Glossary
Sales Enablement
DEFINITION
The primary focus of sales enablement is the customer and finding the best ways to engage with them. A company must understand what their customers want and provide the sales team with the tools they need to fulfill those needs.
The content provided as part of sales enablement should be easy to access, easy to use, and applicable to sellers across the entire organization. These global resources enforce a consistent customer experience regardless of what section of the company a buyer is interacting with.
The managerial role of the sales enablement team is to monitor the efficiency and relevant metrics of the sales department. How are the resources provided by sales enablement being used, and can anything be done to optimize future sales enablement efforts?
Sales Enablement in a new word: Challenges, Skills and Tech – Webinar
How Is Sales Enablement Conducted?
No matter what sales enablement solutions you choose to enact at your company, there are some general guidelines to keep in mind for successful deployment.
- Understand your customers and what they want. Be aware of the buyer’s experience. Ask yourself what the customer journey is like when they interact with your business? What can you do to enhance the engagement with the sales team? All the information, training, and tools you provide as part of the sales enablement process should be tuned towards the buyer.
- Declare specific goals. You want your sales team to convert potential customers into paying clients. Ask yourself how you can help. Some common ideas include offering more detailed product descriptions, extra training to improve presentation skills, additional sales enablement tools, and even a combination of these strategies.
- Decide on the content. Whether you choose to provide the sales team with useful blog posts, seminars, lessons, guides, or email sequences, remember that you intend to map out the buying process in detail and tailor the content to sales teams throughout the company.
Make a continuous effort. This process is not a “set it and forget it” consideration. Sales enablement training classes should be conducted more often than once a year to guarantee knowledge retention.
Why is Sales Enablement Important?
Sales enablement is important because it helps sales teams to be more effective in their roles. It does so by providing them with the necessary tools, resources, and training to better understand and engage with customers, and ultimately close more sales.
What Are Some Common Responsibilities of Sales Enablement Teams?
Few managers know the subtle differences between a marketing department and a sales enablement team. While marketing teams work to create meaningful experiences and interactions with your brand, sales enablement teams categorize the data and make it more accessible for both your marketing and sales departments. An important aspect of this is the sales engineer role and being involved in creating demos and virtual POC (proof-of-concept) environments for customers.
Dealing with the Data
Modern markets rely heavily on data and key performance indicators (KPIs). This includes things like sales figures, conversion rates, customer interactions, how customers experience your sales funnels and more. However, too much data can overwhelm and compromise the productivity of the marketing department.
One responsibility of sales enablement is to collect and convert the raw data into usable content for the sales team to use to nurture and convert potential customers.
Content Audit
Every company needs sales content to market to their customers. A sales enablement team must determine the value of customer case studies, whitepapers and eBooks, demo decks, and other internal documents like customer profiles and more.
Generating Reports
Sales enablement teams know which data points are relevant to the company’s objectives. They are responsible for conveying the right data through detailed sales reports that track customer activities, deals, and qualified leads.
This type of data can help identify which parts of the organization are running inefficiently. If a large number of resources are being spent presenting products to clients and your company has few sales, then an investigation into your marketing strategies may be valid.
Creating New Content
A company’s content needs are always changing. Your company needs to create engaging content that nurtures, informs, and solves your customer’s pain points. High-quality case studies are one way to accomplish this as they directly show instances where your customers had successful outcomes with your products and services.
Sales Enablement Vs. Sales Training
Sales enablement and sales training are related, but they are not the same thing.
Sales training is focused on teaching salespeople the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in their role. This might include things like product knowledge, negotiation techniques, and sales process training. Sales training is typically focused on the individual salesperson and is aimed at helping them to develop their own skills and knowledge.
On the other hand, Sales enablement is a broader term that encompasses all of the activities and resources that are used to enable sales teams to be more effective. This might include things like sales training, but it also includes other activities like providing salespeople with the right tools and resources, aligning sales and marketing efforts, and providing ongoing support and coaching. Sales enablement is focused on the sales team as a whole and is aimed at helping them to be more effective in their role.
In summary, sales training is a specific activity that focuses on developing the skills and knowledge of individual salespeople, while sales enablement is a broader concept that encompasses all of the activities and resources that are used to support the sales team and help them to be more successful.
