Sales Enablement – A Detailed Guide

The best way to ensure that an assigned project or task is successful is by giving your people the tools, resources, and information they require to complete the job. Moreover, you want your teams to have all they need to perform efficiently and achieve great results.

This is particularly true regarding sales due to the challenge and potential complexity of the role. If you want your reps to close more deals and increase your revenue, you must provide them with the right tools, procedures, and training on how to use them.

Each salesperson must thoroughly understand your customer journey and the best practices for approaching each stage.

But maybe that sounds complicated….so how do you do all this?

A little thing called Sales Enablement.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement provides the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively. It’s all about delivering salespeople everything they need to engage target customers throughout the pipeline. Fundamentally, this involves giving salespeople two types of information:

1. The resources they need to perform well
2. Information and resources that the buyer wants

Internal sales resources examples: SOPs, best practices, sales tools, and sales training.

Buyer information examples: whitepapers, videos, webinars, or other information about the company and its products and services. Sales enablement is an iterative process, not a one-off.

Over time, you build and refine the resources that help your business’s sales team to close more deals. In particular, these resources may include content, tools, and processes to sell your product or service to customers effectively. When implemented correctly, sales enablement empowers your sales team to engage buyers throughout the buying process while coming away with more closed deals.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Many organizations make the mistake of relying on individual, high-performing sales talent to ensure the job gets done. The problem is that this approach could be more reliable. Ideally, you want a sales enablement strategy that takes any average salesperson and ensures they perform well, or at least acceptably, every time. Sales enablement is providing your sales team with the best practices, training, tools, and resources to achieve better results.

Align Everyone with Your Overarching Sales and Marketing Strategy

The best-performing companies have a precise alignment between the individual’s role and the organization’s overall strategy. Sales enablement is an excellent vehicle for doing this. It has the additional benefit of setting up a transparent collaboration between your organization’s sales and marketing teams as they work together to build content, track results, etc.

Ensure All Your Salespeople Have Core Sales Skills.

Only some salespeople have every essential sales skill right out of the gate. Additionally, Sales enablement helps ensure your entire sales team has high competency in all the standard sales skills required to perform well. Some of which might be new to them (or worthy of a refresher) include prospecting, pre-call planning, call follow-ups, consultative sales skills, etc.

Sales Enablement Trains Salespeople on Specific Processes

Beyond instilling all the core sales skills, sales enablement lets you train personnel on specific procedures, tools, and expectations that might be unique to your business or your current sales strategy. This will create confidence and clarity for your salespeople on what they are supposed to do and also give peace of mind to managers that people know what they are doing.

How to Build a Successful Sales Enablement Strategy?

Three fundamental principles behind a successful sales enablement strategy:

Define the Entire Buyer Experience

Sales enablement is all about giving your salespeople everything they need to sell effectively. Moreover, one essential component of this is an intimate understanding of the value proposition, customer persona, and buyer experience. When they understand each stage, they’ll be more likely to know precisely what to do next to move the deal through the pipeline.

Invest in Ongoing Sales Training

Processes change, skills fade, and people get rusty. When you invest in ongoing sales training, you are creating a sales or marketing strategy for ensuring your entire sales team is up to date on the skills and information that they need to get results.

Monitor and Ensure Compliance

The best sales enablement program will fail if no one follows it. Similarly, the worst sales process is one that no one minds. The most useless sales tool is one that isn’t consistently used. Therefore,  establish a way to verify that your sales enablement program is being followed.

Best Practices for Sales Enablement

Here are four best practices for any sales enablement strategy:

Scalable and Usable

An essential principle of effective sales enablement is that it works whether you have five salespeople or 500. It also needs to be clearly defined and easy to use; otherwise, people won’t do it, and even if they do, it will cost excessive resources due to low efficiency. Ensure everyone is aware of sales enablement tools & resources, knows where to find them, and how they are expected to be used.

Includes Training and Development

Every great sales enablement strategy requires some degree of training for the salespeople to know how to use the resources provided. This might involve training on specific tools (such as your CRM) or specific sales processes (how to deliver a sales presentation). And since your sales enablement process should be iterative and ongoing, continuous training is also essential so everyone is up to date on current tools, techniques, and resources.

Consistent and Enforceable

The best sales enablement programs ensure a consistent application across your workforce by tracking and enforcing whether processes and resources are appropriately used across your organization. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if you have the most outstanding sales process in the world if no one follows it consistently.

Measured (Inputs and Outputs)

It’s essential to measure both the KPIs of the sales process and the sales enablement process.

Measure sales metrics like:

• # of prospects vs. # of leads vs. # of booked sales
• conversion rate
• sales cycle length
• deal size
• cost of customer acquisition

Measure sales enablement metrics like:

• # of hours to onboard a new salesperson
• # hours of ongoing sales training
• % of reps achieving quota
• % of reps following best practices

What Tools Are Needed for Sales Enablement?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

This is how your sales team keeps track of deals in your pipeline and essential details about prospects and measures performance in a centralized system.

Sales Enablement Software Options include:

• Hubspot CRM
• Pipedrive
• Zoho CRM
• Salesforce

Presentation Platform

Your sales process involves some sales call or presentation to close. A Software like Slidecast is an extremely effective

Example Sales Enablement Tools:

• Slidecast is the best presentation platform for sales enablement
• If you need help designing prettier slides, Canva is an excellent option for that

Engagement Analytics

How many leads are you getting in the door? How many are you converting? Moreover, in what way are people responding to your marketing material? Ultimately, there’s only one way to know: having killer analytics.

Example Tools:

• Some CRM tools track specific sales metrics, so it’s worth checking what yours can do.
• SalesLoft
• Activecampaign
• For tracking engagement analytics for your sales presentations, Slidecast (the presentation platform mentioned above) has built-in analytics.

Training Systems

Many tools can help facilitate the process of creating a sales training library, running staff through training programs, and monitoring and measuring results.

Example Tools:

• Mindtickle
• Allego
• Lessonly
• Saleshood
• 360 learning

Reliable and Efficient Sales Enablement using Slidecast

As mentioned above, Slidecast is an excellent choice for sales enablement tools. If you are looking for a better way to deliver, track, and follow up with your sales presentations, one tool stands out: Slidecast.

Slidecast is a powerful remote selling platform designed to help you streamline and scale your business presentations, pitches, and product demos. Furthermore, you can easily and efficiently build, deliver, track, and create new touchpoints from any slide-based presentation. Additionally, you can sync your presentation analytics to Salesforce automatically. Lastly, you can share the presentation with any of your Salesforce contacts in a few clicks.

Key Features of the Platform Include:

• Create beautiful, professional presentations in minutes instead of hours
• Deliver a pitch or presentation to your contacts instantly, from any device to any device
• Deliver more pitches and close more deals with fully automated sales presentations (called Self-Guided)
• Understand your presentation’s performance with presentation analytics
• Identify when prospects are engaging with your content in real time and instantly reach out at the perfect moment when they are already engaged.

More than 250,000 presentations have been delivered through the platform, with 41,000 hours spent on user presentations – an average of 10 minutes of attention from each prospect on your presentations! Consider the value of buying that much attention from your sales prospects!

Frequently Asked Questions