How to use sales enablement to boost revenue in 2021
Sales enablement is essential to the success of your business in 2021.
To better understand why sales enablement is so vital, let’s walk you through an unlikely scenario.
Imagine this: you’ve just been drafted by the Utah Jazz in the 2021 NBA draft.
But when you show up for training camp in Utah, the facility has no workout equipment, no basketballs, no hoops, and no coaches; you are on your own.
This scenario would never happen to you in the National Basketball Association.
But if you happen to be a salesperson, this nightmarish scenario of being deprived of the resources and training you need to be successful is quite common.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to use the art of sales enablement to provide your salespeople with the resources they need to perform like an NBA All-Star –– to boost your earnings in 2021.
Let’s get started.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Let’s start with the basics.
Sales Enablement is the practice of providing your salespeople with the content, coaching, and strategy they need to effectively engage buyers.
Okay, now that you understand the basic definition of sales enablement, let’s take a closer look at what we mean by content, coaching, and strategy.
Customer-Facing Sales Enablement Tools:
And there are Salesperson-Facing Sales Enablement Tools (for internal use):
Sales Training Videos (playlists; modules)
Sales Funnel Visualization
How To Measure Success (KPIs)
Sales Strategy (cadences & Playbooks)
This bullet-point list by no means covers everything in the sphere of sales enablement, but it should give you a good foundational understanding to build on.
Why You Absolutely Need A Sales Enablement Strategy In 2021
According to Sirius Decisions, executive B2B buyers consume 17 pieces of content over the course of the sales cycle.
So, if you want to educate buyers, shorten sales cycles, and win more customers, you need sales enablement content –– and lots of it.
Now, more than ever, potential buyers want to consume content before they can warm-up to your offer and trust what you’re selling.
Don’t misunderstand us, salespeople are the superheroes who fuel your go-to-market strategy. But they need sales enablement content to help them better engage with potential buyers.
There’s another big reason why you need a sales enablement strategy in 2021.
Virtual Selling
Because of the pandemic, there is much less face-to-face interaction taking place.
As a result, salespeople are now being forced to do sales from a distance, across different regions and timezones.
This means salespeople, for the most part, are no longer taking prospects out for steak dinners and martini-fueled lunches.
Instead, salespeople are engaging potential buyers with videos, articles, webinars, and zoom meetings.
You might be thinking, “Traditional in-person sales techniques will return after the world goes back to ‘normal.’”
But the truth is, virtual selling is here to stay. It’s cheaper, more efficient, and, when done right, it can actually speed-up sales cycles in ways that in-person meetings simply cannot.
According to a Mckinsey & Company survey, 65% of B2B decision-makers think this new, virtual sales process is more effective than the previous sales models used before the pandemic.
Train Your Sales Team If You Want Explosive Growth
Sales enablement is more than just a way to engage buyers; it’s a way to get the most out of your salespeople, too.
According to Verne Harnish, author of the bestselling book Scaling Up, “Investments in training and coaching provide you with the best returns available to your business.”
Simply put, if you want your sales team to smash their quota and be a growth engine for your business, you need to provide them with training, coaching, content, and a great strategy.
How Can You Implement A Sales Enablement Strategy For Your Own Business?
You know the basics. Now it’s time to show you how to use sales enablement to boost your revenue in 2021.
Keep in mind that your business is unique. And there’s no possible way to provide you with a sales enablement strategy that solves all of your unique business challenges –– not in a single blog post, anyway.
With that being said, we will show you a step-by-step framework that will help you get started implementing your own sales enablement strategy.
1). Align sales and marketing
Every great sales enablement strategy begins with alignment. Everyone in your company needs to be on the same page.
This is especially true of your sales and marketing teams.
Aligning your sales and marketing team can help your company become 67% better at sales win rates, according to research from Marketo and Reachforce.
Ideally, you want your sales and marketing departments to function like one, tightly-knit team.
Helpful tip: Before you even think about a sales enablement strategy, work on breaking departmental silos –– and unify your marketing and sales teams. This way, both departments are in the loop and ready to help you do research and planning. After all, the success of your sales enablement strategy depends heavily on organizational cooperation.
2). Research & Planning (building a strategy)
Now that you have the cooperation of your entire organization, it’s time to formulate a strategy.
