6 Steps to Accomplish Sales Enablement Like a Pro
Accomplishing sales enablement is the ceaseless process of providing your sales teams with all the resources they need to optimize sales closure. The right resources play a very important role in accomplishing the desired sales enablement framework including subject-matter knowledge, content, the right sales enablement tools including sales enablement software, and all the relevant information to upsell your product or service to the customers.
A successful sales enablement strategy is tailored to the specific requirements of your sales teams. To accomplish sales enablement, sales managers should leverage resources in a way that enables salespeople to target the relevant audience groups interested in their products or services, so that they can close more sales deals. All the resources and information being availed by the sales team should be properly analyzed to test their relevance and efficiency in converting more leads and audience groups into customers.
The “State of the Connected Customer 2018,” report by Salesforce revealed that 80% of customers agree that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. The report also found that 67% of customers are willing to pay more for a great experience.To accomplish sales enablement like a pro, the sales managers and leaders need to be excessively prudent and savvy. There are six critical steps to accomplish sales enablement framework that fetches you a perennially healthy sales pipeline and consistent conversions:
1. Hire the most suitable and knowledge candidates
To accomplish sales enablement, instituting the idea alone isn’t enough. Right from the hiring of a competent sales enablement manager to the hiring of the individual salespeople, every step matters and is critical to the success of sales organizations. Also, the hiring team should be well-versed with the skill sets they need to see in their salespeople including a drive for efficiency, a collaborative approach to handling a situation, a passion for bonding with and helping others, and excellent communication and convincing skills.2. Train your salespeople to instill in them the desired skillsets to comprehend the sales methodology inside out, and most importantly your company’s culture
One of the most important steps to accomplish sales enablement is giving the proper pieces of training to the salespeople. Besides, giving separate and essential training to acquaint the new sales hires of the company culture, the sales managers can give the following types of pieces of training to new recruits:- Develop a rigorous training schedule and roll it out to enhance the knowledge base of the sales force
- Train new hires on how to use the proprietary tools
- Train your sales teams on how to use different pieces of content, especially the types that have historically performed better with the clients
- Teach the new hires to cross-function and collaborate with the marketing team
- Audit the sales process being followed by each sales representative to figure out the areas of improvement and enhance the buyer experience
- Maintain the performance KPIs of each sales representative, this helps in figuring out the personalized areas where many of them might need improvement and additional pieces of training may be required for the same purpose
3. Incentivize your sales representatives for their performance
Incentivizing right is one of the essential steps to accomplish sales enablement as is also an igneous way to motivate your sales teams. Announce new bonus programs, prizes, and recreational activities to motivate your core performers and keep them to their toes. After all, it feels good to be appreciated and the sales employees who will feel so are ought to bring more than 100 percent on the table in terms of their performances.4. There should be the proper deployment of the human resources, i.e. the managers should be smart in assessing how they put their representatives to work
Organizations need to develop a framework wherein the best salesperson is in front of the best prospect, at the best time. This is a critical step to accomplish sales enablement. Try thinking beyond deploying the sales teams beyond geographies and verticals. Remember that your prospects are looking for personalized experiences and the more knowledge a specific sales representative will have of handling the situation, the better it pays off in optimizing the total number of sales closures.5. There should be proper monitoring and management of the salespeople each one of them should be trained on time-allocation and on optimizing their efficiency and quality of service
Time management is one of the most critical steps to accomplish sales enablement. Sales managers should carefully monitor and manage how their representatives spend their time. Remember that not all prospecting opportunities are created equal. Hence, it is essential for salespeople to have ample knowledge of their high-value customers. Prioritizing the high-value accounts can generate some additional revenue for your brand. Sales managers should guide their representatives on how to ensure that their prospects continuously move through the funnel. At any given time, your sales pipeline should have the right mix of deal size and decision cycles. Additionally, the managers also need to ensure that their representatives are assigned a realistic number of accounts to work on. Ensuring that the representatives are effectively working on their deals is critical to accomplish sales enablement. The deals should never be spread too thin. Also, care should be taken that you don’t miss out on your good prospects. Taking proper follow-ups is essential.6. Each salesperson should be given the correct guidance, coaching, and Counselling to succeed in their endeavors
Providing sales coaching is all about a manager working closely with a representative who is quite competent to do his job but has knowledge gaps. Counseling, on the other hand, is handling the team members who have all the knowledge to do the job but aren’t getting it done and guiding them to accomplish their goals. Both coaching and counseling are important to accomplish sales enablement. Coaching needs long-term management and is time-consuming. It’s a necessary process to help the sales representatives reach their full potential. Counseling is finite in nature and requires limited time. If you can counsel your representatives to accomplish their goals, well and good, or you need to replace them. In order to improve the overall success of your sales team, you need to adopt a bottom-up approach to counseling, i.e. start working with your lowest performers first and then progressing forward in an ascending fashion.