What is Sales Enablement?

Simply put, sales enablement is a strategy that uses content, training, and software to help your salespeople improve their skills and boost the number of closed deals. Ideally, this type of investment in employees will lead to increased productivity, measurable progress, and better product knowledge. Your salespeople should be experts in the solutions your company offers, as well as knowledgeable about industry standards.

By providing resources and training, your sales team will be able to act as consultants to customers, rather than just sellers. Incorporating this into your sales strategy can help create a smoother onboarding process, strengthen customer relationships, and encourage lasting partnerships. This type of investment can also play a large role in filling your sales funnel with qualified leads.

It’s important for your salespeople to understand who will benefit from your product. This helps cut back on wasted time with dead end leads, as well as increase the overall number of satisfied customers. By training and coaching sales staff, these employees will be able to better target qualified leads and walk them through the sales pipeline.

While closing more deals is the most obvious benefit of sales enablement, there are several more your team should consider when adopting this strategy. It can play a large role in better aligning your departments including sales, marketing, product development, and customer success. Having a sales team that understands the product and sells to the right customers helps align the company’s overall mission.

Training your salespeople to work effectively with all departments can reduce silos and increase communication. Marketing will be able to receive feedback on the leads they pass to the sales team, which helps them refine strategy. Product development can take suggestions from salespeople based on customer interactions to better improve the solutions your business provides.

Retaining customers is crucial to boosting your overall ROI. It’s more expensive to onboard new clients than it is to service current accounts. With the right coaching and resources, your sales team can set customers up for success before handing them off to your customer support department. This allows each department to work in tandem to keep these clients happy and help with any issues that may arise. 

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Utilizing sales enablement helps create consistency across the entire company. With robust training programs and ongoing coaching, your salespeople will use the right language that helps promote your business’ mission. This also plays a role in cultivating a brand that is consistent across all customer interactions.

Creating an efficient sales team that utilizes resources and cuts back on waste will boost overall ROI. When your salespeople use their time wisely, productivity can increase and the sales funnel can be filled with more qualified leads. Adding in technology to track metrics and automate processes can help improve efficiency.

Along with training your team and providing coaching, creating content that helps further the sales goal is a form of enablement. Your sales team interacts with prospects every day, and it’s important to distinguish your company as a leader in the industry. By using sales enablement content, your team can provide customers with vital information that helps them better understand the solutions you offer.

There are many different forms of this content, and it’s important to utilize a variety to help prepare your team for all scenarios. A lot of content can be pushed out by your marketing team to nurture relationships through your website and social media channels. However, some content can be created and distributed internally to provide ongoing training to your sales team.

For example, creating a sales playbook can help provide a guide for tricky situations that your reps might face. This can be given to your sales team to keep on hand as a reference when new scenarios arise. It also provides the customer with relevant information that can help them complete a purchase since your sales team will be working off of content created by your company.

Setting your team up for success is crucial to maximizing ROI and increasing the number of closed deals. If your company isn’t working on a sales enablement strategy yet, now is the time to get started. It’s important to understand who the responsibility of this strategy falls on, and the best ways to implement it.

Sales enablement should be handled by various leaders, including executives, your sales managers, and key players in other departments. When providing resources, your product team and marketing managers should be able to gather data for your sales team to utilize. Executive leadership and sales managers should have a strong grasp on the industry, which can be used to provide salespeople with relevant knowledge. 

When your sales team has a full pipeline, shorter sales cycle, and more repeat purchases, revenue increases. This type of effort benefits every department in the company, so it’s important to have an all hands on deck sales enablement strategy. By investing in this process, your company will benefit with increased revenue, higher conversion rates, and more satisfied customers.

What are the Best Types of Sales Enablement Content?

Understanding what type of content is important to sales enablement and its best practices can help lead your team to success. Having a strong stock of resources will provide your salespeople with the information they need to win deals and keep customers happy. 

There are two categories for sales enablement content: internal and external. Both can be used by your salespeople to increase productivity and create a better experience for your customers. Below are examples of the best types of content in each category.

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External Sales Enablement Content

This type of content is typically customer facing, and can be distributed to leads and clients to help solidify your company as the best solution. It’s crucial for this content to be seen as valuable rather than just churning out fluff. Use this as an opportunity to establish your salespeople as industry experts while simultaneously showcasing your products and their features.

