Beyond the Software: Mastering Sales Enablement

Sales enablement – Giving your sales team everything they need to increase business performance.

Overview:

• What is Sales Enablement?
• Why is Sales Enablement Important?
• Sales Enablement Best Practices
• Methods for Increasing Sales Productivity
• Conclusion

What is Sales Enablement?

When many sales professionals hear the phrase ‘sales enablement’, they typically think about the various software packages and tools that exist to help support sales efforts. These might consist of a combination of CRM systems, sales toolkits and content, training materials, playbooks and product information presented in a convenient format to help salespeople be more productive throughout the sales cycle, and ultimately close more deals.

However, at Firestarter, we take a more holistic view of sales enablement when we’re engaging with our clients. While all the above elements are important parts in improving your whole team’s sales performance, that’s not the complete picture.

For us, sales enablement is all about structuring, organising and embedding long-term and cultural practices that are designed to optimise the sales performance of each and every person in a sales team – driving incremental gains and improvements across the board so that as many individuals as possible are performing at or above target. A typical sales enablement project will include:

• A clear senior leadership vision and management engagement
• Sustained, consistent and bespoke sales training and assessment
• A programme of sales process analysis and optimisation
• Technology integration and adoption
• Clear metrics management and reporting processes
• Sales team structural alignment

This approach puts a single-minded focus on implementing practices and tools which help your sales team to sell more of whatever it is they sell. Crucially, this is not just limited to just the sales team; sales enablement requires clear leadership, engagement and participation across all levels within an organisation, and also helps to bridge the gap between sales. marketing and operations, to make sure the entire business is structurally geared to enable salespeople to increase their productivity, and ultimately sell more.

Sales enablement aims to capture all the elements that help to, generate more leads, boost sales productivity, implement a sales culture and foster a positive attitude towards sales growth.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement’s importance stems from its ability to improve the productivity of sales teams by giving them the tools, resources, training and structures they need to engage effectively with prospects and close deals efficiently. In the modern world where the sales cycle has become increasingly complex due to advancements in digitalisation and evolving customer needs, having a sales enablement strategy is now an essential tool for growth and continued success. Having a robust sales enablement strategy helps to:

• Align sales, marketing and operational efforts
• Ensures consistency in approach and messaging
• Improves leverage of technology such as CRM
• Utilise analytics for competitive edge

For organisations looking to improve their sales processes, improve team performance and ultimately take the right steps towards their business goals, utilising a comprehensive sales enablement approach should be of high importance to sales leaders.

Having discussed why sales enablement is important for your business, it’s now time we show you some of the best practices that your sales enablement programme should include to establish clear goals for future business, maximise overall team efficiency and achieve maximum growth.

1. Defining clear business goals for the future

To establish your organisational goals, you want to begin by understanding what is it that you truly want to achieve. To help you come to a conclusion about the future of your business it will be beneficial to first discuss your strategic plans with representatives of your business, these could be your sales leaders or stakeholders. Ask questions that shine a light on the overarching goals of your business, questions such as:

• What are our long-term revenue targets?
• How do we envision our market position in the next 3-5 years?
• What new markets or customer segments do we want to penetrate?
• How can we improve our customer retention rates?

To further refine your business goals and ensure they align with your sales enablement strategy, consider the following questions:

• What key performance indicators (KPIs) should we track to measure progress towards our goals?
• What are the current bottlenecks in our sales process?
• Do we have the right people in the right roles to achieve our sales goals?
• What processes can we implement to improve communication between marketing and sales teams? CRM?
• What sales enablement tools do we currently use, and how effective are they?

Once you’ve defined your business goals and answered key questions, it’s crucial to establish how your sales enablement team will:

1. Help to increase and achieve company-wide KPIs
2. Enhance sales team productivity
3. Improve marketing and sales alignment
4. Drive customer-centric selling

By focusing on these key areas, sales enablement teams can effectively work towards achieving their goals, ultimately driving business growth and success. This approach ensures that sales teams are well-equipped, aligned with company objectives, and positioned to meet the evolving needs of their customers.

2. Align sales and marketing through collaboration

After establishing clear business goals, the next step to take is to review the resources and departments you have at your disposal, starting with the sales team and aligning them with your marketing teams. This alignment is fundamental to creating a cohesive customer journey and maximising the effectiveness of your sales efforts.

