Sales Enablement is a term that’s associated with both – Marketing as well as Sales. Enabling sales representatives to reach prospects and sell more effectively being the ultimate common goal of both. This is achieved when marketing provides sales representatives with the necessary resources to create an impact on the prospects leading to sales. That’s Sales Enablement for you which will be discussed in this article.

Sales Enablement Vs Sales Operation

Often the terms – sales enablement and sales operation are used interchangeably leading to a lot of confusion. Let’s clearly differentiate between these two before we move ahead. While the main focus of the Sales Operation is to focus solely on sales, it also needs to interact with Marketing. On the other hand, Sales Enablement is mainly concerned with improving marketing as well as sales activities in order to achieve a better end result.

It is all about improving marketing, it’s no wonder then that it involves more about content creation, visibility, analytics, and reporting. To simplify further, sales enablement is a combined strategic activity of both – marketing and sales. Sales operation is the cog within that combined strategy.

Sales operations enable the sales organization to run smoothly and efficiently and helps to manage the sales tech records and generate statistical reports. Sales enablement is the means to improve both marketing and sales via content creation, research, analytics, etc.

Sales Enablement Strategy – Who to include and How to be effective?

Now that you know Sales Enablement is associated with both – Marketing as well as Sales, it becomes all the more important for any company to emphasize more on their Sales Enablement Strategy to grow their business. The goal of any sales enablement implementation strategy could vary – it could either be to shorten the sales cycle, or close the big deals, or dwell on up-sell or cross-sell strategies, or improve brand value, or break into newer markets. Keeping these goals in mind, you need to decide on what process improvement will create your desired impact. Let’s see ahead who should be part of the sales enablement framework and how you can go about implementing it.

Who Should be Part of the Sales Enablement Strategy?

As any sales enablement strategy directly affects the departments that keep most of your business running, you should take care to list the involvement players. The sales head being and important role that incorporates new ideas and strategies along with analyzing sales data; cannot be bypassed. It works best when there’s good coordination between sales and marketing, and the marketing head who is responsible for creating the appropriate messaging and content needs to be included on priority. The strategy of any business needs to align with the goals of the CEO, or CFO, or COO of that company, and therefore needs to be part of the sales enablement strategy. Finally, if you are partnering with a consultancy or an agency, it’s a good idea to include them too.

How to Enhance Your Sales Enablement Strategy

Technology plays a key role when implementing your sales enablement strategy where you strategize action plans for reaching the sales enablement goals – from creating content to inter-department communication, and reaching out to prospects to using the right tools. A combination of all these can indeed help to make or break your strategy.

In order to implement a sales enablement strategy successfully, you need to have the right sales enablement tools readily available to you. The image below shows how your marketing and sales funnels work together along with the technology that fits in.

The use of integrated automation, intelligent CRMs, and contract management can enable team members in the sales enablement framework to concentrate on connecting with their prospects – meaningfully. A tool like HubSpot that has multiple tools under its roof can help to streamline the entire process – it bridges the gap between sales and marketing. HubSpot has CRM, Marketing and Sales automation tools, Content management system, and more under its roof. Another tool – Salesforce which was just a CRM has evolved into being a suite of sales enablement tools. It enables businesses to effectively customize the CRM as per their requirements. And not forgetting to mention that Salesforce can very well integrate with HubSpot, Marketo, and other marketing tools. All this ensures that data can be shared between the concerned departments.

Analytics and Reporting forms an important part of any process that helps in the decision-making process. When there’s the need to pull specific data for reporting purposes in our sales enablement efforts, the CallRail tool can be of great help in tracking calls and form-attribution reporting.

Generating Quotations, Proposals, and Contracts is the need that arises as leads move through the sales pipeline. By having an e-signature and quoting tool will certainly streamline your process. PandaDoc a good and extremely user-friendly interface that can assist you. It is a tool that contains all solutions – contracts, proposals, and quotes. And, it integrates seamlessly with HubSpot too!

Conferencing Systems become a necessity once leads move and swell in the sales funnel, and most members of the sales enablement framework become involved. Therefore, a solid conferencing tool is needed to run demos and sales meetings across departments that are involved. Nextiva is one tool that’s a leading-edge business communications suite having the ability to video conference. Other tools include Zoom, GoToMeeting, etc.

Drive your Sales Enablement Strategy with Effective Data

In practice, sales enablement strategies are not as simple as they may seem to you. When your sales strategy is based purely on the available or collected data with you, it’s known to be your data-driven sales enablement strategy. It must be noted that for any B2B sales enablement, it is the data at the back-end that holds the key to your lead generation and further sales journey.

You will agree that data is the most indispensable asset in any sales vertical. The more relevant data you have, the more relevant insights you can extract from it. And all this goes a long way in improving your sales process. You are in a better position to keep sales representatives well-informed, and also help sales managers to create efficient timelines.

Businesses across the globe are harnessing the power of data to attain a range of goals – either for their business expansion or for their global outreach plans. Today, companies are on a continuous spree to gather and analyze their data to create an impact to stay ahead of their competitors. Your data-driven sales enablement strategy holds the key to increasing your business revenue and also in improving the performances of your sales reps. It’s time for you to enhance your footprint in the market, and unleash the power of your data. For any data-related requirement, reach out to us at [email protected]

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