The right approach to sales enablement can help you increase your sales rates and boost revenue. While you may recognize the importance of sales enablement, you may not know about some of the sales enablement best practices that can fuel success.
Discover what works when optimizing your sales process and empower your sales team with the following best practices.
What is sales enablement, exactly?
Sales enablement entails improving sales performance across your sales organization through specific initiatives that facilitate better results. Sales leaders and salespeople can benefit from certain sales enablement tools, training programs, and processes the company streamlines. All of these measures can allow for more closed deals and revenue growth.
With a better idea of what sales enablement is, let’s get into some specific ways to improve it to improve your overall sales operations.
1. Establish clear and realistic goals
Like any other strategy, your sales enablement strategy will begin with some goal setting, which will give it a defined direction. You must know what you specifically want to achieve with your sales enablement teams and work toward those goals, which should ultimately align with broader business goals.
Some of the many goals you might set for effective sales enablement include:
- Closing deals of a specific amount
- Achieving a particular quota over a set period
- Overcoming certain challenges and pain points that hinder sales management, the customer journey, onboarding, sales training, or other processes
- Improved content management and performance
- Shortening the sales cycle
- Streamlined sales tasks that optimize efficiency
Based on your goals, you can identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you achieve them and measure your progress. These KPIs could include everything from conversion rates and closed deals to traffic on key bottom-of-funnel landing pages.
Whenever you create your goals, using the SMART goal structure is among the most effective sales enablement best practices. According to this acronym, your goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
2. Determine which sales activities perform the best (and worst)
Another of the key sales enablement best practices to implement entails identifying the sales activities that get real results. At the same time, you should figure out where your weak points lie and work on those.
For example, you might find that particular content pieces perform better than others when converting leads to customers. You may also discover that certain sales reps do better than others due to better training or people skills.
Meanwhile, you may find that other areas of your sales enablement programs underperform. You’ll want to try to improve upon these areas, whether it’s by further optimizing sales enablement content, integrating sales coaching, introducing new sales enablement software or sales tools, or taking other critical steps.
If you can figure out precisely why areas of your business are performing or underperforming, then you can take the right approach to increasing efficacy. Ultimately, this practice will fuel sales success and increase your bottom line.
3. Fully develop your sales enablement content strategy
This is another of the most essential sales enablement best practices. The content you develop for your sales enablement efforts can make or break your campaigns. Your content should help carry people through the buyer’s journey from beginning to end, supplementing the efforts of sales professionals to drive conversions.
You can use all types of content to connect with audiences, including whitepapers, ebooks, blog posts, articles, landing pages with calls to action, webinars, and more. All of this content should consistently engage potential customers and lead to more sales.
As you develop a successful sales enablement strategy, the following are the three main stages to consider when creating content:
1. The Awareness Stage
This part of the customer journey begins when people come to know your company and what it’s about. Prospective customers will first learn about you here and want to learn more as they engage with your brand. At this stage, people will want to explore certain industry topics, often by reading blog posts, articles, and other informational content. They’ll also be more likely to trust you over competitors as they move down the sales funnel.
2. The Consideration Stage
At the consideration stage, potential customers begin to look for certain solutions to a problem or pain point they’re facing. In the process, they may search for specific products or services as they move toward the bottom of the funnel. Here, your content should steer people toward your offerings over competitors’ and make a compelling value proposition. Some consideration-stage content could include case studies, customer testimonials, ebooks, and whitepapers.
3. The Decision Stage
Finally, people will transition to the decision stage of the buying process when they’re ready to make a purchase. Much of the content you push here will be similar to content during the consideration stage, with bottom-of-funnel content helping convince prospects that your offerings are the right solutions for them.
Knowing what types of relevant content to push and when will help you automate much of the sales enablement process.
Also, measure content performance and determine which content pieces yield the best results. You can then make any necessary changes to your strategy as you perfect the content creation process.
4. Optimize the customer experience with buyer personas
You can improve your customer experience with the help of in-depth, accurate buyer personas that describe your target customers. These personas define certain types of customers based on specific characteristics that differentiate them using a fictional format.
For example, you might have a buyer persona called Professional Pete, who represents an audience segment comprising busy professionals. Your persona might detail that this person is most likely to engage with you on their commute to and from work or during off hours such as lunch breaks. It could also reveal other aspects of this hypothetical customer’s life. Based on this persona, you can determine the best times to engage in sales calls and which approach will lead to a conversion.
In addition, marketing departments can decide on the right visuals and messaging to connect with audiences based on their respective personas.
When you create your personas, research what motivates each segment of your audience. How do they go about looking for new products or services? Are they interested in specific features that you can highlight? What are some particular pain points that apply to them in their daily lives? What social media channels do they use most often?
Breaking your audiences into different personas will ultimately inform sales conversations and help you decide on the best approach to optimize the buyer’s journey for each one.
5. Use the right technology to improve processes
Another essential step is to incorporate the best existing and new technology to help you get ahead with sales enablement.
Use innovative solutions for the automation of menial tasks and streamlined workflows. Salesforce, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, training tools, enablement platforms, and other technology should make up your entire suite.
In addition, analytical tools can help you measure the results of your efforts with the right metrics and actionable insights. You might determine that:
- Certain sales reps or teams are underperforming
- Stakeholders are dissatisfied with something
- Your training isn’t sufficient
You may also find other weak areas that you can improve upon. Equipping your teams with the best sales enablement technology will go a long way to help sales teams and enablement leaders perform at their best.
6. Don’t fall behind on training and education
To get the best results from sales enablement efforts, you must ensure optimized sales productivity through sufficient training and continued education. Without these sales enablement best practices, you’re going to fail to stay ahead of competitors.
There’s always something new to learn for sales managers and reps alike, helping them continually achieve their goals and align them with overarching business goals. You can also use multiple methods to facilitate training and education, including in-person meetings, gamification, roleplay, team-building events, and sales training software.
You can also develop personalized training for each employee to help them continue developing their skills based on their specific weak areas and at their own pace. Solutions like learning management software (LMS) can integrate into your operations, allowing for more consistent and meaningful education across your sales organization.
Implement the right sales enablement best practices to experience real success
With the help of these and other sales enablement best practices, you can get the long-term results you want from your efforts, driving more customer engagement and, ultimately, sales.
Taking the right approach to your sales enablement efforts will help you develop a solid strategy as you work to optimize individual and team performance, enhance customer communications, and streamline workflows.
One effective tool you can use to succeed with your sales enablement strategy is an LMS like Docebo. This informal learning solution can give you what you need to effectively train and educate your sales leadership, with the ability to implement it for teams of all sizes. When you combine it with other sales enablement best practices, this LMS can be the key to helping your company boost sales and experience growth.