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You know how a sales enablement process boosts your sales team at this stage. But the challenge exists in creating an effective sales enablement process.
It can be challenging to figure out how to set up this process, but once you do, it will pay off in spades. Let’s create the process from scratch.
Before you roll out a sales enablement strategy, you need to know your goals and where you’re going with them. Without this clarity, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
Just because you create a strategy and publish it, it doesn’t mean your team will use the information or implement any changes effectively.
When you help your sales team understand the purpose of a particular selling strategy, they’re more likely to follow through on critical activities that it requires.
Sales enablement teams should create a framework or playbook to share with other teams. This will ensure that everyone understands how the team plans, communicates and executes its strategy—and it's an opportunity for buy-in from sellers who might be skeptical about change.
When you have a clear strategy, it’s easier to communicate your plan (which may involve persuading other people to buy in and participate), track progress toward goals—and ultimately see whether or not the whole thing works.
A successful strategy includes specific sales enablement goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example,
Creating benchmarks and monitoring progress toward deadlines will help you assess your sales enablement efforts.
By measuring common sales enablement KPIs, like quota attainment and lead quality, you can set future targets based on your current efforts to improve over time. By taking the time to set realistic goals and KPIs, you’ll be able to track your progress and make adjustments along the way. This will help ensure that your hard work doesn’t go to waste.
No matter how well-intentioned your sales team is, if there's no solid plan to help them sell the way they need, you'll have gaps that may never be filled.
You must understand the entire sales cycle, including the experience of individual sellers and your team. This way, you can identify processes and training gaps that might cost you money or hamper productivity.
Identifying gaps in sales enablement and creating plans to address those gaps allows companies to improve transparency, productivity—and ultimately, the bottom line.
When developing a sales enablement framework and implementing it, it's best if you have a dedicated team of people doing so. It’s also beneficial to connect your marketing and sales departments when doing this—or at least make sure they are aware that these changes are happening.
Ensuring sales enablement success requires collaboration and proactive communication between the marketing team and sales reps.
If your sales enablement team doesn’t collaborate and provide feedback about their work, the entire framework for improving sales will fall apart.
To scale your sales enablement, you’ll need technology and software to help structure it. For example, some technologies are designed to be the central hub of your sales enablement efforts—holding all content and training materials. Others allow you to share specific pieces of information with a prospect.
Collaboration tools allow salespeople to share information and work together on projects. Even if you don’t have a strong technology background, you can still find the right tools for your sales enablement program. You just need to know the essential features for your team and search for solutions that meet those needs.
Let’s consider an example. If you want to boost the performance of your teams while demonstrating your product to your prospective customers, you can arm them with an interactive product demo tool like Storylane. Using it can be a double-edged sword; you can train your new reps with static demos for different use cases, and it also helps your team showcase your products in the best light possible.
In the end, who would say no to a product that demonstrates how it solves a problem?
When sales reps don’t understand the value of using new tools, they're unlikely to use them. Demonstrating that value is essential if you want your sales team members to collaborate effectively with one another.
That means providing them with the training they need to get started. That might include showing them how to use collaboration tools, highlighting their value, and teaching them how to communicate in a way that doesn’t interfere with the workflow of other team members.
Sales enablement isn’t a one-time thing; your strategy should be evaluated regularly—ideally, this happens monthly or quarterly.
Once you’ve made measurable improvements, it’s essential to identify the causes of those changes so that future progress can be maximized. The best way to do this is by conducting a sales enablement audit. This can be done individually or as part of a larger project. Any sales enablement audit aims to identify areas where your strategy needs improvement and then develop actionable solutions for making those improvements.
Though there is no one size fit for all sales enablement approaches, you can beef up your sales enablement when you hit the nail on the head.
Here is what you have to do if you want to align everything towards better conversion rates,
You may have an existing system up and running. Start identifying the loopholes and refine your system to get the best results.
Smash the numbers and pile up the KPIs that you need to refine the entire process. When you have a bird's eye view of your current system, you can dust off the system and help your team to achieve their goal – more deals!
The user’s journey is a critical part of the complex puzzle, the sales process. To fit everything perfectly in its place, you must align your efforts that resonate with the user’s journey.
When you segment your prospect based on the user journey, crafting a sales enablement strategy will be a cakewalk. If you have already done this, identify the loopholes. Once you have identified where are the loops and holes in your existing process, align your strategies around them.
