What Is Sales Enablement?
Empower your sales team with the right tools, content, knowledge, and information through sales enablement to close more deals and boost your business's success.
Updated: April 27, 2024
Sales enablement is the process of providing the resources for the sales team of your business to close more deals. Resources may be content, tools, knowledge, and information that is required to effectively sell your product or service to customers.
Sales and marketing both impact the overall sales enablement strategy of your business as both own sales enablement.
Sales and marketing work together on enablement as sales representatives are provided with articles, videos, product guides, and a variety of other content to help prospects and customers make informed buying decisions. In turn, feedback can be given by the sales team to their colleagues in marketing to inform more effective content strategies going forward.
Content is provided by sales enablement that will be provided to the buyer by the sales team.
Best practices, research and tools are also provided by sales enablement that sales will consume internally.
Training and development needs to be a big part of most programs as salespeople must know how to use the resources you provide to them.
Traditional training programs in addition to using technologies like collaboration tools can be conducted to make sales training continuous.
Make sure resources are easy to find and easy to apply when designing for usability as it should be easy to use for the sales team.
The usability of resources should be tracked so that future sales enablement efforts can be optimized based on what is used and what is not used.
The credibility of your sales teams can be accelerated with your customers and relationships can be built that will strengthen over time. It can be made sure by enablement leaders that the training, certifications, and other activities fit into a bigger plan.
They will have a focus on making the sales goals easier for everyone to know what is going on across the organization by walking through sales goals with their teams on a regular basis.
Training and other enablement activities will be prioritized for salespeople alongside other responsibilities by good enablement leaders.
Sales organizations can keep up with evolving buyer expectations with sales enablement as your sales teams will be provided with the tools and content they need to guide prospective customers through their buyers' journeys.
It can be made easier to create and adapt marketing materials to support new products and campaigns and to distribute them anywhere and at any time with digital technology.
Goal Setting:
Goal Setting is a must for sales enablement just like you do for sales. The goal setting should align with your broader business goals when you set goals for enablement. Infact, organizational alignment can be created which is a great framework that is easily adopted by organizations of any type and size.
Communication:
Time Management:
Time management is a key actor for an effective enablement program. Just-in-time learning should be balanced with ongoing work in support of long range strategy for the best sales enablement activities. In time training and content is often required for new products and initiatives to support short term goals.
You should not overwhelm your sales teams with too many schedules which can disrupt enablement activities to achieve long-term goals.
You can conduct a content audit to collect all the materials of your company in one place, by pulling from across your website, other public-facing channels, and internal marketing as well as enablement repositories.
Holes, overlaps and other needs in your content strategy can be identified from the centralized location where all the materials are available.
A sales content management system can be really helpful when it comes to organizing existing content and planning new content strategies as a huge amount of content may already exist on the company website, which is ready to be refreshed and repurposed.
Software can be used that is designed specifically to support enablement as it comes with sales activities including alignment across sales and marketing.
Sales enablement involves new prospects, existing customers and sales teams.
The content created by you should suit its intended audience and purpose so that each segment of your audience gets support at every point along their respective journeys.
It is much easier to share content electronically as compared to dealing only in printed sheets of paper.
It is as easy to share a document with your sales team as it is to send a copy to a customer or promote it through social media by hosting digital content in an online repository as it is designed to support enablement.
Your content is ready to be used and repurposed whenever you need it when it is online and accessible to your team. For example, a set of content created for an enablement training will remain online and accessible by sales reps even after the training.
The right documents might later get shared with a prospect during a sales meeting by a representative who is already familiar with it.
Some of the content might get shared as part of a buyers' journey by your marketing team, or they may repurpose it for a blog post teased through LinkedIn
Reporting and Analysis:
Standardize Reporting:
A set of standardized sales reports is the most immediate way to derive valuable insights from business data.
Activities logged by salespeople, deals won and lost, leads generated / worked and product demos delivered are the most common reports.
Sales enablement professionals can help create these reports for sales leadership.
Sales Process Review:
A sales process audit helps discover the areas where sales performance could be improved by providing an in-depth, data-backed analysis of the sales process of a company.
