When adopted correctly, sales enablement will improve your bottom line. While sales enablement is less of a strategy and more of a client-facing philosophy, it doesn't mean you can't be strategic in your approach to its implementation.
Since sales enablement is essentially broken into three buckets – technology, processes, and content – analyzing the current state of your client-facing departments can give you crucial insight into where to direct your initial sales enablement efforts and how to close leads.
When it comes to implementing sales enablement, figuring out what technology stack to use to help you accomplish your goals is an important, if not necessary, step. As millennials begin to take over a larger portion of the workforce, the learning curve for implementing new technologies has changed drastically. In fact, millennials adopt new technologies twice as quickly as their colleagues from other generations.
Similarly, as sales goals become more and more aggressive, sales technologies have been forced to evolve to help drive revenue, provide useful metrics, reveal data and trends necessary for future improvement, and create better alignment between marketing and sales teams.
Since technology is a broad category, let’s delve into how sales enablement technology can help your reps close more leads, more efficiently.
Increase Productivity
You can give your sales reps the tools and technology to improve their sales and outreach execution by empowering them with the right sales enablement software.
Drafting emails and delivering them at the appropriate times can be a time-consuming endeavor for anyone. Using sales enablement technology can help your reps save lots of time by automating a chain of templated emails to send at a cadence you determine. Before activating a sequence, reps can add small details to each email for a little personalization. More touches in less time mean more closed leads.
Shorten Sales Cycles
While it may seem too good to be true, deploying sales enablement technology can not only help you close more, but it can help you close faster, too. Using the right combination of sales enablement content, processes, and technology can help you shorten sales cycles by giving your reps more qualified leads that are more receptive to buying.
Give Your Reps More Time
Many sales enablement technologies exist to reduce redundancies and create efficiencies, so your sales reps can spend more time on what they do best – sell.
Sales enablement can reduce some of your company’s growing pains by helping you identify where your reps are spending most of their time. Are your reps managing their own leads? Are they wasting time on data entry?
If so, they’re not alone. In fact, 23% of salespeople cite manual data entry as the biggest challenge when using their existing CRM and 27% of salespeople are spending an hour or more on data entry each day.
Marketing and sales automation are vital components of sales enablement technology. Consider this: companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months. That’s a significant increase for a relatively small investment that will effectively give your reps more time. With automation, you can have lead statuses, deal stages, and lifecycle stages update automatically when a specific property changes. Or, you can have your reps notified if a lead opens specific pieces of content or multiple pieces of content.
Get Important Metrics and Valuable Data Insights
Having access to sales enablement technology will give you a wealth of reporting options. Customized reports that help your sales and marketing teams track their efforts, will help maintain accountability between departments. Service Level Agreements (SLA) are becoming a standard practice for providing clear interdepartmental expectations.
Technology is a tool. Finding the right tools for the job and the company will yield impressive results. Not sure where to start? Need help with sales enablement? Start a conversation with us today!
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