For example, if you are running a business that sells services and products, the user’s journey can be divided into three steps – awareness, interest, and purchase. To improve sales conversions, you can align your strategies based on these three stages.
No sales will happen if the approach is not buyer-centric. So, evaluate whether the process is tailored to align with your buyer's pains.
Customize each engagement to deliver the best buying experience by aligning the program with the buyer journey.
The sales enablement process is systematic. To ensure smooth functioning, you must dust off things and update them to meet the desired results.
The sales team should know the company’s strategy and goals. The training, coaching, and mentoring resources should be aligned with the sales enablement strategy. This will ensure that the salespeople can sell products and services based on their customer's needs rather than their preferences.
It’s easy to get lost with the many options that revolve around your head but worry not; with a perfect checklist, you can narrow down the choices available and finally hit the ideal tool you need in your tool stack.
Here is the checklist that aids you with selecting your ideal sales enablement tools.
Of course, sales enablement software can aid you throughout the entire sales cycle, but it focuses more on early and mid-cycle activities.
In the early stages, your focus will be mainly on discovery calls, tailoring solutions, and using product demos. Thus, it’s the foundation where you build your entire sales cycle. Providing your team with the right sales enablement tools ensures a frictionless user journey.
Instead of relying on your sales team to deliver a lengthy, scripted presentation during their sales calls with clients, equip them with tools like product demo software that allow them to narrate the features and benefits of your product as they interact directly with customers.
Searching for a tool and then analyzing its features is inefficient. Instead, write down the features you need in a particular application or software and use that as your search query when looking at new tools. This will allow you to quickly eliminate tools that don’t meet your needs and focus on those that do.
Some of the basic requirements include,
1. Ability to quickly create and present a compelling tool demo.
2. A simple interface for users that is easy to learn and use but includes advanced features for power users who want them.
3. Support multiple user roles (e.g., administrator vs. regular user).
4. The ability to customize the tool to suit your business needs (e.g., by adding new fields or changing the existing ones).
5. An open API allows developers to create add-ons like third-party tools and apps for the tool.
6. Support for multiple users and teams, including roles such as administrators, managers, and salespeople.
7. Availability of analytics to monitor how your prospects react to your product demo and tweak it better.
When it comes to the sales process, time is the essential factor. Thus, look for a tool that takes off clumsy work from your plate. Look for a tool that can automate crucial tasks like,
For a software solution to be effective, it must hit the balance between the perfect harmony between sales and marketing. In fact, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment grow 20% annually.
With regular collaboration and communication between the sales team and marketing, you’ll be able to develop a comprehensive structure or framework for sales enablement. As the sales team can assist in developing a better understanding of the client, marketing can help create a compelling sales pitch based on that knowledge.
The right technology will make it much easier to collaborate across teams and keep everyone in sync with what’s happening in the business. The best way to get started is by getting everyone on the same page about what success looks like for each team.
It may not seem like an essential feature, but it will save you lots of time for your sales team. For example, you can integrate product demo software into a CRM to auto-personalize the demo. Doing so can save your team’s effort in babysitting and tailoring demos for every prospect.
On the other hand, your sales team can also connect the software to the email platform, Slack, and much more to facilitate seamless communication.
The ultimate goal is to increase the conversion rate. When your sales increase, you have to grow your business size too. If your software can’t accommodate your requirements, you have to reinvent the wheel. To avoid this loophole, invest in flexible software to scale later.
Moreover, ensure that the software allows you to share your demo or other data via multiple gates to ensure a smooth sales process.
Investment should be your final consideration, as several factors and your requirements determine it. Now you have your checklist handy, so narrow down your software list to a few and compare the budget you have between the software.
It is advised not to give too much attention to the price tag, as it directly affects the product's features. Thus, stick to a product if it is worth it, even if its price is slightly higher. It will help you save money in the long run by providing you with more features and options.
With Storylane, you can create demos for multiple use cases and train them to use the right one, depending on their customer. Furthermore, your sales team can track how prospects interact with the auto-personalized demo and use this information to further tailor their conversations with potential customers. This will help move them down the funnel towards a purchase commitment.
At the end of the day, it’s all about sales. You can have an amazing product and service, but if your sales team isn’t equipped with the right tools and knowledge, it will be impossible for you to capitalize on your potential.
So, what are you waiting for? Want to see Storylane in action? Schedule a demo, and we’ll show you how we can help your sales team close more deals faster.
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