Preparation is key, especially when it comes to business. If you’re in a competitive market, every little thing that can give you an edge over a competitor can help, let alone a big systematic change like a sales enablement.

If you run a team, the way to set them up for success is with a previously selected and approved set of materials that will bring in more revenue.

Let us show you how to improve your sales enablement strategy below 💁🏻‍♂️

  • What Is Sales Enablement? 🤔
  • Who Is Responsible For Sales Enablement? 👨🏾‍💻
  • Sales Enablement Best Practices 💯
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra).

    What Is Sales Enablement? 🤔

    Sales enablement equates to providing your business sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources include content, tools, knowledge, and information in order to effectively sell your product or service.

    Enabling sales may not be a new process, however, we have been hearing about it a lot more lately.

    It seems that companies have realized just how important it is to pair a modern buyer with a modern seller. A lot has changed in the past few decades and more than ever, it’s important to cut through the noise.

    Think about a time before the Internet. In most cases, the salesperson was the only source of information the customer would have, and now the exact opposite is true.

    Customers are saturated with information and they don’t necessarily know which sources are reliable, so the first step that a salesperson needs to take is to make sense of all that information that’s clouding their judgment.

    The market is changing and with that comes the change in customer behavior, which in turn demands a change in selling practices.

    What you need to remember is that sales enablement is more about the buyer than the actual sales. The practice of sales enablement is focused on providing the sales department with the tools needed to reach and engage with their target audience.

    Now, when we’re talking about improving, we’re not excluding the top salespeople from the conversation.

    The sales department should be a team, not a group of individuals. After all, the goal is to improve your sales and revenue, not to get an A+ on the report card.

    Even the best have room for improvement. This means that even your top salesperson stands to benefit from a structured sales enablement.

    Nowadays, B2B sales enablement solutions are more buyer-focused, with a specific goal of helping sellers target the right buyers and removing any barriers that might prevent a smooth buying process.

    The right buyer is located by the right sales technique, which is creating the buyer persona. The sales team should give the buyer the information they want to hear, but not outright.

    When you use all the information you can possibly get on your biggest buyers to create a buyer persona, you can use that intel for quicker turnover.

    Find out what your buyer persona likes and cares about, what are their needs, wants, and experiences and shape your approach accordingly. A personalized touch will maximize your sales opportunities. After this, you can move on to preparing a business proposal.

    Sales enablement challenges

    Who Is Responsible For Sales Enablement? 👨🏾‍💻

    If you’re looking for a sales enabler in your team, meaning you don’t want to hire a new person, the obvious choice would be someone who has authority in the sales department.

    According to CSO Insights, 50% of sales enablement functions sit under the head of sales, while others report to executive management, sales operations, or even marketing.

    If you’re looking to hire a new person, the right fit depends on the company. First, you will need to assess the state of your company and the needs of your sales department.

    If you need a lot of content produced because your sales team relies on presentations and long format sales pitches, you’ll likely go for someone with a marketing background.

    On the other hand, if you’re planning on expanding, i.e. launching a new service or platform, and know that you’ll be engaging in a big onboarding process, you’ll likely be looking into someone with an HR background.

    If you’re reading this and have no idea what kind of background your sales enabler should have, it would be safe to assume you need to restructure your sales department first.

    In most cases, a company’s marketing and sales departments don’t align and companies like that will most likely hire project managers or someone who has a broader knowledge of their respective fields.

    A project manager can find the best ways to bring together two departments and find a way for them to work as a big team.

    If your marketing department is already bringing in a lot of leads, funnel those leads and share the content used in such campaigns with the sales team. Make their life easier by providing materials that will make their presentations pop.

    In return, the sales team should share their findings and analysis with the marketing team.

    Those findings should be a starting point for creating future business strategies and long-term goals. Include both departments in planning and executing important practices that generate revenue.

    With input from both teams, you’re on your way to creating a successful “revenue” team.

    Sales Enablement Best Practices 💯

    #1 Embrace Technology

    With numerous sales tools and apps that help facilitate sales, there’s no reason not to try them and find the perfect one for your company.

