Are your sales team members missing their revenue targets? Do they struggle to close the right deals fast?
If yes, it might be time you empower them to become more effective at selling. This is what sales enablement is all about. It involves training your sales team and equipping them with all the right resources, tools, or support they need to close deals and hit revenue targets.
To implement sales enablement correctly, you must create a solid sales enablement strategy tailored to your specific organization. We’ll discuss why a sales enablement strategy is important, and what a successful strategy should include below. And we’ll give you some practical sales enablement ideas to supercharge your sales team.
Why Sales Enablement Strategies Are Important
A sales enablement strategy outlines the steps your team needs to take at every stage of the sales process to convert prospects into repetitive buyers. It also helps you to create the resources your team requires to deliver engaging and personalized sales experiences for potential customers. This is crucial because your team will:
- Know what they need to do to sell better at each stage
- Provide more value to potential buyers
- Move leads down the sales pipeline seamlessly and faster
- Convert prospects into loyal customers
- Meet revenue quotas
With a well-thought-out sales enablement strategy in place, you can also streamline the activities of all your customer-facing teams, including your marketing and customer success teams.
Then, over time, track how well your sales enablement practices are performing. This way you can make necessary adjustments to support your workforce better. Ultimately, a good strategy results in positive business outcomes, including a company culture that promotes maximum sales and revenue growth.
What to Include in a Successful Sales Enablement Strategy
A successful sales enablement strategy should include the following:
Business Outcomes and Goals
Defining your business outcomes and goals reveals the areas your sales enablement activities should focus on. Based on these, you can determine what type and level of coaching your sales team needs to achieve specific goals.
As a sales enablement manager, you’ll want to approach various stakeholders or team members to gather relevant information. These may be sales and marketing leaders or sales representatives. Doing so will help you define your sales outcomes and goals better.
Find answers to the following questions to get an overview of your current sales processes and identify the gaps you need to fill to improve:
- What are your primary sales goals? (Is it winning more deals, increasing upsells, or better customer retention? How do you define success?)
- Where are your sales representatives spending most of their time? Are they where they should be: targeting the right customers? If not, where do your best-fit customers hang out and how can you help your sales reps reach them effectively?
- What are the frustrations your sales reps face?
- How closely are you working with other relevant teams to get the insight you require to make selling easier? For example, are you working closely with the marketing team on sales content creation? How can you enhance the sales content to achieve better outcomes?
Once you get the information above, set clear goals and outline how your sales enablement processes will attain them. For instance, you can include what steps you’ll take to help sales reps tackle specific challenges.
Buyer Personas
Describing your buyer personas clarifies your target customers’ needs and wants. It helps your sales team to have this information because they can tailor their sales pitches to appeal to the right prospects.
When creating your buyer personas, evaluate your target customers and group them according to their differences. You’ll come up with a few categories, which you can research further to create complete customer profiles.
Try to specify the following information about each of the categories you’ve identified:
- Who are your prospects? (What’s their background, including the usual demographics, i.e., their age, location, education level, and other preferences)
- What products or services are they looking for? Why do they need these products or services? This will help you understand their pain points or challenges and the goals they’re looking to meet with a product.
- What might motivate them to use your product? Answering this well will bring out your unique selling proposition.
- What might prevent them from accepting your product? What common objections are you likely to face from each customer category?
- What’s the best way to approach your ideal prospects? Do they have preferred methods of contact? (In-person meetings? Email? Phone?)
When defining your buyer persona, you may want to approach your marketing team for additional insight from their social media and web analyses. With all this information, you’ll know what your most viable sales positioning is and can create a memorable customer experience for each persona.
Customer Experiences
About 73% of consumers cite customer experience as essential when making buying decisions. Prospects will buy from brands that provide a pleasant customer experience even if their prices are higher than competitors.
Your sales enablement strategy should include ways you’ll support your sales team to provide an enjoyable experience for prospects. Identifying these ways is easy if you have well-defined buyer personas.
Let’s say you’re the sales enablement manager of a sales demo automation platform like Saleo. You’ve identified one of your buyer personas as managers of travel SaaS companies looking to customize their demo conversations with various travel niche leaders and gain customers.
You can find ways to help your sales team tailor their sales messaging around this persona and their need within the travel SaaS space. One way you may do this is by creating a sales playbook (more on this and other sales enablement ideas below.)
When developing training programs to support customer experience optimization, evaluate your existing customer experience practices first. You’ll know what works and can base your coaching on optimizing what’s already working.
The Buyer Journey
For your sales team to succeed, their primary objective should be helping potential customers first. Selling comes second, but it’s often a breeze if your team offers genuine help.
Besides knowing about your customers’ backgrounds, you need to consider their buyer journey. This way, your sales reps can genuinely help them with any questions or concerns every step of the way.
Doing this requires you to keep the following five stages of the buyer journey in mind while creating your sales content and training programs:
- Awareness & Interest – prospects start familiarizing themselves with your products or services through your website and other marketing channels.