Blog Posts

Utilizing SEO tactics while sharing relevant industry knowledge is a great way to demonstrate your company’s value. These posts can be shared on websites and social media, as well as distributed by salespeople through LinkedIn posts to provide customers with valuable insights.

Case Studies

Another great way to share valuable information with your clients while showcasing your product’s achievements. This content uses data to provide clients with useful details of other customers who have benefited from your solutions.

Webinars

This content can be a great way to capture new leads, as well as nurture current client relationships. Your team can act as industry experts to lead live product launches, discuss industry trends, or provide in-depth training tutorials. 

Ebooks

Your marketing team can put together a downloadable Ebook that showcases your product, answers questions from target buyers, and discusses insider information. This allows your team to capture new leads or nurture prospective relationships. It’s important to have a visually appealing layout for the Ebook to help encourage readership throughout the entire piece.

White Papers

One of the best ways to establish yourself as a credible leader in the industry is to produce content that’s backed by research. Utilize white papers to showcase data and dive deep into topics that relate to your company’s mission. Make sure to use this content to educate your leads through data and without sharing opinions.

Product Sheets / One Pagers

Give prospects a snapshot of your product and solutions by creating a product sheet or one pager that summarizes your offerings. This is a great way for your sales team to give an elevator pitch with the help of a visual aid.

Internal Sales Enablement Content

On the flip-side, you can provide your sales team with content that’s distributed internally to help boost productivity and efficiency. Some of these examples may be shared with clients as well, but they’re utilized by salespeople throughout the sales journey. This is also a great opportunity to help align your marketing and sales departments through a united voice.

Sales Playbook

Set your team up for success by creating a playbook that details scenarios and provides suggestions on how to handle them. This enables your salespeople to take ownership of their pipelines while still working off of a common script.This also helps align the voice of your company. It’s a great way to provide ongoing training and help sales reps deal with tricky situations.

Email Templates

Efficiency is key when increasing ROI, and automation can help improve the sales cycle. While you don’t want your salespeople to sound like robots, utilizing email templates can help them save time and establish mass outreach to prospects. Make sure you use segmentation when creating these templates to help ensure they get to the right target audience.

Customer Journey Maps

Create a visual that helps your sales team to understand the many touch points throughout the sales cycle. This allows your employees to have a tangible view of the customer journey so they can better understand which of their efforts should be going to which steps.

Customer Personas

Along the same lines, your team can create visuals for the different customer personas that you want to attract. This helps your sales and marketing team gain a deeper understanding of target audiences to help reach the right leads.

Slide Decks

This type of content is usually shared with clients, but through a sales call or presentation. By creating slide decks that can be utilized by your sales team, you can help alleviate the stress of sales calls and streamline the sales presentation process. It’s also a great way to provide leads with visuals when they’re being introduced to your solutions. 

Why are Sales Enablement Metrics Important?

Measuring the success of sales enablement helps your team stay on track, determine what works and what needs improvement, as well as plan future strategies. To understand what success looks like for your team, you can implement metrics that help track how well your strategies are working. Before your team starts looking at data, it’s important to have a grasp on how to establish these metrics and develop ways to determine what will increase productivity. 

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Start by identifying the behaviors your team should be implementing, such as questions asked during discovery calls or number of touch points completed. Take this information and determine what indicates success in these behaviors. From there, your team can develop a map that showcases how these behaviors lead to increased revenue.

Throughout this process, your salespeople can rely on different types of metrics that are measurable to help keep them on track. Before setting any numeric value to these goals, it’s important to look at company history as well as projections to see what is actually attainable for your business. Metrics should be used to measure employee progress and increase productivity, but they should be set based on goals that can be reached.

Starting off, your team can measure content engagement to see what encourages interactions with your leads. This metric is key for both your sales and marketing teams, and it can help align the goals of these departments. Any leads that find their way into the sales pipeline need to be qualified, and those who aren’t ready to make a purchase should be put back into the marketing funnel for nurturing.

Using content engagement metrics helps your marketing team determine what type of information is important to clients. It also helps your sales team have a better understanding of the sales cycle, and see what actions are needed to take a lead through the customer journey. 