External sales enablement consultants begin service contracts with a sales process audit to highlight points of disconnect in the sales process that should be addressed by leadership.
Qualify Leads:
Qualifying leads is a valuable use of time for representatives as modern salespeople are often overwhelmed by information regarding people who are actually a poor fit for their business.
Lead scoring systems can be implemented by sales enablement professionals to assign positive or negative weight to contacts and companies.
Businesses using a customer relationship management software (CRM) can lead to representatives the moment they convert on your website.
Salespeople can work on less qualified prospects that are moved to a CRM queue on their own time.
Personalized content is important to move leads through the buyer's journey.
Organize Sales Content:
Conducting a complete content audit is important for the success of any sales enablement strategy.
It can be ensured that your reps can find the resources to share with leads quickly by centralizing all existing sales content in one location.
Customer case studies, Whitepapers and ebooks, Product demo decks, Pricing and discount information and Competitive intelligence briefs are some of the examples of sales content that should be audited and organized.
Tools such as Google Docs, an internal wiki, or a CRM can be used to host libraries.
You should keep time changes and content document libraries up to date while auditing and organizing your content to enable your sales team to succeed.
Create Case Studies:
Case studies such as the success of a previous customer, whether about sales, marketing, or any other topic related to your business and the product or service you sell, are the most important content in a sales team's document library.
Your business should have at least one case study containing the product and the challenges it resolves for your target audience. Our business should aim to have at least one case study highlighting the product and the challenges it resolves for your target audience.
You can track usage of your new products if your business is using a CRM to quickly identify potential case study customers.
Videos can be used in your case studies to reach your audience in an effective way. However, producing high-quality video case studies takes time. Therefore, case study production are usually outsourced to marketing agencies, while the companies still act as the liaison to featured customers.
Create Email Templates:
Email is one of the most effective way for sales representatives to connect with prospects.
You can increase productivity by creating standardized email templates that salespeople can access directly from their inbox .
However, the templates should be customized so that sales representatives can quickly personalize their messages with information customized and relevant to the prospect.
You can use technology and automation to impact your sales enablement process positively.
Create Email Sequences:
Email sequences can be crafted by sales enablement professionals, sales representatives, and other team members which automatically trigger if a prospect did not respond within a set amount of time.
Personalization tokens can be used by the team for contact and company details in email sequences that tailor the message to the specific prospect.
Valuable time of your team can be saved by automating the follow-up process with set-it-and-forget-it sequences.
Automate Prospecting:
Automated prospecting is a set of emails that is sent in the name of a salesperson including direct links to their calendar.
A conversation can be scheduled by the prospects who are ready to buy with the sales representative using the calendar link which will save a lot of time of the representatives by allowing them to simply open their calendars daily to find multiple meetings with qualified buyers.
Implement Direct Messaging:
Sales representatives will have the opportunity to engage with and close interested contacts in real time by setting up live chat on your website.
Filtering criteria must be set by the sales enablement team members to ensure that live chat boxes are only surfaced to high-quality leads. This way wasting representatives' time with bad fit contacts can be avoided.
A sales enablement software can be used to help you with this automation, and to keep all of your sales enablement materials and work organized.
Use Sales Enablement Software:
Sales enablement software can help your team to manage all of your materials and content from a central location.
You can create, share, edit, and manage your materials and resources easily with sales enablement software.
The information here can be accessed by all of your representatives at any point of time and your marketing team can also easily collaborate with sales on the content they create and share with prospects and customers.
8.Empower Your Sales Team:
Your sales team will have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently when you empower them with the right resources, materials, and tools resulting in a boost in revenue. Therefore, You can see an increase in your number of customers and brand value.
The content, materials, technology, and software required to reach and convert more leads into customers by your sales and marketing teams must be accessed and shared with open lines of communication.
Digital Transformation:
Digital Transformation is very important for modern sales enablement.
You can make a big, positive impact on all aspects of your enablement efforts, from content creation and distribution to virtual training sessions by leveraging digital technology.
