What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the technology, processes and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently, effectively and at a higher velocity.
You have a great sales team. What can make them better? You can help them to get more productive by saving them the time they spend on tedious or repetitive tasks
Source: Qvidian via HubSpot
For example, let's say your sales person sends a certain set of emails to a prospect after they have had their connect or exploratory calls. These mails need to be sent in some order, in a few days' gap. It requires the sales person to remember which mails have gone out, and which is the next one to be sent, and then proceed to send it. It's a time taking and repetitive task. These mails have to be sent to each of their prospects too, and that can quickly eat into their real selling time.
Instead, they can use an efficient sales tool that has an email sequencing feature. The sales person can set up the sequence and run it automatically for all their prospects with an ability to customise each email as they wish. They save time while the leads are followed up automatically. The freed up time can be spent on new prospects. More productivity, isn't it? And eventually, more revenue.
That's an example of sales enablement for you. You use technology, standardise processes, bring in reporting and create content that the sales team needs, so that they can focus on what they do best: have great sales conversations and close.
Why do you need sales enablement?
Sourcing is a grind!
As per SiriusDecisions, Sales departments typically self source 55-90% of their leads. To source targets, they ...
- Look up companies on list or web
- Dig through website for contacts
- Try to find email/phone
- Already in CRM
- Already owned?
- Research in Linkedin
- Manually create in CRM
...and it can take from 10 minutes to 30 minutes per lead!
Whatever happened to that prospect? Every lead or prospect that your business gets needs to be accounted for. They simply cannot fall through the cracks. The lead your sales team worked six months ago that went cold, may have warmed up to your offerings. But if the lead is not even there in your sight, how will you follow up?
You need them to live in an easy to use CRM, so you can get back to them when the time is right, with a reminder that tells you to check with them after six months.
Are we on track to hit quota? Where are the quotas of each sales person being tracked? If it's on a spreadsheet, you know how difficult it is to keep track, get updates, ensure it's all tallied, on an ongoing basis. Instead use a sales tool that shows you how each person is doing against his or her quota in real time, so you know where you need to step in to help.
Reps need content : 30 hours! That is the amount of time per month an average salesperson spends searching for and creating selling materials, as per the American Marketing Association
One of the key challenges sales people commonly face is that they don't have easy access to the right content that could help their prospect in their buying process. Often they do not know about the content the marketing team already has, and often end up creating their own decks to push things along. A lot of precious time is wasted in this process.
It is critical to set up a content development process that helps the sales team to sell easily, and give them easy access to all the content. In fact, according to Sirius Decisions, 95% of high-performing B2B organizations align their sales content to key deal attributes to improve findability .
Low productivity - too many priorities and tasks: Sales teams have to engage in tasks that can suck a lot of their time such as…
- Sending follow up emails
- jotting down tasks related to each prospect
- and have a way to remember them to do at the right time
- prospecting, research on accounts
…..and so on. They have to treat all prospects the same way till something in their research throws up insights that help them focus on a lead that has a need for your offerings.
You can save them 30% of this time by using the right sales and marketing enablement tools.
What are the benefits of sales enablement?
- Increased revenue: When you enable your sales team to perform at their best with the right kind of tools, content and processes, they can close more deals, faster. That means more revenue.
- Shorter sales cycle: This also leads to shortened sales cycles, as your sales people can present the right messages at the right time to each prospect and thus move things faster.
- 360 degree view: With the right tools in place, you get complete visibility into each prospect and where they are in the buying cycle. So whether a deal will close or not, is no longer a guess of the sales person in charge of the prospect. Using previous sales conversion cycles and rates, you get a better picture of the number of deals you can win each month.
- Better sales and marketing alignment: The sales enablement process really is about aligning the sales and marketing teams. They focus on the same goals, talk to each other, understand each other's challenges, and support the prospect in her decision to buy from you.
- Improved sales productivity: With all the time consuming tasks automated, with information about each prospect or account easily accessible to the sales person, and with sales content readily available, your sales team will be doing far more than they do now. More prospecting, more calls, more closes.
What we offer
- Sales and Marketing Alignment Audit: Do you need to find out the areas where your teams are not aligned? What about the tools you have already deployed? Are they delivering as they should? Do you have the right processes in place so that all leads are tracked, nurtured and handed over in the right manner? Grow Digitally looks at your sales and marketing processes through interviews and questionnaires, reviews your tech stack, audits your content creation engine and gives recommendations on what all you must do so that your sales results improve.
