What is a sales enablement process?

A sales enablement process is the set of activities, tools, and resources that organizations use to empower frontline teams throughout the entire sales cycle. It includes various stages, from onboarding and training to content management, technology implementation, and ongoing support. 

When launching an enablement program, a sales enablement process serves as a guide for aligning teams, defining the buyer journey, and identifying resources to support the sales team. This ensures that sellers have what they need to engage buyers, close deals, and drive growth.

Getting Started on your Enablement Journey

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Crafting an effective sales enablement process

To build an effective sales enablement process, organizations need to implement a diverse range of strategies and sales enablement best practices. Whether you’re looking to create a new enablement process from scratch or improve your existing process, some essential steps  include:

1

Assess the current process and set goals

Regardless of your organization’s enablement maturity, you need to assess where things stand today and identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals that align with your business objectives to achieve growth and demonstrate ROI.

2

Define roles and responsibilities

Best-in-class enablement requires alignment across all revenue-driving teams, not just sales and marketing. To keep everyone on track, you need to identify your champions and key players and clearly define the team’s roles, responsibilities, and expectations. This level of clarity mitigates confusion and ensures that tasks are completed on time.

3

Create and organize sales enablement content

Today’s buyers expect to receive relevant materials that are personalized to their unique needs. That’s why it’s critical to have a sales enablement content process for creating assets so sellers can deliver relevant, engaging, and useful content to buyers at the right time. A content management strategy provides the structure and accessibility that sellers need to quickly find, personalize, and share content with buyers.

4

Implement sales enablement tools and technology

After laying the groundwork for your sales enablement strategy, you need to determine the tools and technology required to implement your process. To streamline efforts such as planning, content management, and reporting, consider centralizing your activities in a sales enablement platform. Establishing a single source of truth for enablement simplifies workflows and improves your speed to market.

5

Develop comprehensive training and coaching

Sales enablement training provides sellers with the foundational knowledge of your products and services in addition to best practices for engaging with buyers. To reinforce training, you also need to coach sellers with continuous, personalized guidance. With thorough training and coaching, sellers hone their skills and remain adaptable in a dynamic sales environment.

6

Establish feedback channels

To improve the effectiveness of your sales enablement process, it’s important to gather input from your revenue-generating teams. One-on-one coaching between a manager and seller, surveys, and dedicated communication channels are great ways to give and receive feedback. 

7

Measure and analyze results

Defining your goals at the start enables you to measure the performance of your process. To stay on track, it’s important to review key performance indicators (KPIs) around sales activity, content effectiveness, and training. By regularly monitoring progress, your team can understand whether or not the process is supporting the desired business outcomes. 

8

Optimize and adapt your framework

Your sales enablement framework should evolve throughout the year to align with your sales strategies. Reevaluate your process each quarter and optimize and adapt according to your learnings and market changes. By making continuous improvements over time, you maximize your chance of success.

9

Communicate results and reinforce best practices

In the spirit of transparency, share results with your champions and key stakeholders. To ensure success, use the data to reinforce best practices to frontline teams and provide justification for shifting activities to meet a common goal.

Why it’s important to have a well-structured process

Teams with a well-structured enablement process improve sales effectiveness and prove the value of their contributions. It’s important to have a structure in place for several key reasons:

  • Enhance sales performance: Equipping sellers with the right resources and support maximizes their potential, leading to better performance.
  • Drive consistency: Enabling frontline teams to follow consistent messaging and processes improves consistency across the customer experience, resulting in higher trust and customer satisfaction.
  • Improve productivity: Making mission-critical sales enablement materials readily available via the right technology and tools drives productivity and efficiency among sellers. 
  • Quickly adapt to market changes: Delivering just-in-time training with supportive coaching prepares sellers to quickly adapt to business and market changes. 
  • Measure impact and drive improvement: Proving the impact of your enablement efforts is critical to getting buy-in and funding from the C-suite; in addition, it gives you the insights necessary to make improvements to your sales enablement process over time. 

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Create and scale your enablement process with Seismic

Creating a sales enablement process has never been easier with the Seismic Enablement Cloud™. Seismic’s Enablement Planner serves as a central location for frontline teams to plan, execute, and iterate on a process. Seismic also supports critical activities such as content management, training and coaching, and communication and collaboration, complete with robust analytics to measure your success. Together, these tools streamline enablement efforts and empower you to create repeatable and scalable processes that lead to growth. Ready to see how Seismic can benefit your organization? Schedule a demo today.