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Success with a Sales Enablement Strategy
Blog / For Sales Pros / Jun 11, 2018 / Posted by Erica Karnes / 4566

Success with a Sales Enablement Strategy

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More Profit, Less Time: Sales Enablement Strategy is Your Ticket to Successful Sales

It’s an intense time to be in sales these days. Time and energy used to get channeled into staying ahead of the market. But now, sales professionals are funneling that time into merely keeping up with it. This requires sales reps to arm themselves with new tools and workflows to engage buyers. Or, risk getting left behind.

Sure, the “always be closing” urgency of sales hasn’t needed to change. But, given the changing market, closing deals is now less of an individual process. Instead, it’s more of a business-wide effort to provide sales teams with the tools and tactics necessary for scoring. An effective sales enablement strategy ensures access to the right materials, customized for the right customer, and delivered at the right time. In short, it can act as a company’s playbook, successfully leading teams to their target goals.

How does sales enablement work?

1) Simplify the sales process

Back in the day, it didn’t require rocket science for businesses to amplify revenue quicker than sales expenses. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. According to the 2018 State of Sales Enablement report, nearly 70% of sales reps reported that they are experiencing more complex sales processes. Why the shift? Sales processes are now a complex web of variables. This makes inefficiency a stark reality and often results in weak profit margins. Furthermore, stakeholder involvement is on the up and up, and the entire sales cycle is elongating.

However, those companies incorporating a solid sales enablement team are staying ahead of the curve. Sales enablement is a vital part of maintaining healthy, successful sales operations. With heightened competition due to lower entry barriers and more empowered buyers, sales enablement saves valuable time by keeping employees aligned and in tune with content performance.

A sales enablement tool is a system that provides complete visibility across the lifecycle of sales content. With powerful search, scoring, and syncing capabilities, a sales enablement tool closes the loop between marketing, sales, and customers. It helps teams track content performance from publication to pitch. Processes become streamlined. It’s easier to pinpoint customers’ needs. The sales cycle is accelerated. Plus, it’s easy to locate and access content customized for specific stakeholders.

2) Make it easy for your reps to pinpoint content

It’s a shocking statistic that sales reps actively utilize only one-third of their company’s available content. What’s behind such inefficiency? The answer often lies in how they store content. Many businesses don’t employ a sole content repository. Instead, they leave materials scattered across many different storage solutions, which makes content challenging to manage and find. Furthermore, many companies don’t have a solidified process for identifying what content worked within what contexts.

A sales enablement strategy could cover everyone’s bases. And, while it’s a smart first step to gather all content in one place, incorporating tools with search capabilities can take your sales and marketing team to the next level. Not only do these tools enable sellers to search all text in assets (instead of just asset names), but their search algorithms can rank items based on usage and relevance. As a result, this helps sellers locate the content that will make them the most successful. Furthermore, this ensures sales has the most useful content and materials for specific selling scenarios.

3) Connects content to the sellers existing workflow

Even companies that implement streamlined sales processes and CRMs must deal with uncertainty within the sales cycle. There’s no real way (yet!) to see the future. But, having effective content optimized for every stage in the buyer’s journey is the closest thing to clairvoyance. After all, aligning sales content with specific customer needs remains a vital component to sales success. Sales enablement naturally fits into your sales reps day-to-day workflows. It seamlessly integrates into the sales apps, devices, platforms, and technologies you already have in place.

The numbers don’t lie. This year alone, it was even more evident. Combining a dedicated sales team with a sales enablement tool is a surefire way to increase value. For example, nearly 84% of respondents with both tools and teams reported that their company was on track to achieve stated sales goals. Sales enablement solutions can offer an organizational, streamlined backbone to an already fast-moving sales organization. They can provide analytics that help companies better understand their processes, performance, and needs, and course-correct more quickly to help achieve goals.

With a solid sales enablement strategy in place, sales reps will be better empowered, better equipped, and better enabled to land more sales.

 

For more information, check out this article: How to Choose the Right Sales Enablement Tool for Your Business.

About Author

Erica Karnes is a content specialist for Highspot, the sales enablement industry’s leading platform for content management, customer engagement, and analytics.

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