What is Sales Enablement: The Guide to Success in 2023

What is sales enablement?

Depending on who you talk to, there are various sales enablement meanings. We define sales enablement as the strategic approach to unite stakeholders in sales, marketing and operations around the common goal of providing salespeople with the right resources, content, processes and technology needed to engage with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey and sell effectively. Because there’s no globally accepted definition, here’s a look at how it’s defined by industry analysts.

Sales enablement is a strategic, cross-functional discipline, designed to increase sales results and productivity, by providing integrated content, training and coaching services. – CSO Insights

Sales enablement is the activities, systems, processes and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with clients and prospects. – Gartner

Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips employees with the ability to consistently have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s journey. – Forrester

What it isn’t…

While there may be varied definitions depending on specific roles, organisations and processes, it is extremely important to understand that sales enablement is not the same thing as sales operations or sales training. 

What’s the difference between sales operations and enablement?

Sales operations is your boots-on-the-ground team that is closely aligned with the daily activities of the sales team. They will be administering Salesforce (or your chosen CRM) and handling any issues that crop up because of that. They will help with lead routing, so sellers receive leads that fit their territory/solution.

Sales enablement is about strategically aligning people and technology behind a common goal: sales success. It helps organisations streamline sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with better, more relevant sales content and equipping sales teams with the tools they need to be more informed and productive sellers. When executed properly, sales enablement has a measured impact on time spent selling, win rates and deal size. Learn more about key differences here.

Enablement vs. sales training

While sales enablement and training empower and equip sellers with the skills and resources they need to perform, it doesn’t mean that they can be used interchangeably. Sales training is the process of teaching skills, information and strategies that will help sellers close deals. This takes form in both onboarding and ongoing sales training, and it’s just one small piece of the larger enablement landscape.

The growth of sales enablement

Forrester: Steven Wright – How has sales enablement evolved over the last 25 years?

Sales enablement has quickly grown over just the last few years. Take a look at these numbers:

• Back in 2017, there were 3,233 users on LinkedIn who had sales enablement jobs.
• By 2022, that number had grown by approximately 2,000 users each year with more than 13,000 users with the job title.
• Additionally, while only 58% of companies had a dedicated sales enablement person, program or function back in 2017, now more than 60% of organisations do so.

Who owns sales enablement?

Depending on available resources, headcount, goals and priorities, sales enablement ownership will be slightly tailored to your organisation. Typically, it includes alignment and collaboration between sales, sales enablement and marketing departments.

Sales

If sales enablement is ultimately about helping boost sellers’ productivity and ability to close deals, shouldn’t sales own this initiative? A sales-owned approach is best for organisations that want to improve on things like sales communication, sales readiness and collaboration.

Letting sales own the overall initiative provides the added benefit of making the department feel more responsible for ensuring success. Rather than running the risk of sales feeling like sales enablement is just another fad, they can truly be the architects of their own success. In a sales-owned configuration, sales will set the overall tone for strategy when it comes to the way sales and marketing can collaborate moving forward.

Sales enablement

As mentioned previously, many organisations are building enablement teams and hiring more sales enablement specialists than in previous years. Not every organisation will have the resources to build this function, but if sales enablement is a long-term strategic play, starting with a new function can set you up for future success.

Creating a standalone sales enablement department (or manager, depending on organisation size) creates a neutral third party, which helps remove biases. After all, a sales enablement role or department can set expectations, own the project completely and ultimately make things easier. This approach is best for organisations that want to continue to grow and are ready to invest in sales enablement as a long-term investment. It’s also beneficial for organisations that want a neutral party to help foster sales and marketing alignment.

Marketing

Making enablement the responsibility of marketing is the classic approach because, although sales enablement ultimately results in closing more deals in a more efficient manner, a lot of the work is done in improving marketing’s overall efficiency.

By embarking on a sales enablement journey, a marketing team commits to revamping its entire relationship with content. They acknowledge that their content needs to be easier to find, speak more directly to buyers’ needs, enable sales to create their own approved, personalised content, and prove its ROI. Allowing marketing to own an enablement initiative is best suited for organisations that are looking to unlock new efficiency with their entire content process, as well as improve sales and marketing alignment.

Why is sales enablement important?

Selling is more challenging and complex than ever before. Buyers now can obtain product information, reviews and pricing, embarking on as much as 57% of the buyer’s journey alone before ever speaking to a sales rep. Because buyers are more educated, they expect sellers to present them with information that is tailored to the business and that will ultimately help them make a purchase decision.

This means that sellers need to work smarter and more efficiently to engage with buyers. However, we’ve found that sellers without effective enablement spend nearly 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing or revisiting content to send to buyers. This is valuable time that should be spent engaging with prospects and advancing the goals of the sales team. 

What are the benefits of sales enablement?

Increases Revenue	Improves Productivity
Companies with successful enablement see 32% higher sales quota attainment	Effective enablement helps new sellers meet quota up to seven weeks faster

Sales enablement is about people and technology, and strategically aligning them both behind a common goal: sales success. Sales enablement helps organisations streamline and shorten sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with relevant sales content that is tailored and personalised. When executed properly, sales enablement has a measured impact on time spent selling, win rates and deal size. Additionally, sales enablement:

• Creates a central, single source of truth content repository that provides sellers with marketing-approved content they need to have conversations that improve win rates.
• Ensures sellers have the skills and knowledge they need to engage with buyers throughout the entire sales cycle. 
• Streamlines sales communication that empowers sellers with relevant information from teams and departments.
• Provides marketing insights so teams know what content is helping accelerate deals.
• Aligns marketing, enablement, operations and sales teams to yield lower costs, increase revenue, ensure brand integrity and compliance, and close more deals.