Let’s take a closer look at the activities required to build a successful sales enablement strategy.
Internal Brainstorming & Spitballing
Chances are, your sales and marketing teams know a lot of information about your company, important stuff, like:
Common customer questions
Common customer objections
How long it takes to convert a lead
The real-world impact that your product or service delivers
If customers clearly understand your value proposition
The types of content your customers enjoy (blogs, videos, webinars, podcasts)
The places online where your customers can be engaged (Linkedin, Reddit, Instagram, Youtube)
The kinds of challenges your sales & marketing people are confronting daily
The kinds of resources that would make life easier for your sales and marketing team
By brainstorming with your internal team, you will discover a multitude of new, powerful insights, which will inform the development of your sales enablement strategy.
Helpful Tip: Compile your brainstorming session onto a Google Doc, in bullet-point format. This way, you have an organized list of ideas ready to go.
By brainstorming ideas with your sales and marketing teams, and gathering their input, the alignment will be easier to implement
Customer Research
After you get insights from your team members, it’s time to go and get input from the people who fuel your business: Your customers.
Get inside their heads, so you can discover better ways to engage with them through content, products, services, and customer service.
Your major goal with this step is to find better ways to serve your customers.
Here are our favorite ways to extract insights from customers:
Surveys (You can make them free with Google Forms)
Video Conference (You can use Zoom)
Phone call
In-person meeting
No matter what tool you use to extract insights, make sure you speak to your customers like a human and not a robot. You want honest responses.
Let’s move to the next step.
Topic Research
What are the topics that your customers and would-be customers care about most?
To figure this out, you can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, SEMRUSH, and SparkToro.
With the help of these tools, you can easily identify the topics that resonate most with your audience.
This way, when it comes time for you to make content –– blog posts, videos, podcasts, copywriting –– you know exactly what you should be creating.
Sales process design
If you want to build a great sales process, you have to make it visual.
Here is a great example of sales process design, courtesy of Jacco van der Kooij, Founder and Co-CEO of Winning By Design, the no. 2 fastest growing company in silicon valley, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Measurement & Leading KPIs
If you want to have a successful sales process you need to know what to measure.
You’re probably wondering, “What should I measure?”
That’s a tricky question because the answer is different for every company.
You have to decide what KPIs are important for your business, and then track them.
Here are some examples of important KPIs you could be tracking.
Average time to conversion
Sales rep calls and emails made
Inbound opportunities
Win rate
Opportunities created
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Salesperson response time
Average profit margin
Helpful Tip: If you’re not sure what KPIs you should be measuring, talk with your sales and marketing teams. They’ll likely give you the input you need to figure out which metrics will have the biggest impact on your business.
3). Create Sales Enablement Content
Now that you’ve done extensive research, both internally and externally, it’s time to create the sales enablement content that will transform your business.
Remember at the beginning of this article where we laid out the two types of sales enablement tools?
If you don’t remember, listen up, because we’re going to walk you through it again.
Equipped with the research you have conducted –– the internal research with your sales and marketing teams, customer research, and topic research –– it’s time to turn that information into content.
Customer-Facing Sales Enablement Content
At this stage, you’re going to turn all of that research into action.
It’s time for you to create content that will engage your target customers.
This is the kind of content you should create:
Website (SEO-optimized; with pixel tracking)
Blog posts
Tutorial Videos
Case studies
Reviews
Testimonials
Webinars
White Papers
Slide Deck Presentations
Graphics & Design Elements
And here’s the kind of sales-enablement content you should create to empower your sales team:
SalesPerson-Facing Content
Sales Training Videos (For onboarding and growing your sales force)
Sales Process Design
Sales playbooks
Measurement Protocols (Leading KPIs)
Frequent Coaching Sessions
Custom, personalized content made specifically for one buyer.
In Conclusion: Sales Enablement Can Transform Your Business
To build a reliable sales process, with reliable salespeople who are performing at a world-class level, you need to arm them with sales enablement resources.
Players on the Utah Jazz are given the training, resources, and coaching they need to reach their potential. You should be treating your salespeople the same way.
If you need any help with your sales enablement strategy, book a free 30-minute strategy session with us today.
We hope this article gets you one step closer to achieving your goals. Take care.