As sales cycles become more complex, sales efficiency and sales effectiveness are more important than ever. Today, deal cycles consist of more touch points with more stakeholders who are more informed. In fact, before a buyer ever engages with one of your sales reps, they’ve already spent time researching your company, its products and your competitors.
In order to engage these buyers and create repeatable success, organisations need processes that enable sales efficiency and sales effectiveness. We believe that sales enablement is a key differentiator that can help organisations unlock both.
In this post, we’ll share how better enablement leads to improved sales efficiency and sales effectiveness.
What is sales effectiveness?
Sales effectiveness ultimately comes down to closed-won deals and revenue generation. Throughout the deal cycle, there are several opportunities for sellers to “win” with buyers. On average, there are 27 interactions with 11 business stakeholders involved in a purchase decision. Sales effectiveness measures an organisation’s ability to win each of these touchpoints and repeat success over time.
What is sales efficiency?
Sales efficiency measures how much your organisation spends to complete a deal. Sales efficiency can be calculated by dividing the amount of revenue generated by how much your organisation spends on sales-related activities.
You can measure sales productivity when you combine sales effectiveness and efficiency. Sales productivity is the ratio of outcomes (effectiveness) to investments (efficiency). In sales terms, your outcomes can be the number of calls you make or demos completed in a day, whereas investments could be the time you spend on those activities. Based on this definition, if you can achieve more with less effort and associated costs, then productivity increases.
Never stop growing
What does it mean to be inefficient or ineffective?
An inefficient, ineffective sales process can prove costly. One of the most common sources of inefficiency and ineffectiveness is sales content that is difficult to find, outdated or too generic. In order to be more effective, organisations need to enable their reps to easily create content experiences that are highly personalised and meaningful to the buyer.
To get a better picture of how sales enablement can help improve sales effectiveness and sales efficiency, check out a few ways your organisation can leverage sales enablement to great effect.
Plan your go-to-market activities
Sales productivity begins before your organisation runs a sales play or your reps access content. In short, planning is everything. Before your sales reps can become effective and efficient, your sales enablement team needs to plan.
As your organisation prepares to launch a new product or campaign, it’s important for your enablement team to get a pulse on content freshness and content effectiveness. This way, you can ensure that your sellers always have access to the latest, most relevant and brand-compliant content. By planning campaigns and sales plays, it becomes easier for your organisation to monitor what works so you can replicate success over time.
Enable your teams with skills, content and context
Before your sales reps interact with buyers, they first need training and coaching to ensure that every buyer engagement is meaningful. Sales training ensures that every seller has the skills they need to contribute to the team and grow their career. Sales coaching is continuous and ensures that sales reps can strengthen areas of weakness and meet their personal and team goals.
Content helps sellers tell the story of your product and how it can help buyers solve their most pressing challenges. Ensuring that sellers have access to the most recent, brand-compliant content enables them to create meaningful experiences for their customers. Sales enablement software like Seismic help deliver content in context, but empowering enablement teams to align content with the buyer journey.
Engage clients at the right time and place
The modern buyer is active on a variety of channels, including social media, email, text, Zoom calls, websites and more. In order to effectively engage buyers, sellers need to be prepared to interact in this omnichannel landscape. It’s important for reps to understand the channels their buyers prefer to use and personalise their engagements accordingly.
Social selling is an impactful tool for sellers to engage new buyers – and it requires less time than in-person engagement. In less than an hour per day, sellers can participate in online discussions and build credibility with buyers on channels like LinkedIn. Social selling is so effective because it’s where your buyers already are. Social networks also allow sellers to build credibility through their connections and, ultimately, build new and meaningful relationships.
Because deal cycles take place in a variety of channels, sellers need a single location to engage prospects with deal-related information. A digital sales room is a centralised location or microsite where sales reps and buyers can collaborate and access content that is relevant to the deal cycle.
Improve revenue growth and do more of what works
The key to continued revenue growth is understanding what works and creating repeatable workflows. Organisations that have established sales metrics can routinely measure the impact of their sales activities and increase sales productivity.
Over time, the data from your organisation’s sales activities tell a story about buyer engagement. As your sellers close new deals, metrics from the content they shared can help your GTM organisation understand what most resonates with buyers and produce more of it. If a case study worked with a particular person from a specific industry, sharing that asset can become best practice in future deal cycles.
AI-guided selling also helps with seller productivity and continuous improvement. Artificial intelligence (AI) combines human intelligence and machine learning so sellers can identify patterns that enable more effective buyer engagement.
How Seismic can help
Sales enablement is a key driver behind sales efficiency and effectiveness. A dedicated sales enablement solution ensures that sellers have access to the right content and context to have meaningful engagements with every buyer. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built to help organisations plan, enable, engage and improve their sales activities. If you’d like to learn how you can improve sales effectiveness and efficiency, get a demo today.