Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training to engage buyers effectively. Sales reps cannot be responsible for lost sales due to inadequate resources or half-baked leads.
The sales team must get fresh and accurate intel, valuable content, and the right tools. AI-based sales enablement platform provides marketing and sales teams with data-driven insights to optimize their business and drive revenue.
Sales enablement is neither a one size fits all approach nor about training, automation, or CRM. It encompasses different strategies, including onboarding, high-quality content creation, and using different technologies, among many other things.
Sales enablement is a combination of multiple sales functions.
Why sales enablement matter?
Sales enablement, a synergy of different processes and strategies, is a joint effort of sales, marketing, product development, and other organizational units, and their working together results in hitting sales goals and increasing the bottom line.
The goal is to align sales, marketing, customer care, product/brand management, legal, and human resources to improve seller productivity and enhance buyer experience.
Aberdeen found that companies with excellent sales enablement programs achieve a 32% higher team sales quota, 24% higher individual sales quota and 23% higher lead conversion rate. Over 75% of companies reported higher sales in the past 12 months, with nearly 40% reporting growth of 25% or more.
How sales enablement contributes to business growth
We have established how providing the correct information and getting prospects and the sales team to the proper conversation on the right channel results in sales and growth. Let us see how it can help.
Optimal utilization of analytics and reporting
Given that all parts of the sales process rely on data, a constant flow of uncategorized and unprocessed data is a giant productivity killer for sales reps to sit and analyze.
Lead qualification: Sales enablement provides the sales team with a lead scoring system to distinguish between qualified and poor-quality leads. For example, if you sell your product or service to small companies, companies with less than 50 employees are automatically disqualified. Some sales enablement platform notifies the sales team when a company opens an email.
Reporting: Sales enablement standardizes reporting and turns raw data into an asset with each sales rep’s call report, the number of demos given, deals won and lost, and the leads generated and converted. Their advanced and real-time analytics provides the team with click-through, response rates, giving a granular insight to all campaigns.
Sales process audit: Instead of relying on guesses about how many demos turned to conversions, a data-driven investigation of the problem identifies improvement areas through a sales process audit.
Content optimization
As content plays a role in sales enablement, the sales team must engage prospects with high-quality content. Though sales reps can produce email content, a survey says that it takes at least 30% of their time. However, 70% of the content goes unused as the sales team dumps it where they cannot find it.
Instead of the sales team, your content marketing team can create whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, case studies, and, most importantly, email templates. The sales team can take help from content developers to create email templates.
With email templates, your sales team can work on valuable material, then automate and streamline the sales campaign process.
To create valuable sales enablement content –
- Audit the existing content, identify pieces of content by aligning with your prospect’s questions, and use them for specific stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Though usually neglected, look at your internal documents and then find ones that address specific questions about your products or services, which can be reworked and shared.
- Since you cannot always create long-form content, it is best to represent them as explainer videos or infographics.
Productivity and automation tools implementation
Instead of spending weeks on manual work, AI-based sales enablement platforms can automate a large portion of your sales process. Besides, many tools and platforms can integrate, helping you have everything in one place.
Automated sales intelligence platforms like Draup can schedule campaigns and follow up with those who have not replied to your emails, preventing sending out the same emails to contacts who have replied. Its dashboard has powerful features and functionalities with various campaign stats and recipient statuses.
It provides real-time analytics that sales representatives can use to get deep insights into campaign performances. Enterprises can take advantage of our vast lead database regularly verified, updated, cleaned to filter leads relevant to your industry, location, position, or other parameters.
