Sales Enablement: The Art of Effective Selling
The Science Behind the Art of Selling
After completing my article about Customer Journey Maps and using ready-made templates, it seemed logical to explore what happens next: sales enablement. Once you’ve diligently chronicled the buying journey (whether straightforward or circuitous) from a customer’s perspective, it’s logical to map out the sales process and its supporting documents.
Sales teams are notoriously challenging to corral. There is an art to reading your audience’s buying signals, identifying their hot buttons, and effectively winning a sale. Yet behind the scenes, sales enablement relies on science to figure out the ideal cadences for nurturing, which materials increase sales velocity and ultimately land deals. This guide is meant to cover the basics of sales enablement and best practices to effectively launch it in your organization.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Sales Enablement
First is the relatively antiseptic definition. Sales enablement is your business's approach to provide your sales team with the resources they need to effectively sell. It’s a strategy that tailors a sales process and sales materials to your sales team’s specific needs when targeting your buying audience, in the service of closing more deals.
Here’s my take on sales enablement: it orchestrates success for everyone. Great things happen when marketing, sales, and customer success play nicely together. Sales enablement is the structure that gives everyone everything they need when they need it to drive growth and revenue. I’ve found that enablement is data-driven and benefits from the right tools. Note: I’m a firm believer that there is no perfect tech stack. When engaging with my clients, I first utilize the tools they have already implemented and integrated as it avoids decision paralysis. If you’re starting with a blank slate, I’m a proponent of keeping things simple across the organization or company.
My sales enablement philosophy is based on a teacher model. If you have more skilled salespeople and give them what they need, then you’ll make more money. Yet I see hyper growth companies simply hiring salespeople but not training them. Their philosophy is to cut non-performers rather than invest in sales enablement and the tools (e.g., technology, process, content) for scaling. What a waste. The amount of time and expense to onboard personnel is not insignificant. Let me remind you of the trending headlines related to The Great Resignation. Remember, people have choices. Many of us are re-examining the role of work and are less tolerant of organizations that drive burn-out. There is a better way to work. Sales enablement gives you the data, it is a more efficient, scalable and more-people friendly (from both ends of the conversation) way of selling.
Why is Sales Enablement Important
Sales enablement plays a key role in scaling the sales organization as it reaches beyond a handful of overachievers. It provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools, content, and the resources required to be successful. In my sales enablement projects, we tap those overachievers to be leaders or ambassadors. They’ve obviously figured out what works and so why not capitalize on their marketing ideas and successes to build your strategies.
For my fellow data nerds, the following are stats that show how sales enablement impacts metrics where it counts. According to G2:
The presence of sales enablement correlates with a 31% improvement in supporting changes in sales messaging and a 15% improvement in improving low-performing salespeople.
Organizations who utilize enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without.
26% of sales reps say their sales training is effective. And only 35% track the effectiveness of their content.
84% of sales executives cite content search and utilization as the top productivity improvement area.
Lastly, 42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information making a call.
What Does It Involve? Embarking on a Sales Enablement Initiative
I find it helpful to split what’s all involved with the goal in mind. RevOps is all about putting the customer first and then tracking those interactions through the organization. I use that same framework and hit these key areas:
Reporting & Analysis
Before you can figure out how to improve, you need the metrics and reports to set a baseline and a higher-performing bar. What OKRs and reports do you need to determine who performs better and what they use? Once you know what behaviors need to be tracked, you can then replicate them.Optimized Sales Content
Not all content resonates with your audience. Figure out what’s landing flat and what’s landing deals. Maybe things are out of sequence. Maybe pieces need to be retooled. Figuring out how to optimize your sales content is where the art and science of selling intersect.Sales Enablement Tools: Technology & Automation
There is no shortage of sales enablement tools available. I’ve usedOutreach, Salesloft, Groove, and many others. It really depends on your organizational structure and if your sales processes are standardized and centralized (e.g., automated cadences, the feedback loop to marketing ops and success ops). I’ve helped organizations choose and configure the right tools based on their needs, tools already in use, and their growth plans.Sales Enablement Manager
I highly recommend that you hire a dedicated sales enablement manager for your company. They need to have the experience to work well with sales and marketing. They need the personality and influencing skills to be the go-between. Investing in this role pays dividends as they pull together the tools, training, content, and everything else that needs to work well together.
While setting up the enablement structure and advising clients on how to hire for this unique role I often use the example of a middle school teacher. They figure out what students need in order to learn and then give it to them. They use examples (playbooks) to turn everyone into high performers.
Who’s Involved in Sales Enablement?
