Sales enablement is the technology, processes and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently, effectively and at a higher velocity.
You have a great sales team. What can make them better? You can help them to get more productive by saving them the time they spend on tedious or repetitive tasks
Source: Qvidian via HubSpot
For example, let's say your sales person sends a certain set of emails to a prospect after they have had their connect or exploratory calls. These mails need to be sent in some order, in a few days' gap. It requires the sales person to remember which mails have gone out, and which is the next one to be sent, and then proceed to send it. It's a time taking and repetitive task. These mails have to be sent to each of their prospects too, and that can quickly eat into their real selling time.
Instead, they can use an efficient sales tool that has an email sequencing feature. The sales person can set up the sequence and run it automatically for all their prospects with an ability to customise each email as they wish. They save time while the leads are followed up automatically. The freed up time can be spent on new prospects. More productivity, isn't it? And eventually, more revenue.
That's an example of sales enablement for you. You use technology, standardise processes, bring in reporting and create content that the sales team needs, so that they can focus on what they do best: have great sales conversations and close.
Sourcing is a grind!
As per SiriusDecisions, Sales departments typically self source 55-90% of their leads. To source targets, they ...
...and it can take from 10 minutes to 30 minutes per lead!
Whatever happened to that prospect? Every lead or prospect that your business gets needs to be accounted for. They simply cannot fall through the cracks. The lead your sales team worked six months ago that went cold, may have warmed up to your offerings. But if the lead is not even there in your sight, how will you follow up?
You need them to live in an easy to use CRM, so you can get back to them when the time is right, with a reminder that tells you to check with them after six months.
Are we on track to hit quota? Where are the quotas of each sales person being tracked? If it's on a spreadsheet, you know how difficult it is to keep track, get updates, ensure it's all tallied, on an ongoing basis. Instead use a sales tool that shows you how each person is doing against his or her quota in real time, so you know where you need to step in to help.
Reps need content : 30 hours! That is the amount of time per month an average salesperson spends searching for and creating selling materials, as per the American Marketing Association
One of the key challenges sales people commonly face is that they don't have easy access to the right content that could help their prospect in their buying process. Often they do not know about the content the marketing team already has, and often end up creating their own decks to push things along. A lot of precious time is wasted in this process.
It is critical to set up a content development process that helps the sales team to sell easily, and give them easy access to all the content. In fact, according to Sirius Decisions, 95% of high-performing B2B organizations align their sales content to key deal attributes to improve findability.
Low productivity - too many priorities and tasks: Sales teams have to engage in tasks that can suck a lot of their time such as…
…..and so on. They have to treat all prospects the same way till something in their research throws up insights that help them focus on a lead that has a need for your offerings.
You can save them 30% of this time by using the right sales and marketing enablement tools.
Here are some of the Sales Enablement tools which we use frequently. This is not an exhaustive list and we work with more tools as per the requirements of clients.
Audit | Google Forms |
Content | Adobe CC, Ceros, Office, Google tools |
Content Personalization | HubSpot |
Account Data | LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Hunter, Zoominfo |
CRM | HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics |
Sales | HubSpot Sales Hub |
Chatbots | HubSpot, Drift |
How do I know I need sales enablement?
If your sales and marketing are not talking the same language, and don't seem to be working with the same goals, you need sales enablement solutions.
If your sales team seems to be spending a lot of time in tedious tasks, it's time to look at sales automation tools and augmentation services such as database development.
Your marketing team makes a ton of content, and yet you find your sales team also making their own to send to prospects, you definitely need sales and marketing alignment as well as content services.
How do I keep my sales and marketing teams aligned?
Get them together and focus on business and sales goals. Ensure that they understand the 'must prioritise' activities that will help them achieve the goals, and not get sidetracked by vanity metrics. Implement joint KPIs that matter instead of vanity metrics.
Making marketing teams more appreciative of sales teams pain points and making them realise that the two teams cannot work in silos.
Set up processes so the sales and marketing syncs happen regularly, and that the to-dos are captured and executed upon as well. Review regularly, so no one goes off track, simply because a new campaign had to be launched or an event had to be attended.
Let’s discuss how sales enablement services can help you close the difference between your pipeline value and revenues. Book a time that works for you using the calendar below.