What are sales enablement tools?

Because enablement is so beneficial to organisations, the platform you invest in is a big deal. 

Sales enablement technology is defined as the tools that reduce the workload of sales and customer service teams, streamline their workflows and provide go-to-market (GTM) teams with valuable insights for improved performance and revenue growth.

 Sales enablement platforms include multiple capabilities and solutions:

• Sales content management: A central, single-source-of-truth repository serves sellers the marketing-approved content and sales enablement materials they need to have the conversations that improve win rates.
• Training and coaching: Customer-facing teams need learning, coaching and skill development. 
• Buyer engagement: These tools help sellers develop and foster relationships with prospects and customers so deals move faster.
• Strategy and planning: This is designed to help enablement teams define their strategies, plan initiatives and optimise their processes based on real revenue and efficiency insights.
• Insight and analytics: Teams have the information needed to know what’s advancing deals so the sales content creation process can improve and be even more effective.

The value of a sales enablement platform

To better understand how organisations benefit from a sales enablement platform, we surveyed more than 1,200 full-time sales, enablement and customer service leaders across the United States and Europe.

The 2023 Value of Enablement Report found that enablement technology was extremely popular, with 82% of respondents saying they use it in their role. And, a resounding 99% of those respondents agree that enablement technology makes their jobs easier.

These responses are no surprise as they point to a variety of outcomes that businesses hope to achieve by adopting enablement tools. These include:

• Go-to-market (GTM) efficiency, particularly as it pertains to time-savings and overall productivity.
• Effective onboarding and learning, so employees can get up to speed fast and grow their confidence.
• Talent attraction and retention by nurturing job satisfaction, workforce morale and career aspirations.

How to build a business case for sales enablement

The Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report confirms that the value of sales enablement is universally high. If your organisation recognises the need to invest in an enablement platform, it’s important to understand where your organisation currently stands with your sales enablement strategy.

Now, it will be easier to create a roadmap of actionable steps that need to be taken. Remember, creating an enablement framework and implementing a sales enablement tool is a large investment that will affect many people throughout an organisation. Here are some steps to take in order to select the correct vendor and win over decision-makers.

Survey sellers and marketers

Sales enablement aims to improve the life of both marketing and sales but, in the end, everything and everyone is focused on one goal: better selling. Marketing works hard to generate leads and create content that will move buyers down the funnel, all in the hopes of facilitating better engagement and closing more deals. Sales, it nearly goes without saying, is always looking for the next best thing that will improve their efforts and engage buyers.

When building a business case for sales enablement within your organisation, it’s important to gain a baseline understanding of how both sales and marketing operate. By knowing the intricacies of their operations, you can build a better business case that speaks directly to the areas that need improvement.

Interview the people who feel the pain

Once you have determined the types of problems your organisation faces, set out to speak with people who feel these pains daily and acutely. Whether it’s someone in marketing who is swamped with content requests or someone in sales who wants to offer more personalised content, finding a person who routinely struggles with the problems you’re hoping to solve is key. Connect with as many people as you can and set out to learn where their pain points lie. Conduct interviews to specifically learn what parts of their job can be improved with a sales enablement solution. Asking pointed questions of people in various positions across both sales and marketing will give you a big picture view of the gaps in content creation, content management, engagement analytics or usage statistics.

Survey the market and choose your vendor

Ideally, you will begin this process with a general idea of the sales enablement space. It’s important to have an idea of who the vendors are, the solutions they offer and how they differ from one another before embarking on building a business case. But once it becomes time to actually put together your case, it’s necessary to perform a deep dive on the platforms available, and then decide which one will perfectly fit the needs of your organisation. To begin this deep dive into the sales enablement market, turn to trusted sources for honest assessments of the platforms in the space. Leaning on independent research will provide an unbiased picture of each solution, and allow you to be confident that you are making a well-informed decision.

Deliver your pitch

Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, the ultimate decision may lie with department heads, a purchasing committee or as far up as the C-suite. Regardless of who actually makes the decision, it will be necessary to have an air-tight case that will not only put their minds at ease but also make them excited about the prospect of a sales enablement platform.

Your presentation should tell an engaging story that paints the picture of why your organisation needs a sales enablement solution. Those who are seeing the presentation may not even be aware of the problems that sales and marketing are facing. Bring in the people you’ve interviewed who can speak clearly and directly to those problems. Humanising the ordeal is a great way for your business to make an emotional connection with its leaders, and its decision-makers.

Enable your sales team with Seismic

Seismic is the industry leader in sales enablement and can help your business increase efficiency by better connecting with customers and buyers. Improve conversion rates, target your content and unify the customer journey by creating a central location for customers to interact with the sales team. Empower your reps by suggesting relevant concrete content based on data from past sales, building momentum via key insights proven to increase sales. Seismic enables all this and more with our sales enablement tools. To learn more, speak to our team and get a demo!