Content about improving sales processes, and particularly inbound sales, is incredibly saturated. There’s no shortage of sales strategy advice and supporting content available for savvy businesses to learn and improve from. However, there’s not a ton of information on the actual execution of those strategies.
Sales enablement is one of these very strategies; it’s a shift in strategy and focus that serves to unite sales and marketing teams, empower sales with proper resources and documents, and ultimately, reduce sales cycles.
But where do you start with a sales enablement strategy? What are the steps to making it all work?
To understand how to implement sales enablement, you should consider your objectives and work backward from there. The core deliverables from sales enablement are:
With this understanding, it’s time to focus on the actual implementation of sales enablement.
The first step in any successful sales enablement implementation is reviewing current processes for gaps or improvement areas, as well as opportunities. To get started, you should:
This is the perfect opportunity to audit the sales and marketing assets your team is currently using, and get a clearer idea of what assets they could and should be using.
A complete content audit of your marketing information and sales process will help you create a resource library, providing your sales team much of the firepower they need to close a deal.
Before you open conversations about changing the sales process or realigning teams, you can use this opportunity to better equip your team with efficient sales tools.
From your audit of current tools, sales feedback, and personal research, you should be able to clearly determine sales tools that are worth the investment (free or premium). Introduce these tools, their capabilities, and how they should be utilized for maximum effect, and work with your sales teams to holistically adopt these tools.
Listen to feedback from your team on tool performance and capabilities (particularly if the tool is offered at various pricing tiers, with different services unlocked at different tiers), and make adjustments as needed. Don’t shoot your sales team in the foot by limiting them to the free version of an otherwise incredible tool. You may also want to limit consideration to tools that are championed by a majority of the sales team.
Tools to consider include:
One of the foundational elements of sales enablement is content — that is, equipping sales with powerful content that is tailored to specific pain points and stages in the Buyer’s Journey (Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages), as well as social proofs like case studies, testimonials, reviews, and media assets.
In some cases, businesses will already have these assets created and in regular use. In this situation, the first step to supporting your sales team with sales enablement is mapping that content to the Buyer’s Journey, and helping your team understand the value and intended result of each piece of content.
Is the content an in-depth blog post intended to encourage readers to learn about possible solutions—or a webinar recorded to compare service types?
For sales purposes, these two types of content should be delivered at relatively specific times in the Buyer’s Journey — the blog post early on in the Awareness stage, and the latter during the Consideration stage. It doesn’t make sense to share high-level information, like a service page or most blog articles, during the Decision stage for the sake of sharing something. Doing so can actually work against a team, and give recipients the impression that their rep or your company isn’t finely attuned to their needs.
Instead, you should use this as a chance to either:
Companies that try and fail to implement meaningful sales enablement often do so because the strategy does not have comprehensive support. Sales enablement is a foundational strategy — it’s a potentially major shift in business culture that champions:
To properly and effectively introduce a sales enablement strategy, you may need to reconfigure your internal management style to support those values.
Below are a number of management approaches that businesses successfully implementing sales enablement use; the implementations you consider should depend on team availability, growth goals, and existing processes.
However you choose to implement sales enablement, it’s important to note that the strategy as a whole is very iterative. Like all things in the digital marketing space, sales enablement is something to grow from. During implementation and regular execution, analyze how sales reps are using contact information to improve their emails and outreach, and keep track of sales and marketing initiatives to drive the process.
With this information, you should use the formative knowledge necessary to implement a strong sales enablement strategy. If you get lost in your implementation, just remember to zoom out and focus on the objectives:
Need help introducing a complete, no-fuss sales enablement strategy? If you’re serious about getting started, reach out to Tobe Agency today! We’d love to talk.