This post was written with contributions from Henry Davey, Ahmed Hassan, Jane Pan, Paul Parker, and Anita Sharma – members of Seismic’s award-winning Professional Services team.
Selling has become more challenging than ever before, making it far from an easy task in today’s B2B market. With easy access to research, modern buyers are more informed about a company’s products, services, and competitors. As a result, buyers are less interested in being sold to and more interested in building trust and partnership.
Leading enterprises have turned to sales enablement as a means to empower their sellers and maintain competitiveness. In the 2023 Value of Enablement Report, we found that 99% of respondents who use sales enablement platforms said that it makes their job easier.
High-performing organizations understand the value of sales enablement and are reaping substantial returns on their investments. However, building a successful sales enablement strategy is not an overnight endeavor. It requires careful planning, dedicated resources, and a considerable amount of time.
To help you in this journey, we worked with our award-winning professional services team to create ten tips for developing a world-class sales enablement organization. Check them out below:
1. Start with an outcome in mind
In an era where more businesses are competing for customer attention, it’s difficult to differentiate noise from need. Organizations that are successful begin with a business objective in mind – one that aligns with a broader organizational goal. Focusing on a business outcome helps stakeholders find support among colleagues and identify a platform to drive the best outcomes. Technology matters, but it’s not a silver bullet. Without a really good grasp of what you need to accomplish first, it’s difficult to select the right technology.
2. Start small and learn as you go
Beginning your sales enablement journey can be daunting. Revamping your enablement framework can seem even worse. However, when broken down into time-bound, measurable tasks, a big project can become more manageable.
Start with the basics and pick one outcome to drive a measurable impact. For our support and services teams, this might be decreasing handling time. For our sales teams, this might be reducing the time it takes to find pitchbooks. Once you’ve measured the impact of one outcome, work with your teams to identify the next priority, making sure to build and document this in your framework as you go. Transformational change doesn’t happen overnight – stack a few outcomes together and you’ll gradually progress in the months and years to come.
3. Create dedicated sales enablement roles
Having a dedicated sales enablement team is critical to being competitive in the modern sales landscape. Sales enablement professionals bridge the gap between marketing and sales, ensuring that sales reps have access to relevant and up-to-date content, training, and support.
These dedicated roles focus on understanding the buyer’s journey, developing sales strategies, and aligning the sales process with the company’s goals. This brings efficiency to the sales team, empowers them to deliver value to customers, and contributes to the organization’s revenue growth.
4. Give sales enablement projects an owner
Appointing a sales enablement owner establishes a clear and accountable leader who will oversee strategic planning, implementation, and measurement of sales enablement programs. This individual acts as a liaison between marketing, sales, and training departments, ensuring seamless collaboration and alignment. They should possess a deep understanding of the sales process, customer needs, and industry trends, allowing them to tailor enablement strategies that address specific challenges and opportunities. A dedicated sales enablement owner also ensures that the organization maximizes the impact of its sales enablement efforts, resulting in increased revenue, improved sales performance, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
5. Establish a governance committee
A governance committee can play an essential role in ensuring the effectiveness and alignment of sales enablement initiatives within your organization. By tapping into key stakeholders from various departments, such as sales, marketing, and training, this committee can establish a strategic enablement framework to guide sales enablement activities. The goal is to enhance sales productivity, drive revenue growth, and improve customer engagement by streamlining processes, optimizing resources, and fostering collaboration across teams.
6. Make sales content easy to find
Ensure that your content is easily accessible to sellers by delivering it directly to where they work and interact, such as CRM systems, mobile, and tablet devices. According to CSO Insights, “Newer solutions provide a sales-specific, taxonomy-driven business layer that allows organizations to structure, manage, present, filter, provide and analyze content in EXACTLY the way sellers and customers need it.” Don’t assume that sellers know what content is available and expect them to search for it. Instead, make sure that your content finds them and utilize contextual information to drive the explanation.
7. Reinforce training in context
The old model of training – where sellers were pulled out of the field for training – is difficult, outdated, and inefficient. Today, reinforcing training in the context of the sales cycle is mission-critical. Just-in-time training is effective because it provides sellers with deal-specific knowledge in their moment of need. This matters because 87% of new skills learned by sellers are lost within 30 days if they are not systematically coached and reinforced. For training to resonate, it needs to be easily accessible and reinforced in sellers’ daily workflows.
8. A single pane of glass
Content packaging and system integration allow you to simplify the sales enablement process by optimizing the user experience. By streamlining access to content, playbooks, and selling scripts, your organization can improve adoption and effectiveness, enabling sellers to leverage sales enablement content efficiently and drive better sales outcomes which ultimately increase sales productivity.
9. Gain visibility into what’s working
It’s important to have insight into what does and doesn’t work within your sales enablement program. A single source of truth for your sales enablement collateral can help you gather insights into the effectiveness of your efforts. By tracking content usage and frequency, you can make more informed decisions about when to update or retire assets. By creating this feedback loop between sales and marketing, your enablement team can unlock greater sales efficiency and, hopefully, close more deals, faster.
10. Set, track, and expand goals
Aligning sales strategies with business outcomes requires a structured approach to setting and tracking goals. Begin by gaining clarity on strategic objectives such as revenue or pipeline targets. Consider the key elements that impact these objectives, such as seller activity, sales cycle times, and conversion rates. Then engage the right people in your organization to identify the current state and where gaps may be. In many instances, a lack of visibility and inefficiencies, in the process, create bottlenecks that impact objectives.
Set goals that directly tie to improving the key elements of your strategic objective, and how any gaps can be mitigated. For example, a sales enablement program gives sellers back the time they would spend searching for and creating content, so they have more space to focus on customer activity or improving deal outcomes. Assess these goals periodically and look for opportunities to expand them regularly.
Get started with Seismic
Driving world-class enablement doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and continuous effort to achieve your organization’s desired outcomes. But you don’t have to go at it alone – Seismic is here to help. Our award-winning professional services team has partnered with countless organizations on their path to enablement maturity. Reach out to us if you want more guidance on how to start or continue the journey to enablement maturity.
