Today, customers are in the driver’s seat during the buyer journey. They’re more informed than ever before and they’ve already done their homework on your business, its products, and your competitors before they even reach out to a sales rep. The relationship between sellers and buyers has evolved, and while the move to hybrid and digital-first sales models was on the rise pre-pandemic, McKinsey’s latest B2B Pulse survey shows that hybrid is expected to be the most dominant sales strategy by 2024.
In order to win in digital and hybrid sales environments, go-to-market teams need to do three things well:
- Enable their teams with the skills, content, and context to win deals and create loyal customers.
- Engage with buyers at the right time and place across all interactions in every channel.
- Continuously improve their efforts based on real performance data across people, content, and process.
Since the sales cycle is driven by highly informed buyers, sales reps have fewer opportunities to make an impression—so every interaction with a prospect needs to count. Training and coaching software helps organizations prepare sellers to engage buyers with the right messaging and content. Content management ensures sales reps can easily access the right content and personalize it at scale. Engagement tools across email, social media, and text ensure sellers can engage buyers in an omnichannel landscape. And content analytics and enablement intelligence help organizations track what works, what doesn’t, and areas for improvement.
By implementing all of the above, your organization can use enablement to really drive revenue growth. When you understand what works, you can do more of it and increase your wins over time.
4 ways to grow revenue with smart enablement
In order to grow revenue, it’s important for organizations to enable reps faster and equip them with the right content for virtual selling. They also need to provide reps with sales enablement tools and playbooks to navigate complex selling situations. This gives sellers the opportunity to engage with buyers throughout the entire lifecycle and across multiple channels in a way that’s personalized and stands out from the competition.
Here are four ways a dedicated sales enablement strategy can grow your revenue:
1. Data-driven sales enablement efforts
Your sales data is the most powerful tool that you have in your toolbox, and you need to understand the ROI of your enablement strategy. Extract and analyze the crucial sales data regularly. With so many buyers doing their research online, it’s no surprise that each of them generates a digital footprint. This footprint is a goldmine of leverageable data, revealing what content a buyer finds truly engaging and allowing you to extrapolate what countless look-alike buyers will likely gravitate to.
We have found that no enablement strategy will be effective in the long run if companies don’t review results and make improvements. Is your sales content as useful as it should be? Do your reps have the right skills and knowledge? Is there a specific tool or resource that’s missing from the equation? Asking yourself these questions and reviewing data will likely uncover room for improvement and change.
2. Focus on sales culture
Sales culture is a funny concept. You can’t measure its quality like you measure your team’s monthly revenue through data, email activity, average tenure, or quota attainment—but that doesn’t mean it’s not essential.
When was the last time you assessed the culture of your team? The quality of your organization’s sales culture plays a huge role in the success of your sales team, including how much they sell, how productive they are, and how long they stay with your company.
A good culture in your sales organization plays a pivotal role in supporting sales enablement and boosting your sales revenue, so make sure to create a culture where sales reps:
- Are motivated to learn, work, and innovate
- Can communicate openly and freely
- Possess the ability to tackle issues immediately as they arise
- Have strong rapport and trust with sales teams and managers (especially important in a remote environment)
A strong culture plays a pivotal role in supporting sales enablement and nurtures the development of individuals and the company, while also boosting revenue.
3. Prioritize sales enablement at each level of the organization
Sales enablement roles are responsible for improving sales onboarding, training, coaching, content management, and engagement analytics. With a wide array of responsibilities, prioritizing initiatives at every level of the organization is essential to getting things done. It is vital to look beyond the sales team and enable groups that play a direct role in driving the customer experience, such as customer success teams, field service technicians, in-house technical support teams, account executives, etc.
To grow your revenue with sales enablement, start the enablement process at the top with the sales leadership team who delivers insights on broad topics like:
- Sales goals
- Workflow
- Sales training and enablement efforts
Empower them with the skills required to monitor the sales at a higher level and manage the team of frontline sales managers. Then, drill down in the hierarchy. Next comes training and enablement for the frontline managers who are responsible for providing tailored training to each individual rep. This includes monitoring each rep’s performance closely, listening in on their customer calls, and providing regular feedback.
All customer-facing employees can benefit from enablement strategies—built with retention, renewals, and excellent service as their guide.
4. Don’t wait to give feedback
The best sales leaders are aware of the importance of sales coaching and prioritize it as a part of their sales enablement efforts. When you implement a perfect process of coaching and feedback, you will see significant revenue growth. If a manager has listened to a rep’s customer call or reviewed a coaching video, he should have a 15-minute follow-up to deliver feedback to the rep. Delayed feedback can result in reps forgetting about the call and, as a result, will not be as direct or effective as it would be if delivered immediately. This helps to improve the call effectiveness of your reps and drives significant revenue growth.
Take your content and learning to new heights with an enablement cloud
Enabling your team for success is crucial. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if your customers’ buying experience isn’t just as great. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built to empower GTM teams with the right content, skills, tools, and insights to effectively engage customers and drive growth, built on a unified, enterprise-grade, AI-powered platform. If you’d like to learn more about how you can ignite growth, download our eBook, The Enablement Cloud™: A Unified Platform for Engagement & Growth.
