Sales Enablement: Boost Your Sales Results

The concept of Sales Enablement aims to optimise and support your teams' sales efforts by making it as easy as possible for them to access the necessary and relevant information to advise customers better, present attractive offers and optimise their productivity and results. This sales support revolves around a few main pillars: training and coaching, and high-performance sales materials. All of this, digitalisation being what it is, often relies on technology tools.

Sales Enablement: what is it?

Sales Enablement refers to all the processes aimed at improving the effectiveness and performance of your sales team. In practice, it means doing everything possible to ensure that salespeople understand, absorb and can sell effectively by backing up their efforts with various resources: demonstration tools, sales materials and even properly formalised contracts.

This involves training them in the products and services to be sold, making them aware of the brand image the company wants to present, giving them all the tools they need to sell, but also involving them in the sales methodology and the sales stages followed by the company.

In large companies, once management has set the broad guidelines, the marketing and sales managers agree on how to implement them so that the business teams apply them. In small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), this task also falls to the manager; unfortunately, it is often wrongly neglected on the principle that "the salesperson just has to go out and sell". More a problem of time management than of empathy…

Finally, it should be noted that Sales Enablement applies just as much to up-selling as to cross-selling.

Firstly, training

Training salespeople is essential. Training in the products and services to be sold. Training in the company's internal processes and sales practices. Training in the company's brand image. Training on target customers. When salespeople know their offer and their target customers, they know what matters to them, which arguments they will respond to favourably, and how to highlight the strengths of their offer compared with competitors. This will improve their sales method and results, as well as shorten their sales cycles.

This training does not stop once the new recruit has been onboarded; it must keep pace with the company's development.

Note

CRM software is the collaborative tool that lets you organise your teams' sales activity.

Secondly, sales materials

Buyers are increasingly autonomous, and anything that can help the salesperson is a sales aid to help them win buyers over. You need to establish a genuine inbound marketing strategy. Pre-qualified prospect lists, attractive and appealing sales documentation that meets customers' expectations (paper and/or digital), an up-to-date website, pre-written emails, personalised case studies, white papers, price lists and rate cards, competitive intelligence briefs…

These elements, delivered by a real content strategy approved by the marketing department and sales management, make salespeople more efficient.

Note

If your CRM includes a document management (DMS) feature, as eKo CRM does, your teams will work from a shared, always up-to-date library of sales materials in every format (doc, xls, pdf, pwt, email templates, SMS templates,…).

Thirdly, technology tools

Businesses have gone through digitalisation and it is no longer possible to do without it. Salespeople are connected. They must organise their activity to prepare their targeting, use pre-formatted emails, report accurately on their actions, manage their task reminders and manage their portfolio of deals…

Note

eKo CRM lets you draw up your quotes and track your customised sales cycles to measure the effectiveness of your salespeople.

Benefits of Sales Enablement

• Create a common reference base: general company presentation, product/service documentation, white papers, customer cases, … This reference base ensures unified communication, with personalised presentations, free of spelling mistakes (ideally 😉) and leaving as little as possible to chance.
• Improve onboarding and skills development for new recruits: new and experienced salespeople will quickly speak the same language, rely on the same working method and easily support one another.
• Strengthen sales effectiveness and relevance: all content is immediately available to salespeople. They know where to find it quickly and how to pass it on to prospects and customers.
• Close collaboration and teamwork between the company's different departments: the guidelines set are respected by everyone and everyone works together!
• Streamline and shorten the sales cycle: salespeople are more relevant, provide suitable answers to customers and effectively support customers in their decision-making process.
• Improve results: salespeople quickly provide the right answers, customers decide faster and, normally, decide in favour of the salesperson who properly helped them make their choice.
• Benefit from better marketing/sales alignment: marketing creates the materials salespeople need, and salespeople give feedback to make them more relevant.
• Generate more revenue: with more efficient and faster sales cycles, salespeople can handle more deals and no longer waste time on minor tasks… So it is only natural to expect better results.

Define your Sales Enablement strategy!

1. Set the objectives: who sells what to whom, and how to help them.
2. Choose the materials and the messages to convey, in line with the company's visual identity guidelines.
3. Create the content library.
4. Build this content into salespeople's ongoing training
5. Build this content into the sales method.
6. Monitor performance and identify areas for improvement

And why not combine the launch of your first Sales Enablement initiative with a sales challenge within your teams? To help you with this sales process, discover eKo, the online sales management software. To find out more about all its features, this way!