If you found this page, then you most likely hear, and use, the term “sales enablement” throughout your workday. However, it’s not always easy to understand the sales enablement meaning since the sales enablement definition will vary from practice to practice across industries or organizations. We define sales enablement as the strategic use of people, processes, and tech to improve sales. Sales enablement combines sales training, feedback, coaching, and the right tools to empower sales teams to grow.
No matter how you define it, the most important thing is that you have a sales enablement strategy. This applies to any business, whether you’re a clothing manufacturer, software company, or local electrician. If you’re selling, you need a strategy, and hope is not a strategy. With a clearly defined strategy, you are better able to equip your sales team with the tools and resources they need to capture more leads, close more sales, and please more customers on a daily basis. Doing this will lead to more profits so you can improve or expand your business.
Must-read sales enablement content
Believe it or not, there are a ton of absolutely free pieces of sales enablement content that can help sales leaders plan, update, and manage their sales enablement efforts. By using these free resources, you can increase your profits without spending a dime. How’s that for ROI?
There are tips that can be implemented in your organization immediately, as well as ideas that might require a bit more thought or overhaul of your sales process. Regardless of what you choose to bring to your sales team, you’ll see an increase in closed leads and a more efficient sales cycle.
We’d like to share a few of our favorite sales enablement assets that you can start using today. Some of these come directly from us at Lessonly and include sales enablement best practices that we use every day to sell our software to business leaders across the country. These have been developed over years of experience and are proven to be effective. We’ve also included a couple of our favorite thought-leaders in the sales enablement space. We’ve learned a lot from following them and we hope they also inspire you to empower your teams to Do Better Work.
The Business Impact of Sales Enablement and Training
If you’re looking for more reasons to improve sales enablement in your organization, or if you need some material to convince higher-ups that this is the right move for your business, take a look at The Business Impact of Sales Enablement and Training. This resource shares 15 proven ways to impact your company’s sales outcomes. We know, because we’ve tried them and they’ve worked for us! Improve ramp up time by seven weeks and reduce annual sales rep turnover by providing them with the sales enablement resources and training they need to do excellent work.
The Complete Guide to Sale Enablement
This five-part guide can help accelerate your sales enablement initiatives—whether you’re researching, vetting, evaluating, or adopting sales enablement. This guide also provides a look at the important business initiatives that organizations should go through before investing in sales enablement.
Gartner
Another thought-leader in the sales enablement space is Gartner. We love following them for their helpful and insightful articles, as well as the informative sales enablement webinars and conferences they produce. They can help you pivot your field sales team to virtual, better support your sales reps, enhance performance with the latest technology, increase the quality of buyer interactions, and evolve your sales process to simplify the buying experience for your customers. There’s no limit to the value you’ll receive by keeping up with what Gartner has to say about the sales enablement process. We know it’s worked wonders for us!
So, are you inspired?
Take the time to explore these completely free resources and we guarantee you’ll learn a lot! There’s no shortage of sales enablement information in the world, and we know it can be overwhelming to find good pieces of content. We hope this summary helps you, and if it has, please feel free to reach out to us and let us know! We love hearing and sharing success stories!
Sales enablement tools
More than just consuming plenty of sales enablement content, there are other practical sales enablement resources you can use in your business on a daily basis. For example, there are many useful tools and software that exist to help your teams increase sales readiness and become more efficient sales reps. These can be broken down into a few different categories depending on which area they are the most helpful in. Here are some frequently used sales enablement tools, a description of what each of them does, and how they can be helpful to your team.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps you to manage the interactions you take with former, existing, and future prospects. This type of sales enablement software allows you to keep track of potential customers you’ve reached out to, when to contact them again, where a lead is at in the buying cycle, and if it’s time to upsell an existing customer. You can also use this sales enablement platform to analyze how well your sales process is working and make adjustments as necessary to turn more leads into conversions.
Content management
A Content Management System/Software (CSM) helps you to collect, manage, and publish information across a variety of mediums. This may be as simple as putting your ideas into a draft blog post on your website, or as complicated as managing a content calendar for all website, blog, social, podcast, and graphic content you produce. This can become sales enablement software if your sales reps use content to connect to your buyers. Instead of explaining your product or service over the phone for an hour, or rewriting the same email 10 times per day, you can put all the information into a piece of content that is easily shareable to your prospects.
Business intelligence
It’s overwhelming to try and analyze all the data your business creates. By using sales enablement software to manage your business intelligence data, you gain a clearer picture of what’s working, and what’s not, in your sales process so you can make changes and develop a more efficient sales team. The best sales enablement technology will allow you to view, organize and manage data such as reporting, analytics, data mining, complex event processing, business performance, benchmarking, and more. This holistic view means you can look at the big picture, or narrow in on the details with just a click or two.
Sales training and coaching
Sales enablement training is one of the best investments you can make in your company. It can help to reduce ramp time from the current average of six to nine months down to four to seven months. This means your sales reps get more accomplished, faster. In today’s current environment, the average sales rep will stick with your company for about two years. If it takes nine months to get them to their highest productivity, that’s a lot of wasted time.
Be More Productive – Today!
These sales enablement resources are the keys to a more efficient, productive, and happier sales team. The best part is that some of these tips can be put into place today so you can start to see results even faster. Of course, the longer-term options are also highly effective and we definitely recommend checking them out. We encourage you to take advantage of all the ideas here and through our resources to see how they can help you. And if they do, let us know!
Looking for even more sales enablement resources?
We’ve got you covered. Sales enablement is a critical strategy for every organization. If you’re ready to level up your current sales enablement program, we can help. Want to learn more? Request a demo to get started.