The conflict between sales and marketing is one that a sales enablement strategy should seek to end, instead of creating conflict it should create alignment. As reported by Aberdeen Strategy & research, highly-aligned organisations saw a 32% year-over-year revenue growth whereas less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease in revenue. The relationship between sales and marketing is multifaceted but both have a dependency on each other, at its core, marketing generates leads through various channels, while sales convert these leads into customers. The link between the two lies within content creation, where marketing produces materials that sales teams utilise throughout the sales process.

When sales and marketing teams are aligned, it creates a powerful engine for sales enablement. This alignment creates a unified view of the customer journey, enabling more effective strategies. Marketing insights can shape sales training programmes, ensuring representatives are equipped with the most relevant and up-to-date information.

The most common approach to aligning sales and marketing is through the use of modern technology such as a CRM system. CRM platforms provide a centralised location for marketing tools and data, customer data, day-to-day tasks, pipeline management and more that is accessible to both teams. This shared access ensures everyone is working with the same, up-to-date information. Perhaps most importantly, these platforms when tailored to your unique business needs open up communication channels between sales and marketing ensuring greater collaboration that extends beyond formal meetings or emails.

The importance of aligning sales and marketing isn’t one that should be overlooked, it creates a unified approach to customer engagement, leverages shared insights and resources, and ultimately drives significant improvements in business performance.

3. Build a sales toolkit that focuses on the buyer journey

Equipping your sales team with a robust toolkit is a key component to any effective sales enablement strategy. A sales toolkit is designed to equip your sales team with the resources they need to navigate various sales situations with confidence, think of it as the salesperson’s armoury that they require for battle. The goal of a sales toolkit is to elevate your sales team’s ability to engage prospects, fight off objections and ultimately close deals.

The most effective sales toolkits are born from close collaboration between sales and marketing, as we’ve discussed previously this collaborative approach ensures that the toolkit not only contains marketing-approved messaging and branding but also addresses the real-world needs and challenges faced by the sales team – this is why regular feedback from your salespeople is essential for growth between the two teams.

Essential components of a sales toolkit include:

• Brochures and one-pagers: Visually appealing, branded documents that highlight key product/services features, benefits and how your product/solution solves the prospects pain points.
• Case studies and client testimonials: Real-world examples of how your product or service has solved problems for other clients. These are great as they act as social proof elements which build trust and credibility.
• Product demos and videos: Videos and demos are a powerful tool as they help with humanising your brand which resonates with people allowing them to make a deeper connection with your brand. According to a study by Dash App, 91% of people watch explainer videos before purchasing a product online.
• Playbooks: A sales playbook serves as a strategic guide for your sales team, providing a structured approach to various sales scenarios and stages of the buyer’s journey. Modern CRM platforms often provide functionality to host and manage sales playbooks, creating a seamless experience for your sales team.
• Presentation decks: Customisable presentation decks for different pitches and scenarios, these should be easily adaptable to each specific prospect while maintaining your brand consistency.

The key to success lies not just in creating these tools, but in fostering a culture where your sales team actively uses and contributes to them. Through regular training and feedback shared between sales and marketing, a sales toolkit will empower your sales team to handle any situation with confidence.

4. Foster a sales-driven culture

An often overlooked but powerful strategy within sales enablement is the creation of a consistent, company-wide sales-led culture. A sales-driven culture should extend far beyond the sales department, starting with the CEO right down to the newest hire. The power of everyone understanding and embracing the importance of sales helps to create a culture that is driven toward growth and success.

The Importance of a sales culture manifesto

At the heart of creating a sales-led culture is the development of a clear, compelling manifesto. A manifesto serves as a guiding light for your entire organisation uniting everyone around a shared vision of sales excellence. Putting together a company manifesto should be the result of a collaborative exercise that brings together key stakeholders from across the company:

Key elements of a sales culture manifesto include:

1. Vision statement: A concise, inspiring description of what the sales-led culture aims to achieve.
2. Core principles: The fundamental beliefs and values that underpin the sales culture.
3. Key behaviours: Specific actions and attitudes that exemplify the sales culture in practice.
4. Success metrics: Clear indicators of how the culture’s impact will be measured.