- Consideration & Evaluation – a potential customer is likely to compare your offers to competitors to determine what suits them. Answering prospects’ concerns to show how your specific offers are the solution to their current issues, and any future problems, will help you stand out.
- Negotiation & Purchase – the prospect is ready to buy. Selling should be a breeze if your sales content tackles the first and second stages well. However, there may be a few internal needs your sales reps will have to satisfy.
These might include presenting product demos to other internal teams for additional funding, security, or buy-in. Factor this into your sales enablement processes so your sales reps will be well-prepared to handle such issues if they arise.
- Retention – the prospect is now a customer and has some experience with the product. What additional support can you offer them to retain their business?
- Advocacy – the customer is so happy with your product and services that they’re willing to share their experience with others, earning you more business. Ensure your brand strategy includes ways you can help them share their positive experience with more people.
The Best Sales Enablement Ideas and Strategies
There are several ways you, as a sales enablement leader, can empower your sales team to sell more effectively.
One method that’s been proven to work well is creating and optimizing sales content your reps can use to convince prospects at various stages of the buyer journey to invest in your business. This moves them down the sales pipeline faster and closes deals quicker. You can also empower your team by personalizing sales training and coaching through regular in-person or online engagements.
Here are a few sales enablement ideas to help you support your sales team effectively and set them up for repetitive wins.
High-Value Blog Posts
High-value blog posts allow your sales reps to provide a memorable experience for prospects. Sales reps can direct prospects to well-written detailed blog posts or tutorials to solve any product-related concerns. This may be particularly helpful during the early stages of their buying journey.
When sales reps adequately address potential customers’ concerns early enough, they’ll trust your brand and your ability to help them solve their challenges. This makes convincing them to work with you long-term easier.
Blog posts that work well for sales enablement purposes include:
- Feature-related blog posts explaining how specific features of your product can help potential customers solve a problem they’re facing. Most of these have ‘How to do XYZ using our tool’ as their title.
- Comparison posts, where you compare your product alongside 2-3 similar products while subtly explaining your product’s uniqueness and superiority.
- Alternative posts. You offer prospects multiple product options while swaying their decision in favor of your product.
Case Studies
When it comes to selling, there’s nothing more powerful than showing prospects proof of the results your products bring. This is what case studies help your sales reps do.
Most case studies are research-driven analyses that introduce a specific situation, examine it, present a solution, and analyze the results. Your sales reps can use them during the consideration and evaluation stage to show prospects what’s possible for them. So they settle for your brand over any other under their consideration.
Specifically, case studies allow your sales reps to:
- Demystify complex information
- Reveal unique use cases and build your reputation.
- Shine a light on specific customer wins so customers looking for similar results know they’ll get what they’re looking for
The best case studies provide concrete details about the results customers are accomplishing and how they’re doing it, educating readers while assisting sales. To create such winning case studies, make sure to include the following:
- Accurate and reliable data
- Multiple scenarios with various solutions and outcomes
- Simple explanations, especially when breaking down complex issues
- Results that match your target customer’s situation
Here’s an example of a summarized case study you can learn from.
White papers
These research-focused guides are ideal if you want to build your authority and position yourself as an expert in your industry. You can create white papers about your product’s features and benefits to help your sales team in two ways:
- Equip them with the correct information to persuade prospects and make more sales
- Let them direct prospects to in-depth guides they can follow to self-learn about the company’s products and features and gauge whether they’ll work for them.
A few ways to convert white papers into effective sales assets include:
- Using credible sources
- Collecting adequate data
- Adding easy-to-follow data visualizations
E-books
E-books, like blog posts, help educate potential customers about a topic or product-related concerns they may have while offering a solution. They’re more comprehensive than posts and are a handy asset for your sales representatives.
If prospects ask them questions beyond their scope, reps can tactfully send them to an e-book, where they’ll find well-explained expert solutions to their challenges. By doing this, reps get to:
- Provide more value to the customer
- Build brand awareness
- Show their commitment to helping prospects solve their challenges
To write engaging e-books that convert potential customers into buyers:
- Talk to your sales team to identify the questions or concerns your target customers have
- Highlight key stats
- Incorporate visual elements
- Organize your content into brief, easy-to-read sections. Use a scannable, visually engaging format. The more scannable your copy is, the more likely prospects will read long enough to get answers to their questions.
Sales playbook
A sales playbook is a step-by-step game plan your sales team can follow to meet their goals. It lays out the best sales practices for various situations, showing your sales reps how to navigate challenging circumstances and close more deals. These game plans are perfect for:
- Planning out the best sales methods and tactics for each stage of the buyer’s journey
- Outlining team responsibilities
- Training and onboarding new members
Here are a few guidelines to help you write a sales playbook that works:
- Document your current company’s sales cycle to identify what’s working at different stages of your existing sales process. You’ll get an outline upon which you can build your playbook.
- Map out the responsibilities of each member of your sales team.
- Include the tools and documents different members need to perform their duties effectively.