My RevOps method is to break down organizational silos whenever possible. Silos stifle collaboration, creativity, and growth. To be successful in setting up and maintaining sales enablement requires involvement from sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. That said, sales will most likely do the heavy lifting and the majority of interactions will occur between sales and marketing. However, customer success and finance will be involved for obvious reasons -- if you can’t implement what you sell or what you sell is not profitable or sustainable -- then bigger changes are needed beyond your sales process and corresponding content.
Now let’s explore the roles in the sales enablement implementation strategies and maintenance:
Marketing controls everything related to brand, voice, standardized graphic and brand guidelines, content development, and lead generation. Marketing should be involved in sales materials development as a collaborator.
Sales ops bears most of the responsibility for training the sales organization. They play a crucial role in operationalizing the information sales receives as part of the sales enablement program.
Sales management ensures that the sales enablement program is being put into practice. That means supporting the organization in getting trained on the tools and content, monitoring related enablement activities through reports, and exerting discipline when it’s not being followed.
Sales enablement collaborators include marketing, customer success, finance and any other areas that contribute to the sales funnel (before, during, and after).
What’s the difference between Sales Operations vs. Sales Enablement?
Typically sales operations are involved with everything related to supporting and facilitating frontline sales teams. Both strategic and tactical, their role is to reduce friction in the sales process. Usually under the sales ops purview are these responsibilities:
Territory planning, team design, and account assignment
Deal desk: deal routing, proposal and contract management, and contract governance
Sales compensation optimization and administration (payouts, clawbacks)
Forecasting reporting and accuracy maintenance
Systems and data management of CRM, CPQ, SPM, and data analysis related to the above activities
Sales enablement is focused on improving sales efficiency through process, tools, technology, training, and performance analysis:
Sales training related to process and sales content, as well as training events (SKOs)
Content planning/automation collaboration with marketing, mapping, management, and analysis
Sales communication
Analyzing, reporting, and modifying customer engagement tools & software
How To Be Successful in Your Sales Enablement Strategy?
There’s nothing magical or new about how to be successful with your sales enablement strategy. If you follow general project management best practices, you’ll be good to go. As a refresher, I make sure my engagements include:
Goal setting - don’t underestimate the importance of setting an intention and rallying your team around it. Sales enablement affects more than the sales team, so be sure to involve the entire organization.
Communication - beyond getting the right people involved and facilitating communication, provide guidelines on the rules of engagement and some structure for regular meetings, reports, etc.
Plan development - define your project scope, chunk out milestones, fight scope creep, and avoid the allure of solving edge cases that derail team focus from executing deliverables
Time management - all the usual suspects around prioritizing goals, establishing timelines, and the like.
Document organization - one tweak I would make relates to content creation. You’ll need to figure out the various content types, version management and access, and distribution channels.
Feedback loop - initiatives are rarely one and done. Your sales enablement program lives and breathes, requiring routine maintenance by way of a robust feedback loop.
Guidance & Empowerment
If you haven’t worked in an organization with effective sales enablement or set one up from scratch, there are shortcuts available. The place to start is with your Customer Journey Map. In my RevOps opinion, a well-defined map should be a touchstone for the entire b2b organization. If you’re having trouble with this fundamental guide, we can figure out a ready-made template that best fits your use case. Then it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks with strategically-minded conversations.
Ready to standardize your sales processes to increase lead velocity and improve revenue? Check out my RevOps approach and methodology. Or, read how successful RevOps projects lead to growth success. Remember, Alternative Partners can help you fill in the gaps and plan for sustainable growth.
FAQs
What does a sales enablement team do for your business?
Lead by a sales enablement manager, this sales team supports sales in a variety of ways. They are often tasked with training development, building sales materials, and managing the sales enablement technology and its various connection points (such as a content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), and other organizational software platforms).
Is CRM a sales enablement solution?
A CRM is a database system that tracks client and prospect relationships. Per se, CRMs like Salesforce don’t help sales teams build a better pipeline and close leads. While some CRMs may have configurable features such as process automation that is a component of sales enablement, true sales enablement is often handled via specialized software.How do you measure sales enablement?
Very carefully. Seriously, the better question is how do you measure all the aspects of your sales processes as well as other related organizational metrics. Before you embark on specialized reporting, I suggest that you entertain a more holistic view, one that aligns all organizational functions in the pursuit of efficiency and accountability to drive revenue growth. For that, read about a RevOps Framework.What are the metrics that sales enablement can directly influence?
The answer really depends on the target audience, selling cycle, and organizational structure. For a generic answer, here are the metrics that are often positively influenced by well-run sales enablement: 1) time spent by reps actually selling and not bogged down with administrative distractions, 2) time spent by managers spent coaching reps, 3) sales training consumed and used, 4) reduced time to close deals aka sales velocity, 5) increase deal value and/or customer retention.