The term “sales enablement” can encompass a wide variety of time-tested strategies. For many companies now, sales enablement tools include technology solutions and associated training for their staff, but it can also include professional training and development, highly tailored content, and thorough internal data collection.
Training and development for members of your sales team can offer highly important workplace skills that can make them more flexible in the face of challenges. Professional sales training can promote better problem-solving, facilitate more organization, and offer them scaffolding for improving their skills and sales performance over the course of their entire career, not just in the short term!
Unlike more technological solutions, training and development improve your sales department at the very base of it all. After all, if your staff simply does not have the skills to sell, no amount of technological intervention can improve them! Training and development programs that focus on the individual, however, often can.
Sales coaching is one of the most ubiquitous forms of training for salespeople, and for good reason. It is incredibly effective at identifying areas of improvement for reps and giving them the information needed to make improvements. While most sales teams have yearly or quarterly training courses on a consistent basis, sales coaching offers highly individualized help when it comes to identifying where reps may be falling through the cracks. Sales coaching may be done by an in-house sales manager, but it is typically administered by a third-party sales coaching program that can come in and offer individualized help for your team with the clarity of an outside eye.
While goal-setting may seem like an intuitive skill for any professional, it is in fact, a skill that needs to be developed over time with ample guidance. When done properly, goal-setting can make the difference between a complete plateau in a person’s professional development or ascending to new professional heights.
Making sure to set goals that are appropriate, achievable, and measurable not only improves ambition by putting success within reach, but it also improves overall morale. Additionally, group goal setting can get every member of your team on the same page about where they should be directing their focus towards next!
Time management is another important skill for success that may seem intuitive but which offers a key place for employee development. Appropriate time management can help reduce stress for you and your team, save you money, and improve project organization and communication. Offering resources for your team to develop their ability to manage their time wisely can cut down on errors and help you close on deals significantly faster. This can include workshops and training programs that focus on common barriers to effective time management, such as distraction, procrastination, poor organization, and lack of delegation.
Through the use of improved sales technology and advanced research on sales enablement best practices, sales content has become increasingly optimized to catch buyers’ attention and engage them. We are now able to supply customers with content that exactly matches what they are looking for in their buying experience, and most companies rely on this form of optimization to increase revenue. Tailored sales dialogue and relevant content are a necessity for marketing teams to remain competitive in a world of highly personalized content on every front!
Rather than treating the experience as purely transactional, engaging with the buyer’s journey and tailoring your approach to where they are in the process can help to close deals much more effectively. Buyers don’t tend to make impulse purchases – rather, they go through a process of searching for the product that addresses their need or problem in a thorough manner. Identifying where they are in that process can help you get them the information that they need to choose your company. Additionally, considering your buyer in this way creates a positive experience for both the buyer and the seller, improving company reputation and improving the likelihood that buyers will come back for more.
Improved email templates, text templates, and phone scripts can set your sales team apart by better engaging the buyer. Poorly developed content can put potential customers off before they’ve even had a chance to consider your product or service, while well-written, well-tailored content can be the element that convinces a buyer to choose your business over another one.
While it may seem like a minor detail, accessibility and organization matter a great deal when it comes to appealing to the largest swath of customers. Organization makes your content easier to absorb, making the benefits of choosing your product more apparent, while accessibility makes your content available to the millions of people living with disabilities like visual impairment and hearing loss.
Measuring and reporting internal data is one of the most important cornerstones of any sales enablement program, and it is often the most neglected one! With standardized reporting of analytics, your team has empirical data to determine which aspects of their sales strategy are working and which ones are not.
Sales data and analytics can help your team to determine which behaviors actually drive conversions. Some parts of your strategy may seem intuitively like they are the crux of your success, but sometimes the data can show you otherwise, which is why it’s important to measure the effectiveness of everything!
It can be hugely disappointing to see that a particular facet of your sales process is just not working out in terms of driving revenue, but it also offers the opportunity for improvement. By reviewing the data your team has collected on their sales enablement strategy, you can change your current plan to something new with the hopes that this new approach will stick. Without well-collected empirical data, it can be nearly impossible to definitively tell what’s not working, meaning that you’re leaving money on the table.