Sales proposals
Your sales reps need sales proposals to pitch company offerings, particularly at the negotiation and purchase stage. Sales proposals can be digital or print documents that:
- Explains why a potential customer should work with you
- Shows you understand the potential buyer’s pain points
- Outline your unique solutions for their issues
Tips to help you increase the chances of prospects accepting your proposals
- Keep it brief, simple, and straightforward
- Personalize the proposal to the specific prospect’s needs
- Reiterate key points from discussions you’ve had
Joint Meetings With Relevant Teams
Keeping your customer-facing teams on the same page is crucial to your success enablement processes. These include your sales, marketing, and customer-success teams. You want to strengthen the bond between these teams to streamline their operations.
It makes communication and sharing of necessary data easier.Sales reps will know they have all the support they need to close the right deals at all times.
One way to strengthen the bond between various team members is to schedule joint meetings. Teams can share strategies as they get to know each other better.
Adopt the Habits of Top-performing Sales Reps
Identify your top sellers and gather input from them. Integrating their winning practices into your training or coaching is a sure way of helping your team win more deals.
It’s sort of a transfer of skills, where you first identify the selling habits that are already working. Then you can establish defined standards other sellers can follow to achieve desired results. You can accomplish this by sending out surveys or holding meetings with your best-performing sales reps and creating a sales playbook, course, or other training manuals.
Level Up Your Training Methods
Improving your training or coaching methods to make them more interactive and need-based will help your reps hit their sales targets continuously. This requires tracking and evaluating the performance of your current methods to identify ways you can improve them. A few ideas to help you level up your training methods include:
- Conducting in-person workshops, which include role-playing exercises. Here, your top reps can coach other team members on navigating various scenarios to eliminate prospects’ doubts and successfully sign deals. Such sessions can transform selling into a fun activity for reps rather than a job they have to do. Reps can also ask questions and receive guidance on any challenges they’ve been facing.
- Providing real-time on-demand coaching to support continuous learning. You can offer several online lessons, courses, and certifications to help your sales reps improve their selling skills at their own pace. But remember to stay available so your sales team can contact you for help whenever they get stuck.
Leverage AI
You can leverage AI to improve the efficiency of your sales enablement practices. Specifically, AI may come in handy in the following ways:
- Monitoring prospects’ questions so you can identify ways to help your sales reps answer them.
- Detect trends or patterns you can use to predict which deals are likely to close and when. This way, you can help reps make accurate follow-ups to close these deals without delay.
- Analyzing historical data to identify high-converting leads and assist your reps in channeling their selling efforts correctly
- Generative AI can assist with creating sales enablement content. You’ll have to combine this with human instinct for it to work. AI content alone won’t help you connect with potential customers as you should. It may work against you because you might lose prospects’ trust.
How to Deploy Sales Enablement Strategies
Effective sales enablement strategy deployment requires proper team organization and coordination. A disorganized sales enablement team can prevent your sales staff from maximizing their revenue-generating potential. Such a team will damage your client acquisition efforts instead of boosting them.
How do you ensure you have a team that will implement your sales enablement strategies correctly and support your sales reps to meet their goals? Follow the following steps:
1. Establish Objectives
Define specific and measurable goals your sales enablement team needs to meet. It will help you track how helpful they are in implementing your sales enablement strategy. The more thorough you are in establishing and evaluating your objectives, the simpler it will be for your sales enablement team to perform its duties effectively.
2. Clarify Customer Base
Your sales enablement team should have a solid sense of who your target customers are just as much, if not more than your sales reps do. They cannot help reps perform their duties optimally if they don’t know who the reps work with.
As a sales enablement manager, ensure the enablement team knows your customer’s profiles and pain points or issues your company products seek to address.
3. Define Execution Methods
Work with your other internal teams to identify the best support channels for implementing your sales enablement strategy. These include how your sales enablement team will collaborate with other teams, like the marketing and customer success teams. The collaboration will help to source the information and resources they need to perform their duties.
You may have to create efficient communication channels for the sales enablement team to get all the sales content they need from the marketing team.
4. Identify and Obtain the Right Sales Enablement Technologies.
Training and coaching are the core duties of all sales enablement processes. Your sales enablement team will have to develop various training programs to equip your sales staff with all the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. They’ll require different tools to make their work easier.
A learning management system (LMS), for instance, can help your sales enablement team to place all their training material in a central place online, making it easy for sales reps to access them. Other tools, like workflow management platforms, can help your sales enablement team streamline their workflow.
Conclusion
Your sales representatives are only as successful as the resources and support you give them. That’s why sales enablement is critical to ensure your reps get a continuous supply of the right coaching, knowledge, and tools needed to close more deals and drive business growth.
The sales enablement ideas discussed above should help you optimize your sales processes to the point that hitting your revenue targets becomes predictable and scalable.
Another idea you should seriously consider is using a sales demo optimization platform, like Saleo-live, to enhance your sales processes further. Sales demos come in handy during the negotiation and purchasing stage of the buyer journey.
When customized according to the prospect’s needs – something Saleo helps you achieve – closing the deal becomes a no-brainer. Book a free demo to see how the platform works.
