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Any sales enablement program aims to increase sales success rate and company revenue.
Sales performance and customer experience largely contribute to achieving goals, making them crucial for revenue teams to track success. However, if you don’t have a reliable sales enablement strategy, tracking or optimizing these metrics might not yield the results you expect.
This article will discuss creating an effective sales enablement strategy that suits your organization.
Remember, a plan isn’t one size fits all. Every company's sales processes, market, competitors, and industry differ.
You can take inspiration from this article to create your sales enablement strategy.
Core elements of an effective sales enablement strategy
A good sales enablement strategy revolves around four areas: collaboration, content management, technology, and coaching. To create a successful strategy, you need to strategize these four areas.
Collaboration
It’s not just about sales and marketing alignment. It’s about revenue alignment, where sales, marketing, product, and support teams come together to deliver a seamless customer experience to buyers and close more deals.
You need a well-rounded strategy to ensure this collaboration happens at a company level and you have the tools and processes to support it.
Ensure you have the right communication tools to collaborate with your team on customer interactions. For example, if your client communications happen on WhatsApp, Cooby lets you tag team members to different client conversations, helping the team to be on the same page.
If prospects frequently ask particular questions, you can tag your marketing team on the conversation to create self-serve or sales enablement content to address these asks. For example, potential clients ask, “How does your product differ from XYZ solution?” Tag your content team to create a competitor/alternative blog on the same or a battle card to compare the two products effectively.
Cooby also syncs with HubSpot and Salesforce to move your WhatsApp chat to CRM, where you get complete context for client conversations. On the CRM, you can work with different teams to create content to enable the sales team further to close more deals.
Content management
If you equip your sales team with the right content, they can effectively engage prospects and customers. While ideating the sales enablement strategy, ensure you have content easily accessible to the whole team.
You can use sales enablement platforms to organize and manage this content, keeping everything in one place where salespeople can easily access it. Think of your content repository as a storehouse of ingredients to help you cook a delicious deal. It will help salespeople engage prospects effectively and close deals better.
Technology
An organization can choose various tools, such as communication platforms, CRM systems, sales performance management software, sales coaching software, and sales enablement platforms, to empower its sales team.
The right tools will help a business maximize its content while streamlining internal and external communications. For example, you can leverage learning platforms like Coursera or LinkedIn Learning to help your team sharpen their selling skills.
Training and coaching
Training and coaching empower salespeople with the required skills to succeed. Conduct periodic in-depth training sessions to help your team reach their targets more quickly and consistently.
Encourage salespeople to develop critical thinking and strategic planning skills to maximize sales opportunities and convert them more effectively.
Tips to create a sales enablement strategy that works
Creating a successful sales enablement strategy involves several crucial steps. Here’s a simple guide to help you get started:
1. Create a sales enablement charter
To set a sales enablement strategy, you’ll need buy-in from all stakeholders. Make sure you include leaders from sales, marketing, product, and support in discussions. Let the C-suite folks participate in these conversations. But before you put the discussions on everyone’s calendar, ensure you have a blueprint ready.
The blueprint outlines the goals, missions, and tactics you plan to use. Ensure it includes how the sales enablement function will evolve and align with the company’s vision. This will help people stay on the same page and create a scalable strategy.
2. Keep customers at the center
Understand a customer’s journey in detail. Understand how they discover your product or services and their journey to pay for them. Visualizing this journey will help you locate instances where your teams need sales enablement. Remember, you’re speaking to the same prospect, no matter whether you belong to sales or marketing. You’d need a targeted and collaborative approach to better cater to potential customers.
Get sales, marketing, and customer experience teams together in the same room (or virtual room) and map out the buyer’s journey. Locate areas where content can help sales teams. It can be explainer videos, comparative analysis, or battle cards to advise solutions that best suit potential buyers. Ensure your sales enablement content takes buyers forward in their journey faster than before.
Customers control much of the buying process, often conducting their research before ever speaking to a sales rep. In B2B sales, 50-90% of a buyer’s journey is complete before interacting with a sales rep. Knowing when to engage with prospects—at awareness, consideration, or decision stages—can significantly improve your interactions.
3. Enable everyone who interacts with customers
Sales enablement isn’t just for the sales team. Expand it to include any team interacting with customers, like marketing, customer support, and even the C-suite. This is often called revenue enablement. It keeps messaging consistent across all customer touchpoints, improving customer experience.
Focus on empowering all customer-facing teams to have meaningful and personalized conversations. Use insights from sales call analytics to train your team on engaging effectively, making every interaction count. You can periodically set roleplays and customer call reviews to coach your teams in dealing with clients daily.
Top 5 tools supporting a winning sales enablement strategy
Sales enablement tools sit at the foundation of a winning strategy. Below are the top five sales enablement tools you can plug into your tech stack if you don’t already have them.
1. Cooby
Cooby helps sales teams organize their WhatsApp communications, making managing customer interactions easier and prioritizing significant sales opportunities. It keeps the WhatsApp inbox uncluttered and syncs it with HubSpot and Salesforce to reduce manual work. The platform offers a range of WhatsApp productivity tools to improve message broadcasting and group chat management.
It allows for note-taking and task assignments during customer conversations and provides sales leaders with insights into these conversations.
The pricing starts at $20.99 per user per month.
2. Superhuman
Superhuman speeds up email communications by automatically organizing emails into separate tabs and setting reminders. It also automates responses to save time, prevent duplicate responses, and manage team roles.
It costs $30 per user per month.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is a central platform for managing customer relationships and streamlining sales interactions. It simplifies the tracking of sales stages and aids in coaching by recording customer interactions. You can link it with email tools and other communication platforms like Cooby.
The Starter plan’s pricing starts at $15 per user per month.
4. Ambition
Ambition tracks sales performance and encourages sales reps to meet their targets. It motivates reps with visual leaderboards and custom celebratory messages. The platform also connects with various tools to consolidate data for better coaching.
Ambition offers custom pricing. You can get in touch with the team to get more details.
5. SalesLoft
SalesLoft provides insights into sales activities that directly generate revenue, improving sales forecasting. It sets up sequences for personalized outreach and offers detailed reports on sales performance.
Its pricing ranges from $125 to $165 per user per month.
How to measure the success of a sales enablement strategy
You can measure a sales enablement strategy’s success by measuring a few performance metrics. A few indicators give early insights into what aspects of the strategy are working well.
- Sales pipeline velocity measures how quickly opportunities are moving through your sales pipeline.
- Conversion rate is the percentage of prospects that convert to the next stage of your sales process.
- The sales cycle length is the average time to close a deal.
- Win rate is the percentage of opportunities that turn into sales.
- Revenue is the total sales generated
- The average deal size is the average dollar amount per closed deal.
- Customer satisfaction measures customer happiness with your sales process and interaction. It’s measured by a survey sent after a sales interaction.
Review these metrics regularly to ensure your strategy aligns with business objectives. Use these metrics as a source of truth to keep optimizing the program.
Make sure both sales and marketing teams own these metrics. This will automatically help them align and collaborate toward the common revenue goal.
Toward revenue alignment
Sales enablement isn’t just about the sales teams. It’s about all teams that interact with customers to drive business revenue. A good sales enablement strategy will help you discover opportunities where you can better support customers with more personalized content and suggestions.
Learn more about essential skills you can hone when managing present or potential clients to deliver a memorable customer experience.
