What if you could lift your sales by over 25% within 12 months? Would you latch onto such a solution?
Sales are the lifeblood of any organization. Nothing else happens until you make a sale. If you can grow your sales, then you’re talking of a direct lift to your topline at the very least.
As such, an effective sales enablement strategy is invaluable if you’re trying to win market share. But how do you craft a plan that helps you meet – and even exceed – your sales targets?
Here is an in-depth look at some things you can do to develop a worthwhile sales enablement approach.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of delivering information, collateral, and systems that empower your sales team to connect with leads and generate more sales. When your sales enablement is effective, your team spends less time looking for information and more time nurturing their pipeline.
How to Craft the Right Sales Enablement Strategy
Although sales enablement can be a vital contributor to robust sales, it will only be as useful as it’s planning. As such, you need a well thought out plan on how to execute sales enablement so your team can benefit from the support.
Let’s look at some vital elements and approaches for creating sales enablement organizational strategies your sales team can rely on.
1. Define and Communicate the Purpose
For you to generate the best results from the sales enablement solutions and tactics in play, you and your team must grasp the purpose sales enablement serves. Every aspect of your strategy will support your team in a particular manner.
For example, content is critical in helping every lead across your funnel understand how you can help them solve their problem. The more relevant your offering becomes to your leads, the higher your conversion rate can grow.
Thus, your sales team needs to understand the value content contributes to converting a lead. Once they are aware of that, it becomes easier for them to deploy the right content for each buyer persona and move them along the funnel.
With more social selling, your team will discover the need for more targeted content. A clear purpose and strategy enable them to use personalized material when engaging with leads.
2. Win the Executive Team’s Support
The best sales enablement strategies are those backed by senior management. That’s because at some point you’ll inevitably need their buy-in in fostering sales enablement.
For example, you’ll likely need to purchase sales enablement tools to execute your strategy better. Other times you may come across technology you need to buy to help scale your sales enablement efforts.
Without the executive team’s support, you won’t make such crucial investments. Inevitably, your sales enablement plan will face significant setbacks.
If your executive team isn’t convinced that sales enablement is essential, you need to pitch them cleverly.
Begin by showing them the existing gaps and challenges in your sales process. Go a step further and tie these sales challenges to the negative impact it has on the bottom line. You’ll have their attention.
Once you show how sales enablement works to untangle these sales knots and the potential it holds in lifting sales, you’ll have better success in gaining executive-level buy-in.
3. Understand Existing Pain Points and Challenges
There isn’t a standard approach to sales enablement you can cut-and-paste. Each organization designs and executes a strategy tailored to resolving its sales challenges.
Some of the questions you can ponder to help you uncover challenges and pain points your business faces can include:
- Are there any particular market changes that are forcing your firm’s hand in pivoting?
- Is the buyer journey you’ve always known changing?
- What issues are contributing to friction within the sales process?
- What do leads already know by the time the sales team is engaging them?
- Can the sales team have targeted sales conversations with the right leads?
These questions and more delve into the internal and external environment your firm operates in to uncover issues you need to address. If your strategy focuses on solving the challenges and pain points you encounter, you’ll have a recipe for success.
4. Study Your Top Salespeople
Unless you’re launching a new organization from scratch, you likely have a sales team with top performers. One way to craft an outperforming strategy is by studying your top-performing salespeople to see what makes them succeed.
The aim here won’t be to reproduce what you find among the rest of your sales team. Instead, you’re looking for factors that contribute to their success and the tools that can help them reach higher heights.
Just as you developed a buyer persona to understand your leads, you can use the insights you uncover to craft a top-performer profile. In every recruiting interview from that point on, you can use the profile to hire the right candidates.
5. Make the Support and Training Practical
What good will a sales enablement plan be if your team can’t apply what they learn in their daily operations? Your salespeople will only commit to the program if they can see tangible success.
Design your strategy such that it emphasizes the fundamental sales skills and insights necessary to get going first. As the team implements the plan, they can then move from the fundamentals to more advanced skills.
Being successful in the short term will make the tools and training your offer practical. Even your executive team will offer more support as they witness the growing sales success arc of a strategy that workers can immediately implement.
Grow Your Business With Better Planned Sales Enablement
If sales are the fuel that powers your revenue engine, you can’t compromise on it. Sales enablement helps equip your sales team for them to hit and exceed their quota. As long as your sales enablement strategy is well thought out to solve your unique challenges and pain points, you will ultimately succeed.
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