Next, your sales team can track the cycle length for customers. This should follow a lead from the first open opportunity in the pipeline all the way through to a closed deal. Shorter sales cycles mean your team is working efficiently to close deals and win clients.

Lead conversion rates and win rates are helpful for understanding the percentage of leads and opportunities that convert to closed deals. Higher conversion rates lead to increased ROI, while lower conversion rates leave room for improvement within the sales cycle. If possible, it’s also helpful to track which stages in the pipelines lead to the most lead fallout to determine what places need improvement.

Measuring customer satisfaction is crucial for overall client retention. Your team can use resources like feedback surveys, follow-up calls, and onboarding conversations to determine how satisfied your clients are with their purchases. This will also help your team understand how likely these customers are to provide referrals for your business within their own networks.

Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are a way to track if your customers are going to recommend your services to other people. Word of mouth is a valuable marketing tool, and referrals also help increase your brand loyalty. Documenting this information will help your team tighten up the customer success processes for your products.

Forecasting and sales predictions are important for company planning. Data helps your business make projections about sales and revenue, which allows your company to create budgets and plan long-term growth. Measuring your actual numbers against sales forecasts to determine overall prediction accuracy will help track how well your sales team is performing.

Along with customer metrics, it’s also important to track productivity internally to see how well your sales reps are doing. This information can help your team plan for future training, create ongoing coaching programs, and keep employees on target. Using sales productivity metrics is key to understanding workflow efficiency. 

This type of metric helps lead one-on-ones between managers and reps and provides your salespeople with attainable goals to measure their progress. Metrics are important for identifying top performance on your team, as well as determining which salespeople may need more support to get up to speed. These KPIs typically include tracking the number of outbound calls, emails sent, meetings scheduled, and revenue generated by individual sales members.

Lastly, your company should be tracking the onboarding time for each new salesperson hired to have a realistic idea of when your new hires will become profitable. Every salesperson gets a ramp-up period while they’re learning the product, training on company mission, and getting acquainted with the industry. Keeping track of how long a new hire needs before they become successful will help with your overall company goals. 

How Does Sales Enablement Software Increase Lead Generation and Conversions?

Data analytics and automation are two key factors for increasing efficiency and boosting productivity. By integrating sales enablement software into your team’s daily workflow, you can help your employees cut down the amount of time wasted on repetitive tasks. This is also a great way to ensure data is handled properly, kept fresh, and void of human error.

These tools should be focused on streamlining the sales cycle, creating alignment between departments, and tracking KPIs for your salespeople. Many sales enablement softwares can integrate into your current techstack as well, which can make training and coaching easier on the team. Along with boosting efficiency, this type of software should help increase lead generation, as well as improve the overall quality of prospects in the sales funnel.

Software like Leadboxer uses data to track website engagement, complete client profiles, and score leads to help your salespeople qualify prospects. This means less time will be wasted chasing down leads that may not be a good fit for your business. Through engagement tracking, Leadboxer can also help the sales team identify which step in the process their potential clients are at. 

Using software that integrates with your current CRM can help prevent information silos within your organization. Marketing and sales are able to work from the same database with the same lead information, which means no leads are getting lost in translation. By keeping your system up-to-date from a marketing and a sales standpoint, each team will be working off accurate data.

Sales enablement software also plays a large role in bettering the customer experience. Leadboxer helps identify and enrich leads from engagement by filling out the prospect profile with key information like contact details, company size, and industry. This provides your salespeople with important details that can help tailor their sales pitch to the correct target audience. 

Including automation in your workflow is an easy way to reduce wasted time and resources. Sales enablement software is a great way to provide your sales team with support for these daily tasks, which means they’ll be able to spend more time actually selling the product. Using lead scoring and qualifying technology helps your team pinpoint which prospects are ready for a pitch and which may need more nurturing.

This software can also help your team gain valuable insights into account activity and conversion rates. With lead tracking and in-depth reporting, Leadboxer handles the work of analyzing which campaigns are generating leads, as well as which accounts are interacting with your activity. Providing both your marketing and sales teams with this information helps cut the guesswork out of the sales cycle. 

Get started with sales enablement software by utilizing Leadboxer’s free trial!