Marketing floods the market with additional content created to educate buyer and generate demand, but ugly truth is only a small fraction resonates. Salespeople’s struggle to present buyers with new information that is tailored to their unique business.
This creates a double struggle: overwhelmed buyers and frustrated salespeople.
This is where sales enablement steps in to simplify the buying process…. resulting in smoother and faster sales cycles for all parties involved.
With a wealth of product reviews and case studies at their fingertips, today’s informed buyers prefer to pursue a partnership with sales. They seek salespeople who can leverage their preliminary research with personalized solutions that tackle their unique challenges. Salespeople who embrace a collaborative approach and align with the team’s requirements are essential for building trust and achieving a successful sale.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is about providing salespeople with the right resources, processes, and technology needed to sell effectively and increase revenue. When done effectively, sales enablement maximizes every point of engagement salespeople have with buyers and improves the experience they provide.
The world’s top athletes can always enhance their performance through better tools, superior coaching and insights on new techniques. This principle holds true for sales enablement as well. Even the most skilled sales representatives can see improved results with the right support, infrastructure, and technology. That’s the essence of what sales enablement offers.
Sales today is more challenging and complex than ever before, sales enablement is no longer a ‘luxury’ software. By 2027, sales enablement budgets will increase by 50% to address shifting buyer preferences, boost seller effectiveness and drive revenue growth, according to Gartner.
Sales enablement, simplified.
Sales enablement helps buyers buy and sellers sell.
Sales enablement is about aligning stakeholders across sales, marketing, and operations around the common objective of equipping salespeople with the right tools and resources.
There are varied definitions from industry analysts, but the essence remains the same: enhancing the human connection during the sales process.
Sales enablement is a strategic, cross-functional discipline, designed to increase sales results and productivity, by providing integrated content, training and coaching services. – CSO Insights
Sales enablement is the activities, systems, processes and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with clients and prospects. – Gartner
Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips employees with the ability to consistently have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s journey. – Forrester
Sales enablement is a strategic approach to unite stakeholders in sales, marketing, and operations around the common goal of providing salespeople with the right resources, processes, and training needed to engage with buyers and close deals faster.
Every company will have its own requirements for what it wants to get out of sales enablement. This may or may not include improving all the necessary systems, processes, and effectiveness of content used in sales interactions with customers and prospects – along with sales training and coaching that improves sellers’ skills and product knowledge.
Sales enablement can be owned by various departments, including sales, a dedicated sales enablement team, or marketing. The approach chosen often depends on an organization’s specific goals, resources, and priorities.
Sales Enablement is not….
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience. It is a way to engage with prospects without the pressure of a hard sell, by providing education and information before, during, and after interactions with sales teams. In a B2B environment, Content Marketing and Sales Enablement aren’t at odds; they work together. Sales Enablement relies on the right content to support sales conversations.
Sales training is the process of teaching salespeople new skills, knowledge, or techniques to help them sell more effectively. This can include training on product knowledge, sales techniques, industry trends, and other areas that can help salespeople to improve their performance. Sales Training often focuses on the individual salesperson, and can be delivered through a variety of mediums including classroom training, online courses, coaching and mentoring.
Sales operations is focused on making the go-to-market teams more productive by maximizing results with minimal effort, which in turn allows for more time spent on sales activities. Performance and productivity go hand in hand, many operations and enablement teams work in harmony to maximize efficiency and effectiveness for their GTM teams.
