Improve Your Teams Performance: 5 Steps to Implement Sales Enablement

Imagine… you talk to your colleague from the sales team, and they say: ‘We need sales enablement to be more productive! ’ And you’re like: ‘What? What’s that? ’ 

In case the situation you faced leads you to this page, you’re lucky. We’ll tell you what’s sales enablement, how you can use this, who owns this process, and other important details. Be sure, after this article, you’ll be able to continue the conversation with your colleague as a sales enablement expert?

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is a concept when you provide a sales team with all the resources, materials, and tools that empower sales people to sell the product more effectively and close deals faster.

Sales enablement includes analytics and reporting, content optimization, technology and automation, sales enablement software. 

Today we’re going to discuss the synchronization of marketing and sales teams. In Dashly, we have something to tell about this. 

Why do you need sales enablement?

CSO Buyer Preferences Study said that about 70% of decisions about purchases were made before the contact with the sales team. This means that the marketing team sometimes has even a greater impact on sales. This is why more and more companies say that their goal is to make sales and marketing teams work together and synchronized — to get more impact from the marketing teamwork.  

Dashly case study:

Recently, we conducted JTBD. First, marketers who conducted the research told about the results in the company meeting. The second stage was to help our sales people to create a new presentation that sales reps will use on their demos. This practice helped our sales team to be more precise when selling the product to our target audience.

Well, it’s obvious that sales enablement helps to increase sales and broaden the last stage of the funnel, but how? Let’s find out the reasons why you need a sales enablement.

1.Your teams will be synced up

Can you remember the situation when you saw an offer, decided to buy a product, contacted sales people, and they told you the information that completely differed from what you’ve seen on the landing page? 

Let’s look at this situation from the product side. I bet there was at least one case when your sales team faced some problems because they didn’t know about marketing plans? Or vice versa? 

Sales enablement will help to avoid misunderstandings between marketing and sales teams. So that the value your marketers give on landing pages corresponds with what the potential customer hears from the sales reps. Therefore, sales reps will use relevant materials — this will be rather easier to convince prospects to purchase.

Sales enablement gives systematization, and everyone (both sales and marketing teams) know where to take needed material. Thus, instead of research, they will focus on selling.

2.Sales teams will become more competent

Salespeople will have the right content at the right moment to engage customers. Therefore, they will make more sales.

When I was an SE I felt like I was the balance to the push that was Sales. I was the voice of reason and actuality by guiding customers through what their product experience would be.

Dan Affourtit

Senior Product Manager at  Blackbaud

3.It gives a vision of a product for new people

Sales enablement is great for new people to the product/solution. It gives them the vision and potential of what they could \be doing/selling.

Keith Brooks

CEO of B2B Whisperer

4.Sales enablement is a key to scale the sales team and KPIs

Due to the fact that all the team members have equal access to resources, practices, and tools. As a result, all the team improve skills gradually and performs better.

Dashly case study:

A year ago, we launched a Leadbot. This is a chatbot whose main purpose is to collect leads on the website. Our product marketer conducted research on how our buyers use a Leadbot and found its main jobs. After this, she delivered the results of this research to the sales team.

5.Marketers will be able to estimate how their content work

As sales people will share content directly with prospects, it will be easier to get feedback on this content from the horse’s mouth. 

What steps do you need to configure to start Sales Enablement?

First and foremost — make the customer experience the foundation of the sales enablement strategy. 

1.Define the goals why you want to implement sales enablement. It’s obvious that the general goal is to help sales reps to sell more effectively, but you need to decompose this goal. 

2.Make sure that the customer experience is the foundation of your sales enablement strategy. Otherwise, what is the reason for changing something in the way you sell if you don’t even know how the customer comes to the decision to buy your product? The jobs to be done framework may be useful for this. We have several articles on this:

• The theoretical basis about the JTBD
• How to implement the JTBD
• How to conduct the JTBD interview

3.As soon as you learn how your user experience looks like, create great content that will attract your future buyers. In 2021, blogs, social networks, and other communications with audiences are a must. Without this, your future customers wouldn’t even know about you. This content may be used by your sales reps to prove the value of your product. 

Dashly case study:

We’ve written over 100 articles. This is a vast amount of materials that can be repurposed and used by our sales reps. For example, our sales people often use case studies when they talk with hot leads. Also, they often use materials about releases to tell users about new features that we’ve got.

By the way, don’t forget to hold regular syncs to be sure that the process of passing new material from marketing to the sales team is still working. 

4.Don’t forget about regular training. I guess there is nothing to add — you already know everything.

5.Create templates for the sales team. As we already said, many salespeople often use marketing materials. What is more, they can use emails. So, it’s a good idea to create email templates, so that they will spend less time on creating emails for prospects.

By the way, you can use Dashly to create templates for emails . Every team member will have access to these templates and use them when needed.

When you invest in your teams, they perform more effectively. They will help your business to grow. The ROI of this investment will be high. So, invest in sales enablement and make sure that your sales and marketing are synced up for getting better results.