5 Tips for Crafting a Strong Sales Enablement Strategy
Sometimes, it’s okay to be an enabler. Well, at least when it maximizes your team’s sales and productivity. Sales enablement is the act of providing resources, data, content, and other forms of information that allow your sales team to perform to the best of their abilities.
This strategy is intended to create a repeatable, scalable process for reaching quotas and goals without relying solely on the charm of your best sales representatives. By giving each sales employee equal access to the resources they need to improve in their roles, you can also improve your bottom line.
Implementation of a sales enablement strategy benefits three parties: the buyer, the sales representative, and the company. Firstly, the consumer is receiving accurate, meaningful data and valuable content that will permit them to make an informed purchasing decision. Second, your sales reps are able to effectively sell product and reach their individual quotas. Third, your company generates revenue and establishes credibility based on the competency of your team and quality of your content.
Sounds like a win for everyone, right? It certainly can be if you create an actionable strategy that is carried out by your sales and marketing teams. When organizing an outline for your new sales enablement strategy, keep these five tips in mind.
#1 Build a Customer-Centric Strategy
Your consumers’ interests, needs, and desires should determine how you approach your sales enablement program. To engage your target audience, you first have to know your target audience. Identify key metrics and pain points that can be used to create educational collateral that guide sales representatives through every step of the buyer’s experience.
Additionally, your marketing team should tailor their content and campaigns to speak to the customer’s needs. These resources should be visually appealing, easily consumable, and communicated in a way that resonates with your audience.
Commitment to the customer also requires dedication to your brand’s overall mission. Align the execution of your strategy with your company’s core values to maintain consistency throughout the customer experience.
#2 Break Resources Into Categories
Generally speaking, there are two categories of resources: those that sales will use internally and content that will be provided to the buyer. How you label these resources is up to your team, but we suggest first breaking them into these two groups then further organizing materials by how they fit into each stage of the purchasing funnel.
Ensure that your team has access to all sales enablement resources and can properly navigate the information so that they can pull what they need from your library of data.
#3 Offer Quality Content
Your sales enablement plan needs to include the creation of resources for the prospect, whether that be educational blog posts, helpful infographics, or reader-friendly informational guides.
The purpose of content is to engage your audience and provide value outside of your product alone. Quality content gives your prospect the opportunity to connect with your brand without feeling the sort of pressure traditional, one-off sales techniques often apply.
While our internet-age generation has become sensitive to content that is overly saturated with sales intent, that doesn’t mean that this strategy doesn’t convert. In fact, a long-term content marketing strategy encourages brand recognition and loyalty.
#4 Implement Continuous Education
You wouldn’t send someone to cut firewood without an axe, right? So don’t send your sales team to their desks without the tools they need to engage your target audience. Furthermore, these tools will be rendered useless unless your reps are thoroughly trained on how to put them into play.
In addition to the initial sales enablement training a new hire receives, your entire team should be informed of updates made to the resources and new discoveries obtained through metrics. We suggest holding a training meeting every month to keep your team in the loop.
#5 Record Metrics
Hello, data, my old friend. Love it or hate it, metrics are the driving force influencing our business decisions in any department. The success of your sales enablement strategy should be measured so that changes can be implemented as necessary.
Some metrics we suggest tracking are the number of reps meeting their quotas, the average sales cycle length, and content attribution rates. You may also want to compare your win/loss rate against your primary competitors to identify weak spots in your sales enablement strategy.
This data should be put into tables or sheets that are easy for your sales reps to understand. Not only will this performance data impact your sales reps’ professional growth, it will create high-level accountability for your sales enablement strategy.
Make this data available to your team so that they can gain a broader understanding of how their performance is measured. Plus, seeing how the company stacks up against the competition may spark a competitive spirit in your team that they haven’t felt since their stint in J.V. track and field.