Technology used to power enablement works best when it is a part of a broader infrastructure that facilitates information sharing and collaboration across the whole organization.
Sales enablement is a combined effort between sales, marketing, and a dedicated enablement team. Customer support, product, and operations may also play some role.
Your sales enablement plan should be spelled out in a document which will evolve over time.
The plan should be reviewed regularly, and updated as needed to keep your enablement efforts aligned with the change of your business and your customer base over time
Getting stakeholders or leadership connected to sales enablement to commit to enablement plans is important for success.
You should identify key stakeholders from sales and marketing, leadership and management, and anywhere else where buy-in is key when you create your sales enablement plans.
Your stakeholders will help drive adoption, spread the word and generate excitement, all of which are helpful to the success of enablement programs.
Getting the right people in place is the key to driving your success.
An experienced salesperson or sales leader can deliver your training and other enablement activities whenever possible.
Some facts about Sales enablement:
Sales enablement requires the help of marketing and sales as sales enablement is owned by both marketing and sales. A variety of resources including videos, blogs, and conversation and product guides are provided to the representatives they need by marketing to effectively sell. These resources that are provided by the marketing help support the interactions of representatives with potential customers. This content is shared with leads and customers by the representative to help them make a decision about whether or not they want to convert.
Sales team can communicate with marketing team about the types of content and materials that are missing which can be shared with leads throughout their buyer's journeys. So, new materials can be created and shared with representatives to allow them to reach customers and sell more effectively.
Sales enablement is part of a sales approach that includes coaching, technology and other sales strategies. Technology, like a CRM solution can provide organization-wide access to the latest enablement materials and resources as it can easily integrate sales enablement into the daily workflows of your representative and managers.
Sales and marketing work together on enablement as sales representatives are provided with articles, videos, product guides, and a variety of other content to help prospects and customers make informed buying decisions. In turn, feedback can be given by the sales team to their colleagues in marketing to inform more effective content strategies going forward.
Content is provided by sales enablement that will be provided to the buyer by the sales team.
Best practices, research and tools are also provided by sales enablement that sales will consume internally.
Training and development needs to be a big part of most programs as salespeople must know how to use the resources you provide to them.
Traditional training programs in addition to using technologies like collaboration tools can be conducted to make sales training continuous.
Make sure resources are easy to find and easy to apply when designing for usability as it should be easy to use for the sales team.
The usability of resources should be tracked so that future sales enablement efforts can be optimized based on what is used and what is not used.
Importance of Sales enablement:
Sales enablement can help assist salespeople to cut down unnecessary conversations with customers, sales managers, product and marketing managers, and support teams and prioritize what actually matters for their role and to their leadership.Poor enablement can negatively impact your bottom line by driving poor sales performance because of using the wrong training, delivering out of date content, or leaning on the wrong strategic vision.Your sales teams can learn about your products, your value proposition, or even how to sell with sales enablement so that they can bring in more business.
They will have a focus on making the sales goals easier for everyone to know what is going on across the organization by walking through sales goals with their teams on a regular basis.
Training and other enablement activities will be prioritized for salespeople alongside other responsibilities by good enablement leaders.
Sales organizations can keep up with evolving buyer expectations with sales enablement as your sales teams will be provided with the tools and content they need to guide prospective customers through their buyers' journeys.
It can be made easier to create and adapt marketing materials to support new products and campaigns and to distribute them anywhere and at any time with digital technology.
Sales enablement is a must for any kind of business with increased competition, and the rise of the work-from-anywhere digital economy.
Sales Enablement Strategy:
A sales enablement strategy is the approach taken by your business to provide the resources needed by sales team to effectively sell. Sales enablement strategy is tailored to the specific needs of your sales team so that they can target your audience and close more deals. An analysis of the resources, tools, content, and information can be provided to the sales team which help them convert more leads and audience members into customers. You should keep sales enablement best practices in mind in order to begin developing your business's strategy.
A solid strategy should be built and executed on it for succeeding in sales enablement. The various aspects of sales enablement and strategy include Goal Setting, Communication, Time Management, Content Creation, reporting and analysis, sales content optimization, technology and automation, and sales enablement software.