    With the rule of thumb being that you need to keep up with technological advances in order to grow, it is imperative that you find the right set of tools.  

    Sales enablement software plays a key role in cooperation between departments. It should be the center of all materials and information, with an easy way to customize all the content that’s going out.

    Your sales team should always be more technologically advanced than your customer pool, hence the need for acquiring new skills and working with new tools.

    Sales tools come in handy in different situations, like customer relationship management (CRM), lead handling and processing, sales and market intelligence, analytics and reporting, sales training, and sales automation and integration. You can also look into custom CRM development for a more tailored approach.

    Your CRM should be a top priority in your sales process, and the tool you select for it should integrate seamlessly with your work stack, as well as simplify your day-to-day work. If your CRM is creating more work for you, it’s a sure flop.

    Let’s take a look at some CRMs you might enjoy. HubSpot’s CRM is free and offers a reporting dashboard, company insights, deal tracking and pipeline management.

    With automated update reports, you’ll easily keep track of how your team is tracking towards the set quota.

    Also, you can easily connect your favorite tools with the many HubSpot CRM integrations available.

    • Scoro helps you coordinate your sales process and improve the performance of your team with project & task management, sales pipeline management and reporting. It allows you to get an instant overview of each client, including contact details and communication history.
    • Freshdesk lets you streamline all your customer conversations in one place, automate your repetitive work to save time, and collaborate with other teams to resolve issues faster. It gives you more insight into your customers so that you can serve them better.

    Lead handling and processing is a step that when done correctly you don’t give it much thought, but when done badly it’s the biggest factor in unsuccessful sales.

    Identifying promising leads quickly, and providing them with a customized approach and content they enjoy may be the most important part of sales, and here are a few tools to help you with that.

    • CloudSponge allows users to search, select, and input contact information without typing anything or leaving your website to copy information. It's an easy networking device that improves collaborations.
    • LeanData helps you build an accurate data foundation across your business by automatically matching leads, contacts, and opportunities. Shorten sales cycles by automating complex routing flows without a need for vast technical skills with this easy tool.
    • Mailshake is a powerful cold-email outreach tool that provides automatic follow-ups and engages with prospects via phone or social media all in one dashboard.
    • Intercom helps you proactively engage, qualify and convert website visitors in real-time. You can organize a demo of your product or service with high-value leads while they’re live on your website.

    Sales and market intelligence is used to collect and analyze external information to guide strategic decisions.

    If you want to maximize the data you have collected to identify opportunities, act fast, and differentiate you’ll need a sales and market intelligence tool.

    Many companies still don’t have a structured process of gathering information, and that’s where these tools come in handy.

    Market intelligence, of course, doesn’t equate to just analyzing your competitors, the key here is to analyze and predict market trends and to know how your buyers are perceiving your brand and prices.

    This type of intelligence helps you find the best course of action by providing an in-depth SWOT analysis, which helps you determine problems (both real and potential) internally and externally.

    Sounds just like the thing you need? We have just the tools for you!

    • LeadGenius claims to have the highest quality data available anywhere, collected and verified by a combination of human research and machine learning. They have developed a personalized crawler that can be configured for individual projects to acquire custom, specific data at scale.
    • Vainu provides salespeople with actionable company information, when and where they need it. Vainu is powered by technology to collect and understand all company information ever written and to make it easily consumable for the salesperson.
    • HG Insights while focusing on website tech, lets you target, qualify and close opportunities quicker. Build better forecasts and target your campaigns more precisely with accurate insight.
    • ZoomInfo empowers each phase of your sales process with technology, integrations, and automation. They collect most of their data by interviewing companies a few times a year.
    • Leadfeeder is a tool that helps companies discover more about their visitors, focusing on companies that visit your website. It shows you how a certain company found you and what they’re interested in. They enrich leads with contact information for a smooth sales process.

    Collecting data may seem like a huge task, but until you process data correctly, it is useless. This is where analytics and reporting tools step in.

    Your collection of data may look powerful, but how well do you actually understand it?

