Drive the Ideal Sales Enablement Growth Strategy with These 3 Best Practices

The sales department in an organization is the oxygen that allows businesses to breathe and to thrive. However, with this great responsibility comes great pressure and expectations. When it comes to leading a sales team, having the proper tools and understanding of what it takes to successfully enable your department is vital. This cannot be achieved without thoroughly understanding the strategies that can assist in growing your business.

To refresh, sales enablement is defined as “the process of equipping your sales team with the resources (like content, information, and collateral) they need to turn a prospect into a closed-won deal. Good sales enablement tools and content places the focus on the customer, helping sales reps target the right buyers and increase engagement using relevant content.

Since the start of 2017, sales enablement has been on the forefront of effective selling strategies as sales organizations have shifted to investing more in tools to develop skills and coaching, or to become more nimble and efficient. No matter where your sales org is in the process of sales enablement implementation, we are here to highlight several growth trends that are vital to the success of any sales organization.

Streamline Your Tech Stack

With the plethora of sales tools on the market today, it is easy to become wide-eyed and adapt too many unnecessary tools too quickly. On average, companies utilize about 23 different enablement tools today which is double the amount of ten years ago. As much as these tools can optimize productivity and increase revenue, the amount of tools sales leaders and their teams use can be overwhelming and costly. Despite this, the fast development of enablement tech has allowed many tools that previously served one purpose to perform a variety of tasks on one single platform.

When building a consolidated tech stack, consider these factors in your tools:

• Onboarding capabilities to train new hires which gives the ability to keep teams aligned and up to speed.
• Training capabilities and call analytics to enhance rep’s skill sets and prep for calls.
• Content storage and asset management; organized and all in one place.
• Data analysis and measuring metrics such as individual rep performance, length of sales cycle, deal sizes and more.

Looking for recommendations on the ideal sales enablement tech stack? Check out our top picks here.

Focus on AI

Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, sales organizations have had to rethink how they interact with prospects, coach reps, and conduct day-to-day business activities as a whole. More than 55% of sales leaders say remote work has negatively affected team culture and 60% of sales leaders say it’s hard to keep their remote team current on new products, features and pricing. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence has the capability to bridge these gaps and keep rep’s growth and development on track.

AI helps sales departments grow lead volume, close rates, and enhances overall sales performance. This is due to the automation and augmentation of many components within the pipeline.

Without the copious amounts of busy work and live call attendance, leaders can invest more of their time in improving team performance, customer satisfaction, and increasing revenue.

Become More Data-Driven

Developing a data-driven sales strategy works by synthesizing data and information being collected during all sales interactions to personalize messaging, make educated predictions about customers, and mimic the success of past prospects throughout the pipeline. It is not sufficient to simply make inferences or base assumptions on one-off customer interactions.

Using concrete data analysis within your department allows for better observations to be made about what tactics are effective and what tactics should be improved upon. This allows rep training to consistently improve and achieve larger-scale goals in the long term.

Analyzing data is not always the easiest task, so when looking at your findings, ask yourself these questions:

• What channels are customers coming from?
• Has my profit margins moved recently? Why is that so?
• How many customers have we lost or gained during this particular quarter compared to last year?
• What are the areas of expertise for our sales team? What areas do they still need improvement in?

By answering these questions on a consistent basis, you can constantly refer back to these results when working to refine current processes and observe longer term trends.

Becoming more data focused also applies to sales and marketing alignment. A study conducted by MarketingProfs found that organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates. By developing common processes, centralizing communications, and investing in sales enablement, sales teams can be properly trained on how to use content effectively by their marketing counterparts, giving them the strongest effect. Investing in enablement creates a consistent and reliable stream of information between both organizations and allows them to focus on what they do best.

Incorporating this variety of strategies will give you and your org the best overall sales enablement tools to beat revenue goals and achieve success throughout the entire pipeline. It’s time to instill confidence in yourself and your team when it comes to growth, scaling, and closing more deals!