Goal Setting is a must for sales enablement just like you do for sales. The goal setting should align with your broader business goals when you set goals for enablement. Infact, organizational alignment can be created which is a great framework that is easily adopted by organizations of any type and size.
A broader sense of purpose can be created for everyone involved in creating, delivering, and taking the enablement by viewing sales enablement as a part of greater organizational goals.
Sales representatives can develop new skills and enhance their career growth with proper goal setting for sales enablement. It also supports specific product, sales, and business goals.
It should be made clear by the sales enablement leaders what is expected of participants in classes, self-paced learning, and other enablement activities well ahead of time. All of your salespeople will be able to know exactly what is expected of them before, during, and after each enablement event by communicating the expected results in detail. Sales enablement leaders should not only communicate with their teams and salespeople, but also with product and marketing managers, regional sales leaders, and company leadership.
Time management is a key actor for an effective enablement program. Just-in-time learning should be balanced with ongoing work in support of long range strategy for the best sales enablement activities. In time training and content is often required for new products and initiatives to support short term goals.
You should not overwhelm your sales teams with too many schedules which can disrupt enablement activities to achieve long-term goals.
Content Creation:
Content creation is a key element where marketing and sales can really work together for successful sales enablement. Take stock of the content you already have before you create any new content. A lot of high-quality content should be provided that maps to the buying process.You can conduct a content audit to collect all the materials of your company in one place, by pulling from across your website, other public-facing channels, and internal marketing as well as enablement repositories.
Holes, overlaps and other needs in your content strategy can be identified from the centralized location where all the materials are available.
A sales content management system can be really helpful when it comes to organizing existing content and planning new content strategies as a huge amount of content may already exist on the company website, which is ready to be refreshed and repurposed.
Software can be used that is designed specifically to support enablement as it comes with sales activities including alignment across sales and marketing.
Sales enablement involves new prospects, existing customers and sales teams.
The content created by you should suit its intended audience and purpose so that each segment of your audience gets support at every point along their respective journeys.
It is much easier to share content electronically as compared to dealing only in printed sheets of paper.
It is as easy to share a document with your sales team as it is to send a copy to a customer or promote it through social media by hosting digital content in an online repository as it is designed to support enablement.
Your content is ready to be used and repurposed whenever you need it when it is online and accessible to your team. For example, a set of content created for an enablement training will remain online and accessible by sales reps even after the training.
The right documents might later get shared with a prospect during a sales meeting by a representative who is already familiar with it.
Some of the content might get shared as part of a buyers' journey by your marketing team, or they may repurpose it for a blog post teased through LinkedIn
Reporting and Analysis:
Standardize Reporting:
A set of standardized sales reports is the most immediate way to derive valuable insights from business data.
Activities logged by salespeople, deals won and lost, leads generated / worked and product demos delivered are the most common reports.
Sales enablement professionals can help create these reports for sales leadership.
Sales Process Review:
A sales process audit helps discover the areas where sales performance could be improved by providing an in-depth, data-backed analysis of the sales process of a company.
External sales enablement consultants begin service contracts with a sales process audit to highlight points of disconnect in the sales process that should be addressed by leadership.
Qualify Leads:
Qualifying leads is a valuable use of time for representatives as modern salespeople are often overwhelmed by information regarding people who are actually a poor fit for their business.
Lead scoring systems can be implemented by sales enablement professionals to assign positive or negative weight to contacts and companies.
Businesses using a customer relationship management software (CRM) can lead to representatives the moment they convert on your website.
Salespeople can work on less qualified prospects that are moved to a CRM queue on their own time.
Sales Content Optimization:
Your sales content can be optimized to ensure it is effective and doesn't take too much time away from selling.Personalized content is important to move leads through the buyer's journey.
Organize Sales Content:
Conducting a complete content audit is important for the success of any sales enablement strategy.
It can be ensured that your reps can find the resources to share with leads quickly by centralizing all existing sales content in one location.
Customer case studies, Whitepapers and ebooks, Product demo decks, Pricing and discount information and Competitive intelligence briefs are some of the examples of sales content that should be audited and organized.