    When presented in a clear way that shows the bigger picture, and correlation to real, tangible issues, that’s when you have the right kind of data.

    The latter is called data visualization and its importance lies in exposing patterns, trends, and correlations that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s a way to simplify your spreadsheets in a more digestible form.

    Tools that work wonders for analyzing and reporting really are worth your while. With Bombora you can take immediate action when accounts show buyer intent. Bombora gives you the information to understand who your prospects are, and who is searching for your content on the Internet.

    • Xant is an AI platform that has collected over 27 billion revenue interactions and over 183 million individual buyer profiles to enrich your leads and processes with powerful actionable insights for building a better sales funnel.
    • Tableau enables your salespeople to see, understand and process a huge amount of data. It enables your team to work faster and smarter with a seamless end-to-end analytics experience. Build your own dashboards with the data relevant to you and publish content on the go with Tableau.
    • FullStory automatically discovers, analyzes, and ranks high promising opportunities so your teams can confidently focus on the improvements that will yield the greatest benefits. You can record every visitor session on your website and watch it back to see what hooks your clients, and where they lose interest.

    Sales training is another big part of the sales enablement process, that when done right takes a lot of time. If you’re looking to speed up your onboarding process, you’ll love these tools.

    • Guru puts emphasis on your workflow. It captures your team’s most valuable information and organizes it into a single source that can be verified by your experts, trackable, and effortlessly accessible.

    Guru cuts down the process of searching for information, and turns knowledge management software to collaboration software with easy integrations, making your company Wiki a thing of the past.

    • Gong records all customer interactions across calls, meetings & emails to deliver a real-time insight that helps you win more deals.

    It uses AI to understand how your market is reacting in real-time, with an option to analyze your best salesperson and “clone” their top-performing traits. Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant, talks about some of the best AI-powered platforms that help provide better sales leads for your business.

    Sales automation and integration tools help you automate busy work. Once you’ve selected the right leads to focus on and have all the content and data you want to use to close your sale, you’ll want a little boost in the right direction with these tools.

    • Better Proposals help you create customizable, beautiful high-converting, easy-to-sign proposals with an integrated payment system that prevents the need for printing or snail-mailing contracts.

    With over 160 templates that look great on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, you’ll surely find a perfect fit for your business.

    Better Proposals offer analytics that shows exactly when your client read your proposal, what part they spend most of their time on, and with an option to manage your pipeline you’ll see who’s ready to sign, who’s ready for a follow-up, and who needs a little more nurturing.

    With all of the tools listed, it’s important to mention not to go overboard, tools should simplify your sales process, but you should regain your ability to perform critical tasks.

    #2 Sales Coaching 👩🏽‍💼💲

    As Albert Einstein said - “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”, and we couldn’t agree more. When it comes to sales training, the first step is always capturing and keeping your salespeople's attention.

    According to research, 87% of sales training content is forgotten within one month of training.

    The best way to avoid that is by capitalizing on the salespeople’s natural competitiveness. Whether they’re playing as a team or against one another, they'll want to succeed by beating the competition.

    Try creating online quizzes with platforms such as Kahoot! and turn learning into a fun experience for them.

    If you already have coaching content, whether it’s an in-house academy, white papers, or else, make sure to also incorporate instructor lead training services.

    You’ll want to avoid solely focusing on teaching sales theory and help your participants develop the skills they’ll need to become successful salespeople.

    #3 Create Content 📹

    Salespeople need to know which content has a higher engagement rate and at which point in the sales process should they turn to it.

    The purpose of sales enablement content is to help sales representatives overcome hurdles they might face during the sales process. Video content marketing basics is a great place to start exploring before jumping into content creation.

    The first step should be understanding your customers and knowing what they are looking for at different stages of the decision-making process. This helps you in creating a winning sales strategy.

    If you followed our steps and used a tool to help you monitor your sales process and find your buyer persona, you’ll know which steps you need to focus on more, and which content you need to upgrade or create from scratch.

    Now that you have all the information, get started on creating your sales enablement strategy 🙌🏽