- HubSpot CRM and Sales Implementation: We are HubSpot partners and can set up CRM and Sales Hub as per your sales processes so that sales enablement is set up for success from the word go.
- HubSpot CRM and Sales Hub training: Grow Digitally also conducts training on the usage of CRM and Sales Hub so your team can quickly get to speed with the tools. We also share some of the best practices to fully empower your teams.
- Target better with top notch account and decision maker research: We provide from quick to deep research and target profile. Based on agreed parameters, we will research your most relevant accounts, find stakeholders and decision makers, develop a database and make it ready for your CRM system to be uploaded. We ready your most effective targets for your sales team to start the ball rolling!
- Sales content creation: If you need support with regular sales content creation, Grow Digitally can help. We work on creating all types of sales collaterals, from brochures to case studies, from videos to webinars, and so on.
- Team LinkedIn Profile Uplift : We all know how critical LInkedIn has become in the B2B sales process. We help your team to get ‘all star’ profiles that presents a professional image of your team and organisation.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Training: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the most effective tactical sales tool that accelerates and supports many aspects of your sales activities. Be it prospecting, be it account research, be it identifying decision makers, be it account based sales and marketing. We offer a short course on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get your team on the path of efficiency and effectiveness.
- Custom Reporting dashboard setup: One of the key needs many companies need is to have different types of dashboards for different stakeholders. We can set it up on HubSpot, or tool like Data Box and customise it as per your business and stakeholder requirements.
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Sales and Marketing Alignment Processes:
Sales and Marketing working together means greater focus and effectiveness for revenue generation process.
Traditionally sales and marketing are playing a 'relay race' where marketing hands over a lead to sales and then sales starts from there. If you start following Account Based Marketing , that the approach becomes a 'football match' approach where Sales and Marketing play together from start of targeting clients to achieve sales, future cross-sell and up-sell to making clients an advocate!
Regardless of your approach, Grow Digitally can work with your teams and work with them to establish new processes and KPIs; so you can institutionalise them.
- Chatbots for Sales : Give your reps more time to spend with qualified leads, and let your chatbot field questions at the important stage when prospects are browsing your website to learn more. You can find more information on this with our conversational marketing services .
Sales Enablement process
Sales Enablement tools
Here are some of the Sales Enablement tools which we use frequently. This is not an exhaustive list and we work with more tools as per the requirements of clients.
| Audit | Google Forms |
| Content | Adobe CC, Ceros, Office, Google tools |
| Content Personalization | HubSpot |
| Account Data | LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Hunter, Zoominfo |
| CRM | HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics |
| Sales | HubSpot Sales Hub |
| Chatbots | HubSpot, Drift |
FAQs
How do I know I need sales enablement?
If your sales and marketing are not talking the same language, and don't seem to be working with the same goals, you need sales enablement solutions.
If your sales team seems to be spending a lot of time in tedious tasks, it's time to look at sales automation tools and augmentation services such as database development.
Your marketing team makes a ton of content, and yet you find your sales team also making their own to send to prospects, you definitely need sales and marketing alignment as well as content services.
How do I keep my sales and marketing teams aligned?
Get them together and focus on business and sales goals. Ensure that they understand the 'must prioritise' activities that will help them achieve the goals, and not get sidetracked by vanity metrics. Implement joint KPIs that matter instead of vanity metrics.
Making marketing teams more appreciative of sales teams pain points and making them realise that the two teams cannot work in silos.
Set up processes so the sales and marketing syncs happen regularly, and that the to-dos are captured and executed upon as well. Review regularly, so no one goes off track, simply because a new campaign had to be launched or an event had to be attended.
Sales Enablement with Grow Digitally
Let’s discuss how sales enablement services can help you close the difference between your pipeline value and revenues. Book a time that works for you using the calendar below.
- Sales & Marketing Alignment
- Increase pipeline velocity
- Target and Account Research
- Sales productivity technology tools
- Accelerate effectiveness by LinkedIn Trainings
- Sales Content that will sell
- Easy to use CRM and Sales Enablement Tools
- Chatbots to help sales teams