Tools such as Google Docs, an internal wiki, or a CRM can be used to host libraries.
You should keep time changes and content document libraries up to date while auditing and organizing your content to enable your sales team to succeed.
Create Case Studies:
Case studies such as the success of a previous customer, whether about sales, marketing, or any other topic related to your business and the product or service you sell, are the most important content in a sales team's document library.
Your business should have at least one case study containing the product and the challenges it resolves for your target audience. Our business should aim to have at least one case study highlighting the product and the challenges it resolves for your target audience.
You can track usage of your new products if your business is using a CRM to quickly identify potential case study customers.
Videos can be used in your case studies to reach your audience in an effective way. However, producing high-quality video case studies takes time. Therefore, case study production are usually outsourced to marketing agencies, while the companies still act as the liaison to featured customers.
Create Email Templates:
Email is one of the most effective way for sales representatives to connect with prospects.
You can increase productivity by creating standardized email templates that salespeople can access directly from their inbox .
However, the templates should be customized so that sales representatives can quickly personalize their messages with information customized and relevant to the prospect.
Technology and Automation:
Manual processes can now be automated for sales representatives so that they can sell better and faster.You can use technology and automation to impact your sales enablement process positively.
Create Email Sequences:
Email sequences can be crafted by sales enablement professionals, sales representatives, and other team members which automatically trigger if a prospect did not respond within a set amount of time.
Personalization tokens can be used by the team for contact and company details in email sequences that tailor the message to the specific prospect.
Valuable time of your team can be saved by automating the follow-up process with set-it-and-forget-it sequences.
Automate Prospecting:
Automated prospecting is a set of emails that is sent in the name of a salesperson including direct links to their calendar.
A conversation can be scheduled by the prospects who are ready to buy with the sales representative using the calendar link which will save a lot of time of the representatives by allowing them to simply open their calendars daily to find multiple meetings with qualified buyers.
Implement Direct Messaging:
Sales representatives will have the opportunity to engage with and close interested contacts in real time by setting up live chat on your website.
Filtering criteria must be set by the sales enablement team members to ensure that live chat boxes are only surfaced to high-quality leads. This way wasting representatives' time with bad fit contacts can be avoided.
A sales enablement software can be used to help you with this automation, and to keep all of your sales enablement materials and work organized.
Use Sales Enablement Software:
Sales enablement software can help your team to manage all of your materials and content from a central location.
You can create, share, edit, and manage your materials and resources easily with sales enablement software.
The information here can be accessed by all of your representatives at any point of time and your marketing team can also easily collaborate with sales on the content they create and share with prospects and customers.
8.Empower Your Sales Team:
Your sales team will have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently when you empower them with the right resources, materials, and tools resulting in a boost in revenue. Therefore, You can see an increase in your number of customers and brand value.
The content, materials, technology, and software required to reach and convert more leads into customers by your sales and marketing teams must be accessed and shared with open lines of communication.
Digital Transformation:
Digital Transformation is very important for modern sales enablement.
You can make a big, positive impact on all aspects of your enablement efforts, from content creation and distribution to virtual training sessions by leveraging digital technology.
Technology used to power enablement works best when it is a part of a broader infrastructure that facilitates information sharing and collaboration across the whole organization.
Sales enablement is a combined effort between sales, marketing, and a dedicated enablement team. Customer support, product, and operations may also play some role.
Your sales enablement plan should be spelled out in a document which will evolve over time.
The plan should be reviewed regularly, and updated as needed to keep your enablement efforts aligned with the change of your business and your customer base over time
Getting stakeholders or leadership connected to sales enablement to commit to enablement plans is important for success.
You should identify key stakeholders from sales and marketing, leadership and management, and anywhere else where buy-in is key when you create your sales enablement plans.
Your stakeholders will help drive adoption, spread the word and generate excitement, all of which are helpful to the success of enablement programs.
Getting the right people in place is the key to driving your success.
An experienced salesperson or sales leader can deliver your training and other enablement activities whenever possible.