What is sales enablement and why is it important?

Working in sales is a tricky business. Every salesperson, in every industry and company size, needs to take into account the various stages of a sales process – before, during and after a conversation has taken place.

Equally, if the salesperson isn’t armed with the right tools and information, it makes that process a lot harder than it needs to be. That’s why sales enablement has become a popular term to help ensure your sales team achieve their targets.

What does sales enablement actually mean?

You might think it sounds like a buzzword, but businesses who embrace it will tell you that it really does help. To put it simply, it basically means the practice of providing your salespeople with the information, tools and resources to help them sell more.

Here are a few examples:

• Calendar integrations to book more meetings
• Training for new product features
• Sales scripts for better conversations
• Sales-specific content for salespeople to send to prospects

Basically, it covers anything that helps your salespeople make more money.

Why is it important?

There are two main reasons for implementing a sales enablement process. Firstly, it encourages a smoother and more efficient sales process. That’s because it helps cross-sell products, have more informed conversations (which helps build more loyal customers), and sell smarter. Secondly, it provides all of your salespeople with the same opportunities. You are, primarily, empowering your salespeople to use content or new learnings in order to sell more.

Picture this: A salesperson has a good conversation with a prospect and wants to follow up the conversation with something of value. Without sales enablement, that will be hard. Alternatively, with sales enablement collateral, the salesperson would be able to follow up with a product factsheet further explaining the benefits, or a one-pager answering any data privacy concerns, for example.

How do you start sales enablement?

Getting started can be a difficult place to start as your sales team all probably want different things. You need to be smart about it. Here are some things you can consider:

• Industry-specific creds documents
• Product features and benefits one-pager
• Monthly product training programme
• Relevant eBooks on industry trends
• Interactive sales script with various pain point scenarios and messaging for solutions

Additionally, sales enablement can include post-sale activity in order to help reduce customer churn and improve customer experience.

Get your sales team to tell you what materials they think would help them close more deals or provide more value to prospects. And sync up your sales team with your product team to make sure they are selling the right features and know the product well. Really, there is so much you can do it’s an open goldmine. Just always keep in mind, it’s about enabling more sales.

Measuring the success of sales enablement

Answer this, do you think that if you provide your sales team with relevant materials, tools and resources to close more opportunities, they will? If the answer is yes, then sales enablement is for you. The key is to provide your team with good content and training to engage the prospect throughout the buying process, regardless of what stage they are at.

Measuring the success of sales enablement can be difficult, but there are a few metrics you need to take into account. For customers, measuring your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is how you can find out if they are happier. For prospects, have a look at the average sales cycle length, the amount of your sales team hitting their targets, and the average deal size.

Equally, speak with your sales team for positive references. Get examples of when sales enablement has helped in real situations – a piece of content that helped move a prospect forward, or some training that helped resolve a pain point question. The bottom line is the more you provide your sales team with the tools and information needed, the more they will be able to sell. And that means more revenue.

Orignal Source:- sales blog