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The potential of a good sales enablement program is exceptional in terms of performance. However, there are several sales enablement challenges that the team may encounter. Awareness of the challenges and how they will manifest into your sales will help sales teams find solutions to stay ahead of challenges.
Here are the five significant challenges that stand out:
1. No Optimization of Sales Content and Messaging
Every business needs various content: blogs, social media posts, whitepapers, case studies, ebooks, spec guides, client presentations, etc., used for brand awareness and customer education that addresses paint points influencing buying decisions.
Customers look for content, making marketing collateral an essential piece of the sales puzzle. With a robust library for every sales cycle touchpoint, you’re well-prepared to meet customer expectations.
Too often, sales collateral is merely glanced at before discarded, and so modern marketers loathe them. While marketers highlight product features and enhancements, it is up to the sales enablement to be the translation engine for sales. Enablement is critical in tailoring content for the field.
As content is created without input and final sign-off from the sales team, the material should add context and relevance through a lens that marketing does not have, thus improving adoption by reps as the content is tailored and adds value to the sales motion.
2. New Hires and the Managers are Underperforming
Companies usually push new hires to contribute after the ramp-up. But condensing training may affect their comprehension and retention of materials.
Companies could consider extra polishing for underperforming candidates. But to truly foster an engaging and educational environment for new hires, a sales enablement strategy is required.
Immersing your new hires and your sales team into a sales enablement culture can focus on building skills and expertise instead of getting the hang of the bureaucratic processes. Reps with instant access to learning materials find the motivation to explore content and collateral in depth.
Further, front-line managers are failing to coach and be role models to team members. This sales enablement challenge continues to go overlooked, considering they are in the trenches, observing and coaching, and seeing their team members’ successes and failures.
Sales enablement programs must view managers as the team’s extensions and enable the resources to coach them continuously.
3. Marketing and Sales are not on the Same Page
Any differences between sales and marketing teams could negatively impact operations and customer experience. How to get them to work together in sync is an eternal question for the organization leaders. Though not an easy dilemma to solve, it could devolve into a crisis and became an ever-entrenched issue to solve.
The marketing team may update content without feedback from sales, or they may push content live and not communicate or train the sales team. Adopting a sales enablement practice could avoid the absence of collaboration and coordination, unify the two departments, and achieves alignment.
4. Ineffective Selling of New Pain Points
With a change in customer preferences, businesses must respond to those changes. An agile sales staff that is quick to catch on will be able to take up new opportunities. A lack of established sales enablement can become a massive obstacle.
When new client needs or pain points emerge, regular material may not be sufficient, and a regular script may no longer be relevant. An asset loses its effectiveness with prospects as it lacks acknowledgment of a new market trend.
5. Failing Account Retention and Growth Activities
Contrary to the belief that sales enablement applies to only leads in the sales pipeline until the contract is signed, it plays a large part in account retention. Not using sales enablement practices into client retention efforts can be a missed opportunity adding to customer churn and revenue prospects out the door.
Acquisition need not come in the way of account retention or growth; all three can lead to revenue growth with a top-performing sales enablement program.
How Does a Sales Enablement Platforms Prove its Value?
Here is what a sales enablement can achieve for your company.
1. They are important to content in three ways:
- Saving time for reps on searches for materials.
- Preventing oversight into existing gaps in the content library.
- Enabling better collaboration between sales and marketing.
2. They turn new hires into self-starters. With the time saved, new hires can focus on core tasks and duties, and the managers can conduct one-on-one mentoring sessions.
3. It automates processes across the scope of the client relationship, returning resources at key touchpoints to provide value to prospects and customers.
4. It enables leaders to leverage tools to:
- Align both teams on what information new or re-optimized content needs to contain.
- Create coaching modules addressing new assets or pain points and equips reps with tools and skills for effective sales.
- Tracking data to ensure the new strategy is working and course-correct if your campaigns miss the mark.
Achieving alignment begins with planning and implementing sales enablement. Draup’s sales and account intelligence platform help your team build hyper-targeted prospect lists that can segment accounts and stakeholders through comprehensive and real-time metrics.
Draup’s account management feature provides sales teams with a data-driven view of their customer and ecosystem to support micro-targeting. Vendors can discover companies that line up with their products/services solving customer issues using the Opportunity Index’s data-backed metrics.
