Like any organization, the biggest investment a financial services firm can make is in its people. So when it comes to top-of-mind goals, financial institutions are focused on driving employee engagement and satisfaction while also supporting the evolving needs of their clients. In order to achieve both of these goals, they’re turning to various strategies and tools that help streamline and automate processes — including sales enablement.
What is sales enablement for financial services?
Sales enablement unites sales, marketing, and operations teams around the common goal to provide client-facing professionals with the right resources, content, processes, and technology needed to engage with their clients.
In the financial services world, enablement helps client-facing teams streamline content management, personalization and automation, and deliver training and upskilling for continued growth. As the financial services industry continues to leverage digital channels and technology to meet evolving client needs, enablement plays an important role in supporting these changes so firms can maximize business success.
Let’s take a closer look at four ways sales enablement can help financial institutions overcome some common business challenges they’re currently facing.
Improve efficiency and effectiveness
Today’s clients have access to more information at their fingertips. So when it comes to working with an advisor, banker, agent, or relationship manager they expect them to share helpful information and relevant content on the topic at hand. The good news is that many financial services firms have content for client-facing teams to use. However, because it’s created by various teams, it’s often housed in a variety of disparate systems. This makes it difficult for client-facing professionals to source and share the right content at the right time.
By using a modern enablement platform, users can quickly find the content they need through user-friendly search, filtering, and navigation features. This also helps ensure that client-facing teams have access to consistent, up-to-date materials. Content management platforms can also be integrated with other tools that empower users can quickly find, access, and share content so that they can spend more time focusing on the task that matters most — interacting with clients.
Never stop growing
Provide personalized client experiences
Sharing the right content with clients is only half the challenge. That content also needs to be personalized and unique to each and every client for it to truly be valuable. However, a client-facing professional can’t efficiently update every pitch deck or report for every client. After all, this takes up even more time that could be used to interact with new clients and deepen relationships with existing ones.
Sales enablement automation tools provide client-facing employees with access to dynamic and engaging content that they can edit and personalize at scale. This also gives employees the chance to integrate useful data from a CRM and other sources for even more customization. As an end result, client-facing professionals can quickly produce highly relevant and personalized content in just a few clicks for increased productivity.
Ensure content is compliant and on brand
Client-facing employees are also likely to follow the path of least resistance to get deals across the finish line. If they don’t have the right materials to send to clients, they’ll likely resort to creating their own materials or repurposing old content. But, in a highly-regulated industry like financial services, presenting outdated or incorrect information can be costly. Since marketing teams also don’t have the bandwidth to ensure piece after piece is correct, firms need a scalable solution that provides up-to-date materials while ensuring brand standards and industry regulations are met.
An enablement platform gives marketing teams the opportunity to create branded templates and collateral while determining how much flexibility employees have to customize content before sending it to their clients. Additionally, it can help firms create a streamlined content auditing process to ensure brand consistency across all client-facing materials. This gives organizations peace of mind knowing that team members are sending personalized content that still meets industry standards.
Simplify and scale learning
The financial services industry is a perfect storm of learning and development challenges — rapid change, complex information, hybrid workforces — the list goes on. In order to close deals faster, both new and experienced client-facing employees need ongoing training on updated products, industry developments, new content, and client engagement best practices. But being able to deliver this training for hundreds or thousands of employees at scale can take a lot of time, energy, and resources if it’s not done correctly.
Instead of relying on outdated, unengaging, and costly in-person training, modern sales enablement provides financial institutions with a single, integrated online learning environment.
Online learning makes it easier to create, edit, and deliver lessons that client-facing employees can take when and where it’s best for them. And, at a time when 62% of financial leaders are focusing on upskilling their employees, online training is a great way for new and experienced client-facing employees to hone their skills while staying up-to-date with business and industry trends.
These are just a few reasons why sales enablement is a must-have for today’s financial services industry. Interested in learning more? Check out our newest guide, Growing Client Trust and Revenue with Modern Enablement, here.
It’s time to invest in a modern solution
Financial institutions that invest in a modern enablement tool can ensure their client-facing teams create and share successful content, stay up-to-date with industry standards, and improve their knowledge and skills. And that’s why Seismic’s Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built for financial firms in mind. If you’d like to see how we help more than 250 financial services institutions upskill teams, deepen client relationships, and increase revenue, visit our Financial Services hub.
