To keep your business thriving and growing, your sales team has to juggle a lot of things – like planning, improving customer retention, converting leads into customers, and much more. But to achieve higher sales and revenues, companies must train their salespeople with training, coaching, technology, content, and other resources. It is also called sales enablement. This strategy helps companies to shorten the sales cycle by improving interaction with buyers and turning them into happy customers.
Here’s a brief guide that tells you all about sales enablement.
Why do organizations need sales enablement?
The most important thing about selling is to know your customer. Sales enablement platforms equip the sales teams with resources like buyer’s intent, demographics, purchasing habits, motives, demographics, and other relevant information needed to effectively engage the buyers. With resources custom-tailored to meet buyers' specific needs, the sales enablement team helps fasten the sales process. When salespeople representing your business provide the prospects an insightful and helpful content, it builds a positive image of your organization. Sales enablement also benefits the organization in scaling up the sales operations beyond some overachievers.
Who owns sales enablement?
The sales and marketing teams jointly own sales enablement. It is important that both teams must collaborate to make the process a success. While training, the sales team is the responsibility of the marketing team. It’s the duty of the sales team to ensure that the sales enablement program is being put into practice. Since the sales enablement impacts the bottom line of an organization, all teams have a vested interest in its success.
What are sales enablement best practices?
- Give your reps easy access to content
It is important to remember that content helps build your brand narrative, including explanatory videos, case studies, customer testimonials, infographics, e-mail campaigns, or a long-term blog post. The content allows salespeople to develop a meaningful connection with high-quality prospects. The enablement content must start conversations and subsequently builds trust. The content helps move the prospects further down the sales funnel. Apart from the external use, the enablement content helps your marketing team, your new sales employees, and your current customers stay informed. The content created for sales enablement should be easily accessible to salespeople across various platforms.
- Align content with the buyer's journey
Given that the sales process is long and complex, your content should be aligned with the buyer’s journey at every point. The buyer's journey is the process that consumers go through as they discover, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service. If you can determine the kind of content that a buyer would be looking at different steps of the journey, you can derive the maximum value out of content. Suppose your customer is at the bottom of the buyer’s journey funnel and is validating whether the product or solution is worth purchasing. At this point, they want the right information before they decide to take the final plunge. Here you can present these content forms:
Live demos: At this point in the funnel, your content should emphasize why your offering is the best in comparison to the competitors.
Free trial: With commuting anything, the customer can experience the solution offered by your company first-hand. This step makes it much easier to convert them in the future.
Analyst reviews: If you have got great reviews, you get a solid chance to tilt the customer’s decision in your favor.
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