Skip to content
Close
TRY NOW
TRY NOW
Team VODIUMMay 9, 2023 12:37:13 PM8 min read

What is Sales Enablement, And Why Does Your Workplace Need It?

Sales are the lifeblood of your business. With consistent revenue, it’s easy to stay competitive and achieve your goals. If your team struggles to close deals, though, everyone in your business suffers. When your company combines your efforts to support sales, it’ll have the tools to perform competitively.

A sales enablement strategy is how top enterprises are supporting their sales today. With sales enablement knowledge and wherewithal at your side, your sales can keep your business afloat and help it reach new lengths. In this article, we’ll cover what sales enablement is and how it’s vital for growing businesses.

Sales enablement is what your team needs to succeed

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of giving your sales team what it needs to convert leads with a high rate of success. This may be resources, data, tools, or best practices from experts. There are several different techniques to implement sales enablement into your business, but the concept remains the same: give your sales what they need to succeed.

For example, sales enablement at your company may involve introducing your sales team to the best practices that they can apply through interactive lessons and role-playing exercises. Even simple tactics like teaching your sales team how to look more professional on Zoom calls can be beneficial.

It can also mean creating resources that your sales team can use to engage with potential clients more effectively, such as:

  • Blog posts
  • Case studies
  • Customer testimonials
  • Research reports
  • Email marketing templates
  • How-to guides

The bottom line is that anything you do that’s designed to help your sales team become more effective is enabling sales—thus, sales enablement.

Why does your workplace need sales enablement?

There’s some research suggesting sales enablement has never been more popular. According to G2, in the last 5 years, sales enablement has experienced a 343% increase in adoption. But is it something that your company needs to worry about?  For most companies, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Here’s why.

First, your salespeople are busy talking with prospects and strengthening relationships with existing clients. If they have to take time away from that to gather what they need to make a sale effectively, that’s bad news for your business.

Additionally, it’s difficult for a salesperson to carve time out of their schedule to focus on improving their sales skills consistently. Even your best salespeople can stagnate if you don’t facilitate development for them under your guidance.

Finally, sales in many industries are constantly-evolving. The same tactics that worked for your team last year may not work for them next year. Ensuring that your team is always equipped with the latest skills, strategies, and technology is critical to maintaining your competitive edge.

How can a culture of sales enablement be created?

Creating a healthy culture of sales enablement begins with your actions as the leader of the company. Your mission and values should be aligned with collaboration and knowledge sharing so everyone can perform at the same level. There are smaller things you can do to help that attitude filter through to the rest of your team, though.

For example, you can encourage your marketing department to collaborate with sales. Silos are dangerous to a business because they stifle interaction and knowledge sharing. Sales enablement is a multi-departmental challenge. Start setting up meetings between sales and marketing so they can collaborate on the kinds of content they need to create to push revenue.

This is just one example of what you can do to facilitate a sales enablement mindset in your business, but it always starts from the top. Talk the talk, walk the walk, and make sales enablement your focus when designing your company culture.

Sales enablement strategies to kickstart your team

Create a sales enablement foundation

One idea is to create an internal team that focuses on sales enablement. This team could encompass leaders from different parts of your organization, such as sales, marketing, management, and even customer service.

Everyone benefits when your sales team performs better. Getting buy-in from each of the major stakeholders in your organization will get your entire company working toward a single goal.

If you’re going to use this strategy, then it’s a good idea to have the internal sales enablement team meet with some level of consistency. When you’re getting started, meet with your sales enablement leaders at least once a week to polish approaches and fix any hiccups. After that, you can move them to bi-weekly or even once per month when you’re in the swing of things.

It’s also helpful to create a dedicated communication channel for members of the team so that they can stay in contact with one another and discuss ideas around sales enablement in-between meetings.

Throw out the sales cycle for the buyer’s journey

Many companies use the concept of a sales cycle to gradually turn leads into customers, but this can neglect the actual journey that buyers go through when purchasing a product. Instead of strategies to simply convert leads, your company should be focused on creating loyal customers and then building backward with data to create sales processes that reach that goal in practice.

Using the G2 research from earlier, companies who’ve adopted sales enablement are 52% more likely to align with the buyer’s journey. With the value that the buyer’s journey can bring, it’s a competitive necessity to throw out the traditional sales cycle for actionable insights into buyer behavior.

As a leader, you can focus on leveraging the power of data analytics to create more buyer-centric processes during the sales process. For example, by tracking the purchasing behavior of buyers in a geographical location, you can hit that region with more relevant marketing. If you understand the buyer’s journey well, then you can create sales enablement content that is designed for it much more effectively.

The net result is a sales process that’s based on real analytics rather than tired sales practices. Sales enablement involves giving your salespeople the resources they need to close, and that includes buyer analytics. But analytics don’t stop there.

Optimize your approach with analytics

If you want to get as much value out of your sales enablement efforts as possible, then tracking your performance with analytics is a must. You can use tools that help you accurately measure metrics like:

  • Individual salesperson performance
  • Overall sales team performance
  • Customer loyalty
  • Average time to conversion
  • Average lifetime value of each customer
  • Overall conversion rate

Armed with these statistics, sales teams can make more informed decisions and leaders can better guide their teams to success. You can gradually improve your sales enablement performance over time and make adjustments based on the changes that you start seeing in the statistics.

For example, you might start focusing on producing content for a specific stage of the buyer’s journey. You might find that doing so reduces your time to conversion or has no impact on it. The results that you see can impact how you think about content creation for sales enablement moving forward.

There are countless examples of how you can use stats to identify opportunities for improvement, implement strategies designed to achieve that improvement, and confirm their success in the desired statistic. If your organization gets into the habit of analyzing data and optimizing your sales strategy accordingly, then you’ll see continuous improvement over time.

Give your team the tools they need to perform their best

Sales enablement is all about making sure that your sales team has the tools they need to achieve optimal performance, and this means giving them actual tools for the job. Sales enablement technology has advanced considerably, and there are always new tools to try for various facets of the sales process. For example, you might want to consider investing in tools that help with:

  • New lead generation
  • Lead tracking
  • Customer relationship management
  • Sales forecasting
  • Sales performance tracking

Sales enablement tools automate many processes that take precious time away from your sales team to close sales. They also improve your team’s approach to customers and facilitate better integration of data.

You may want to look into tools that help your sales staff become more effective communicators. For example, VODIUM can help your team speak more effectively on Zoom calls. With so much business happening on video conferencing software nowadays, a virtual teleprompter will give salespeople the precise language and focus they need to convert.

You may already have some ideas of what those tools are yourself, and that’s a great starting point. But why restrict it to just yourself? Ask your team what their pain points are or ask them if there are any tools they know about that would bring value to the company overall. Sales enablement is all about collaboration.

Add VODIUM to your sales enablement toolbox

Sales enablement is a business-wide approach, and significant change won’t happen immediately. However, every step you make toward sales enablement is a step worth taking, as it directly impacts your revenue stream.

VODIUM can help you get your sales enablement toolbox started. Our virtual teleprompter software makes it easier for your sales staff to communicate with leads, customers, and other stakeholders effectively while on video calls.

The software allows salespeople to read from a script during Zoom calls while appearing to maintain eye contact. This helps create a more personalized connection and ensures that the flow of conversation won’t be interrupted by a forgotten line.

Don’t take our word for it. Sign up for a free trial of VODIUM today to experience the value we offer yourself.

COMMENTS