Sales Enablement Strategy

What is sales enablement? Why should it be a priority for your company? Sales enablement is still a fairly new concept, so it’s not surprising that not everyone understands what it is and how it is crucial for growing their business. Some people think that it’s the technology that helps streamline the sales process. Others think that it’s the marketing materials created for the sales department. Still others associate it with the onboarding process. The truth is that it’s a little bit of each. Sales enablement is all about giving account executives the tools they need to reach out to prospects, connect with decision makers, and close deals. That means that the sales enablement role includes training by your onboarding team, materials put together by your marketing team, and data from the tech team. It brings all these parts of your company together.

What is sales enablement versus sales operations? Sales operations focuses on the sales process itself, including things like lead management, territory mapping, and strategic planning. Sales enablement provides the skills and strategies to make sales operations possible. What about sales enablement versus marketing? People often confuse sales enablement and marketing because they are so closely related, but marketing creates the materials that help sell your company, while sales enablement makes sure those materials are as valuable as possible to your sales team. The definition may differ from company to company, but sales enablement generally means everything that goes on behind the scenes to facilitate sales.

 When it comes to scaling a company, one of the most important things is putting together an effective sales enablement strategy. It’s this strategy that helps transform a department of talented salespeople into a cohesive team. Without a sales enablement plan, your top sellers would continue to operate independently. There’s not a process that lets them impart their knowledge to others. With the right plan, they will be able to pass their know-how along to the rest of the team. Sales enablement allows you to put your institutional knowledge to work. It makes sure that your marketing materials are what sales reps need to connect with customers, and it puts the data that your tech team has been collecting to good use.

Sales Enablement Framework

To make sure that you have an effective sales enablement framework, it’s important that all parts of your sales team work together. That means your Sales, Sales Development, Business Development, and Customer Success teams need to function as a team. There can’t be any friction when a customer is passed from Business Development to Sales or from Sales to Customer Success. You can’t accomplish this if there isn’t effective communication between these different departments. To make sure they understand each other, make sure they are speaking the same language. That’s one of the reasons sales enablement is so important.

How should a sales enablement team be organized? How large should the team be? These factors differ widely, depending on the size of a company, the industry, and the types of sales it does. Smaller companies may have one person working on sales enablement who reports directly to the sales manager. (A recent study found that about half of all companies with a sales enablement staff designate them as a part of the sales team.) Larger companies often have an entire sales enablement staff that reports to sales, marketing, or sometimes to both. Those companies that have made sales enablement a top priority have often added an executive-level leader to run a team broken up into areas like strategy, technology, and performance. Since the roles and responsibilities of a sales enablement team vary from one company to another, there’s not one correct way to organize yours. The size, shape, and function of your sales enablement team depends on what your company needs.

What about sales enablement tools? And what are the most important KPIs for your sales enablement? Your best bet for understanding these is sales enablement training through a company like Winning by Design. The courses available through our top-rated Revenue Academy provide the basis for companies running recurring revenue models.

Courses like Prospecting for Impact and Selling for Impact help your entire go-to-market team understand how sales enablement can help them every step of the way. Frontline managers learn the importance of sales enablement in courses like Management for Leadership. If you’re in the market for sales enablement certification in SaaS, Winning by Design has industry-recognized certification for all its classes.

How Do You Develop a Sales Enablement Strategy?

What is sales enablement able to accomplish for your company? One of the answers is in a recent survey that found that 40% of sales leaders didn’t make their goals last year. There’s a lot of reasons behind that statistic — fluctuations in the economy, challenges in hiring and retaining staff, and ongoing global health concerns, for starters. But one of the big reasons is the way that we approach sales. Because the marketplace is changing, our companies need to change as well. To stay on top of these changes, we need to completely rethink the way we train, manage, and support our sales teams. One of the best ways to accomplish this is putting together an effective sales enablement strategy.

Without an enablement strategy, sales teams don’t have all the tools they need in today’s world. They don’t have easy access to information about their product, data about their company, and insights into their customers. They don’t have the training they need to work as a team, and they don’t have procedures in place to make the customer journey as smooth as possible. But how do you develop a sales enablement strategy? First of all, work with your sales team. No matter how well thought out it might be, a new strategy isn’t going to work if your team doesn’t buy in. Making them a part of the process means they will understand why it’s important and what benefits it will bring to them.

Start out on the right foot with a sales enablement mission statement. It doesn’t need to be too complex, just something to get your team focused on goals. It can be as straightforward as: “The mission of the sales enablement team is to provide our sales team with the people, procedures, and priorities they need to achieve their goals.” There are plenty of sales enablement strategy templates available online that can help you craft a mission statement that’s right for your company. The next step is considering the scale of your sales enablement team. A good way to decide on this is to discuss the reasons you need a sales enablement team in the first place. If you were unhappy with your onboarding process, start there. If your sales team lacked in-depth data about customers or professional marketing materials, that’s where you should put your energy. Remember that you can grow the team later on. Lastly, develop your roll-out plan. Make sure everyone on your sales team knows the resources they will have at their disposal. 

Studies show that two-thirds of companies that invest in sales enablement software see a positive ROI. Of those who decided to postpone that investment, 12% saw a decrease in overall sales. What are the sales enablement tools that are available today? The customer relationship management software you probably already use is a sales enablement tool. But there are hundreds of other tools you can choose from. If you have a CRM that you love, make sure that any new software you consider works well with it. To learn more about what’s available, consider taking a sales enablement training course like those offered by Winning by Design.

B2B Sales Enablement

The rapid changes in how we sell products and services have made sales enablement a crucial part of every organization. The growth of Software as a Service means that companies need their sales teams to be bolstered by science-backed strategies and measurable business impact. For this recurring revenue model to be as effective as possible, companies need B2B sales enablement. For SaaS-based companies, it’s a game plan for high-velocity sales. 

For B2B companies, the responsibilities of the sales enablement team include putting together a sales process that is predictable, repeatable, and scalable. It’s providing great onboarding, ongoing training, and ways to pass along institutional knowledge. It’s the best data on what potential customers need. The sales teams at these companies are dealing with prospects whose phones are ringing off the hook with account representatives from the competition. They need the best sales enablement materials so they can transform leads into sales. 

When it comes to sales enablement, companies are turning to the experts at Winning by Design. Besides open courses that cover all aspects of field enablement and sales enablement, we have private courses geared toward your own use cases, interactive coaching sessions, and a process to follow that unites your entire go-to-market team. We also have best-in-class frameworks and detailed blueprints to keep all this information at your fingertips. And we back everything up with our industry-recognized sales enablement certification.

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