Implementing a sales-led culture into your organisation shouldn’t be viewed as a one-time exercise but an ongoing process. Tracking KPIs to study the impact of your cultural shift is a common way to measure success. Key metrics may include:

• Revenue growth
• Staff turnover
• Employee engagement metrics
• Sales cycle length

When employees see leadership fully embracing the sales culture, it sends a powerful message about its importance. For a sales culture to work, it must be fully adopted by every employee to create an environment where sales excellence is woven into the very fabric of your company.

5. Continuous education through sales coaching

Salespeople often face internal challenges that can significantly impact their performance. These challenges may include a lack of resources and lack of inadequate skills to carry out their job efficiently. This can be put down to the fact that salespeople simply aren’t receiving enough training as it’s said that 73% of sales managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching their sales teams despite its proven effectiveness in boosting performance. In fact, research reveals that sales representatives who receive just three hours of coaching per month exceed their goals by 7%, boosting revenue by 25% and increasing close rates by 70%.

A comprehensive sales enablement programme should incorporate strong coaching and mentoring initiatives. These may include:

1. Regular one-on-one feedback rich coaching sessions
2. Peer mentoring programs
3. Role-playing exercises to practice challenging scenarios
4. Continuous feedback mechanisms

At Firestarter Business Solutions, we understand the transformative power of effective coaching and mentoring in sales enablement. Our tailored coaching and mentoring programmes are designed to empower your sales team, helping them overcome internal challenges and achieve peak performance.

6. Amplify sales enablement through ambassador networking

For large, geographically dispersed sales organisations, implementing effective sales enablement strategies can be challenging. By building a local ambassador network model within your organisation, this offers a powerful solution to overcoming geographical challenges. A local ambassador network allows a small central sales enablement team to dramatically extend its reach and influence across diverse teams and countries.

Building an ambassador network within your organisation

The core concept of the ambassador network is to identify and empower local representatives within each team or geography to act as extensions of the central Sales Enablement function. These ambassadors would:

1. Share and reinforce the central Sales Enablement message
2. Adapt global strategies to local contexts
3. Provide valuable feedback to the central team about local needs and challenges
4. Implement and champion sales enablement initiatives within their teams

By building a network of 10, 20, or even 30 Ambassadors, a small central sales enablement team can achieve a much larger “share of voice” and influence within the organisation.

Methods for Increasing Sales Productivity

In the pursuit of sales excellence, increasing sales productivity plays a key part in any sales enablement programme. If you’re a long-time reader of ours, you will be aware that we like to refer to the methodology that Sir Dave Brailsford applied to his coaching for the British cycling team. Brailsford’s “marginal gains” philosophy posits that by making small, 1% improvements in many areas, the cumulative effect can be transformative.

Applying this approach to sales, we can identify numerous aspects of the sales process where minor enhancements can lead to significant overall improvements. Here are several key methods for increasing sales productivity, each representing an opportunity for marginal gains:

• Automate repetitive tasks and administrative processes
• Provide ongoing training and skill development programmes
• Utilise data analytics for informed decision-making
• Optimise your sales pipeline and lead qualification process
• Develop and use standardised sales playbooks
• Encourage peer-to-peer learning and best practice sharing
• Implement time-blocking techniques for better time management such as the Pomodoro technique or Pareto analysis
• Leverage modern social selling techniques and platforms
• Use mobile technology and sales enablement apps such as HubSpot of Salesforce for on-the-go access to sales tools and information
• Regularly review and refine your sales processes based on performance data

Just as Brailsford’s approach led to unprecedented success for British cycling, a similar commitment to continuous, incremental improvement can drive your sales team to new heights of productivity and performance.

Conclusion

As the sales landscape continues to develop around us, so too must our approaches to sales enablement. By staying committed to continuous improvement and embracing new technologies and methodologies, businesses can ensure their sales teams remain agile, effective, and ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s marketplace.

By implementing some of the best practices and methods outlined in this article, organisations can ensure their sales teams remain agile, effective, and ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s marketplace. These practices empower every team member no matter their level of experience to contribute to the company’s long-term growth and success.