Sales enablement overview
Sales enablement is about making the most out of every point of contact with your customers and prospects.
It’s a strategic approach to unite stakeholders in sales, marketing, and operations around the common goal of equipping salespeople with the right resources, tools, and processes to sell effectively… And enhancing and supporting it all with technology.
5 Benefits of sales enablement technology
A sales enablement platform ensures that your salespeople have just what they need to create value during every interaction with buyers. Here are 5 benefits – each of which can be game-changing for your sales and marketing ecosystem.
1. Synchronize sales systems
Technology is meant to help salespeople work smarter, not harder. But if you implement too many new tools, salespeople end up wasting precious time trying to acclimate to new systems and usually burn out before reaching optimal adoption. How can you give salespeople a one-stop-shop to access the resources they need, when they need them, without drowning them in too many tools?
A sales enablement platform gives reps a single-source-of-truth to access the latest and greatest sales resources – from their laptop, mobile device, iPad, or existing CRM system. Instead of expecting reps to sift through all different types of sales content, sales enablement serves up the hottest content and allows reps to customize with just a few clicks.
2. Align sellers to resources throughout the customer journey
While your sellers are progressing through your sales process, your customers are going through their own buying journey. This journey often takes twists and turns that a regimented sales process can’t account for in advance. So how can you equip sellers with the right resources to go where the customer leads and adjust to shifts in the market or competitive landscape?
A sales enablement platform prescribes relevant content within the context of where sellers are in the sales process… and makes it easy to access additional resources on-the-fly as selling scenarios change. That way, sellers can be agile and give customers the experience they deserve – during every phase of the deal cycle.
3. Improve ease of product education and access to SMEs
Many of your employees have a wealth of knowledge about your products and services. But how do get this information out of their heads and into the hands of your sellers who need this insight and expertise in the field?
A sales enablement platform allows you to capture tribal knowledge from across your organization and make it accessible to salespeople when they need it. Chances are that if one of your sellers has a question about a product, a competitor or a recent initiative – there are other sellers that have the same question. Q&A forums by topic provide your sellers direct access to SMEs, as well as insight into questions and discussions from their colleagues. This streamlines communication between SMEs and sellers because reps know the right expert to contact with questions – and others with similar questions can access these answers down the road.
4. Make account personalization a breeze
There’s no cookie-cutter way to solve challenging business problems. And customers expect more than just a one-size-fits-all buying experience. Salespeople need to be able to tailor their messaging, value propositions, and presentations to meet each customer’s unique business needs. Without spending hours on content personalization and customization, how can your sellers give buyers the red carpet treatment they deserve?
A sales enablement platform makes it easy to assemble marketing-approved content into ready-to-go client-facing presentations. It allows reps to create personalized sales documents such as presentations and proposals by combining content and data from various providers within the organization. The result: targeted, client-ready sales documents that are customizable, up-to-date, and corporate-approved to ensure compliance.
5. Monitor content utilization and track engagement
The average enterprise spends $17.5 million on content creation, yet the majority goes to waste largely because it’s unfindable or unusable. So much wasted content is especially detrimental for sales organizations that rely on impactful resources throughout the lifecycle of a deal. How can you ensure that salespeople are about to find the right content and then track their usage to make smarter future content investments?
A sales enablement platform helps marketing keep a pulse on the content that sellers are using – and the content sellers still need them to create. It identifies the resources your sellers use most, tells you the stage of the sales cycle they’re used, and shows what materials are most effective for your top performers. This opens the door to more-informed selling and greater information-sharing throughout your organization.
Whether your sales organization is made up of 10 reps, or 10,000, your entire sales ecosystem benefits when sellers are properly enabled to work efficiently and effectively.
