5 Signs You Need to Invest in a Sales Enablement Strategy

Can a sales enablement strategy lead to sustainable revenue growth? Will you do just fine with your existing process or does your organization need to invest in sales enablement to help your sales reps reach their sales goals? We discuss five signs that will help you decide whether you need to invest in a sales enablement strategy. 

Sales enablement, as defined by Hubspot, is the technology, processes and content that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. Sales enablement can help in improving the execution of key sales activities like making sales calls, pursuing sales opportunities, managing accounts, and targeting top prospects.  

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If your business is showing the following five signs, then investing in sales enablement could hugely benefit your sales team:

1. Difficulty in Identifying Sales Content

Content is central to creating brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing conversions. Sales reps struggle with sales content on many fronts:

• Identifying the right content for their sales meetings or calls
• Presenting relevant content at the right time
• Identifying content that is important and that will resonate well with the buyer
• Pin-pointing if and which content was effective
• Over-spending on content creation: According to a report by SiriusDecisions, “60 to 70% of content produced by B2B marketing organizations goes unused.”
   

An effective sales enablement strategy can help solve a lot of content problems for your sales team. It will help in the following ways:

• Sales enablement platforms can centralize approved content, where a sales rep can find, use, and share content. Versioning systems can also help track changes made, current content user, and the latest copy to be used.
• The sales system can tag content to be searchable by topic, opportunity level, industry, etc., so the right content will pop up at the right time – increasing efficiency and productivity.
• Incorporating analytics in sales enablement tools can reveal valuable information: which content generated most engagement, which content resonated best with buyers, which content triggered a buying decision, and which content was ineffective.
• Analytics can help you measure content performance, to determine the most effective content and allocate resources accordingly.
   

Also Read: How Good Content Management Can Help in Sales Enablement

2. The Onboarding Process Takes Too Long

If you have a non-existent onboarding program or the ramp-up time for new hires in the sales team is too slow, it will affect your ROI. A sales enablement program can help structure the sales onboarding process by interweaving training, practice, and refresher sessions.

Sales enablement technology can streamline the process for new as well as experienced employees, while making training sessions accessible on demand, irrespective of location or time. Sales enablement managers can track employees that have completed the training, evaluate their learning, and tag the reps according to varying potential levels to adjust their training accordingly.

3. Low Sales Productivity

According to a study by CSO Insights, “Salespeople are spending 35.9% of their time selling, with the rest of their week consumed by other tasks.”

Low productivity is a result of:

• Time being consumed in administrative tasks
• Challenges in understanding unique buyer personas
• Below-average quota attainment, when they have limited access to data when presenting to the buyer, or perform guesswork in content strategy
   

Investing in sales enablement can help in:

• Setting up systems to reduce administrative tasks and improve efficiency
• Implementing a CMS that supports content search at a granular level
• Ensuring better team collaboration to improve messaging and insights
   

Also Read: What You Should Get Your Sales Team This Cyber Monday

4. Aggressive Revenue or Growth Goals

Whether you are a big brand that is launching a campaign to stay ahead of the competition or a startup that’s trying to plant its feet on the ground, you must have aggressive revenue or growth goals. Sales enablement can help you align with:

• The recruitment team – to bring in more employees
• The marketing team – to generate more demand
• The training team – to accelerate the onboarding processes
   

5. Insufficient Coaching

As the pressure of performance mounts, sales reps skip steps in coaching and start selling without understanding how to sell on value. Sometimes, learning capabilities and coaching styles also differ, leading to inconsistencies in implementation.

Sales enablement tools can help in:

• Improving the value selling skills and product knowledge of sales reps
• Coaching sales reps on how to use technology to optimize sales efforts
• Help self-coach or take coaching assignments at one’s own pace
   

Also Read: Marketing’s Place in SalesTech

Conclusion

An effective sales enablement strategy is worth the investment if your organization is struggling to keep up with your financial goals. If you can pinpoint where you are slipping, a sales enablement strategy can help you gain control and steer the company in the right direction.

What sales enablement strategy have you implemented in your business? Has it helped improve your sales performance? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

Also, don’t forget to share this article (and tag us) on social media to help raise awareness about the importance of sales enablement.