it does. It’s not a highly organized file folder, although that’s a nice start.
A content creation arm. Sales enablement, well… enables content distribution. Basically it distributes the right content for the right purpose at the right time.
A pipeline review. I highly encourage you to routinely review your pipeline to suss out what you could do better to move/coaching things along. However, sales enablement is much broader in focus. It’s looking at sales pipeline data, mapping trends and making course corrections in the pursuit of OKRs.
Sales training. Sales enablement assumes sales people know how to sell. It’s not about identifying a pain point. It’s about providing the tactical content related to that pain point, helping the prospect on their journey. Sales enablement is in the service of demonstrating and connecting directly to your value proposition.
Effective Sales Enablement Strategies
Whether you’re creating sales enablement from scratch or reimagining one that’s gone off the rails, follow these strategies.
Build Around the Buyer’s Journey
When you build enablement with the buyer’s perspective -- customer needs and expectations -- you’re on the right footing. According to Hubspot research, the deck is already stacked against you:
60% of prospective buyers want to connect with sales during the consideration stage (after researching options and have a short list).
20% of buyers want to talk during the decision stage.
24% of sales emails are opened
Align Customer-Facing Teams
Successful projects make sure there’s alignment with all customer-facing teams. Sales enablement is a piece of RevOps, where you are connecting organizational activities and processes with revenue generation. As with all RevOps initiatives, you need to involve all teams -- including marketing, sales, customer success, finance -- to make sure the tools are available and everyone knows how to use them.
Integrate With Systems You Have & Use
Unless you’re blowing up your entire organization’s tech stack, you need to integrate with systems and processes already in place. And even if you are blowing stuff up, chances are high that you aren’t ditching everything. Map out what’s needed for your customer-facing teams including templates for phone calls, emails, and in-person presentations. These teams need to know how the data works, not necessarily be responsible for maintaining those systems.
Clear Metrics
Nothing gets people aligned faster than a public dashboard tied to their performance. Benchmark your OKRs and track your successes as well as your failures.
Training & Onboarding
You’ll waste time and effort if you don’t train, monitor and enforce consistent use. This applies to existing personnel as well as onboarding new employees. Make sure employees’ skill levels don’t fall below a certain level. Provide remedial training when needed, and have a plan in place when employees don’t comply with your standards.
Feedback Loops
Sales isn’t a one and done endeavor. Capture inefficiencies and problems and update process and content. By allowing client-facing personnel to focus on what they do best, the entire organization wins.
IRL Advice
In my opinion, the ideal person for maintaining your sales enablement is not a former salesperson or MBA grad. I’ve found that the best person for the job is a middle school teacher. Yes, you read that right. Let me explain.
A middle school teacher is familiar with building curriculums and study guides. They don’t write the textbooks but they do know how to guide students in passing standardized tests. “Tests” in this context would be scenarios when the sales rep tries to close while the prospect tries to haggle. A teacher is motivated to get the student what they need to successfully pass the test and close the deal.
Sales Enablement & Your Plan For Growth
Don’t reinvent the sales enablement wheel. Get on the right RevOps path by integrating your existing platforms and investing in getting the right content in the right hands at the right time.
Alternative Partners can help you plan for growth with our RevOps Services. You can also read our RevOps success stories.