What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is composed of strategies, tools and processes that provide sales representatives with the ability to boost their productivity and revenue generation. These tools and strategies improve the efficiency of sales reps by introducing automation, workflows, analytics and training tools to the fore. Sales enablement tools can also help bolster the quality and completeness of the data in a CRM system.
The following are the three areas in which sales enablement can improve sales performance:
1. Tools
CRM data automation: These tools make sales reps more productive by automating various sales tasks, such as prompts for when to follow up with a prospect. They also increase the accuracy and completeness of CRM data by automatically collecting it from reps.
Sales productivity tracking: Low sales rep productivity results in lost deals. Tracking software identifies problem areas in a sales process and indicates techniques that yield high and low performance among representatives. Tracking software enables sales managers to intervene and correct low performance and poor practices.
Centralized content repositories: Sales reps can access centralized information, eliminating questions about whether the right version is in use and enabling sales teams to standardize certain documents, processes and practices.
2. Strategies
When planning strategies around how to improve sales, the following common processes can help:
Sales methodologies: Sales methodologies help sales teams map out processes, standardization and key performance indicators (KPIs). Sales methodologies add structure to the sales process, which in turn makes it easy to identify areas that are broken or inefficient.
Sales and marketing alignment: Sales and marketing need to work together in a common mission to find prospects who are ready to buy and engage customers in an ongoing way through marketing campaigns.
Mapping to buyer personas: Companies can now use software and processes to segment their audiences and customers according to buyer personas (different attributes that contribute to a sale, possibly of different products or at different times). Buyer personas are fantastic guides for engaging with buyers through content and sales communication. Sales and marketing can develop templates for further action based on buying personas.
3. Processes
Sales assessments: Sales teams need to assess sales performance based on KPIs and evaluations of individual effort. Evaluations should involve analytics on individual and team performance, as well.
Sales training: Organizations need institutionalized methods to train sales reps and boost performance. Training should be connected to sales methodologies.
