What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the discipline of empowering reps with the tools, knowledge and resources they need to maximize their effectiveness. According to SiriusDecisions, 65% of sales leaders indicate their reps spend too much time on non-selling activities.  Discoveries like these heighten the need for organizations to improve sales productivity and performance.

Here are the key components of effective sales enablement programs:

• They incorporate one single, standardized sales methodology.
• Great sales enablement programs define the buying process. Effective sales enablement strategies dictate the sales motions sellers need to win.
• A sales playbook. Sellers need to know how to position, qualify, and sell throughout the buyer’s journey.
• Sales skills training and ongoing reinforcement. Sellers need regular practice on everything from negotiation to objection handling and beyond.

Aberdeen found 84% of reps hit quota on teams with good sales enablement strategies. Top teams know that increasing the volume of sales activity is not enough. Sellers need to do more of the right activities that generate revenue. And they need to do them consistently over time to see results. This is the essence of improving seller effectiveness, and it’s the goal of sales enablement.

Benefits of Sales Enablement

Many companies provide some level of sales enablement, even if it’s only an ad hoc sales enablement program. But the benefits of a dedicated sales enablement strategy are considerable.  Aberdeen found teams that commit to sales enablement see a 47% boost in opportunity win rates.

Improve Sales Productivity

Help sellers work smarter, not just harder. CSO Insights reports sellers waste 7-8 hours per week looking for sales collateral to support their selling activities. When companies centralize sales collateral and invest in sales training, sellers can recover this lost time.

Increase Average Deal Size

Most companies offer multiple products, which can make it challenging for sellers to match buyers’ needs with the right solutions. Good sales enablement programs provide the training for reps to sell product benefits, not just features. Sales enablement programs also make it easier for reps to upsell and cross-sell bundles, which means a better value for customers.

Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Sales enablement aligns sales and marketing teams. The right sales enablement program can achieve the following:

• Suggest appropriate sales collateral for each stage of the buying process
• Ensure sellers receive consistent, buyer-centric messaging
• Empower reps with assets like sales playbooks and battlecards  

Marketo discovered companies are 67% better at closing deals when sales and marketing teams are in sync.

Shorten Ramp Time of New Hires

Organizations are increasingly under pressure to reduce ramp time for new hires and improve their productivity.  With an optimized sale onboarding program, a company can increase sales readiness and reduce ramp time by 20-50%. This translates to faster pipeline build, increased customer win rates, and higher quota achievement.

Sales Enablement Analytics for Future Improvement

Sales enablement platforms reveal a team’s productivity, content engagement, new hire proficiency, and sales collateral ROI. When managers set baseline metrics for these and other KPIs, they can measure the impact of their company’s sales enablement program and prioritize opportunities for improvement.  

Sales enablement emerged in response to all these factors. With the right sales enablement strategy, every team can streamline their operations and improve sales productivity and performance.

Components of Successful Sales Enablement Programs

Sales Content Management

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on content creation. But SiriusDecisions found up to 80% of B2B sales collateral is wasted, either because reps can’t find it or it’s not buyer-centric. Centralizing sales collateral is a key benefit of sales content management systems. But sales enablement platforms go further. These systems recommend the right sales collateral based upon sales stage, product, buyer persona, and industry. Sales enablement systems also let managers measure sales collateral analytics. The best sales enablement platforms allow managers to correlate content engagement with opportunity revenue in the CRM.

Prospect Engagement

Email is a component of every customer acquisition process. But many organizations lack visibility into which content reps share with prospects and how prospects respond. With the right sales enablement tools, organizations can help reps optimize their emails, track prospect engagement, and ensure more timely follow-up. This is a key component to improving opportunity conversation rates.

Sales Onboarding

Sales onboarding is the process of ramping new sales hires up to full productivity. Effective sales onboarding programs give new reps the skills, knowledge and behaviors they need to build pipeline and achieve quota. Successful sales onboarding programs include sales skills training as part of a 2-4 week boot camp, plus ongoing reinforcement. When this kind of sales onboarding supports a sales enablement program, companies ensure reps have what they need to position, qualify and sell on value.  

Sales Skills Training And Ongoing Reinforcement

Top teams recognize the value of sales skills training for all reps, not just new hires. Research has shown every time we learn something new, we forget most of it within 30 days if we do not receive ongoing reinforcement. Effective sales skills training programs incorporate ongoing reinforcement in the form of micro-trainings, video coaching modules, and role plays so reps stay sharp.  Optimized sales enablement programs incorporate reinforcement micro-trainings directly into the seller’s workflow in the CRM. Look for sales enablement platforms that can provide coaching related to the sales stage, buyer persona, product, and industry.

In addition, incorporating a sales methodology is key to reinforcing good selling behavior and optimizing sales skill training. Most companies blend one or more sales methodologies such as Miller Heiman, SPIN, Sandler, Corporate Visions, and Challenger.  Lastly, McKinsey found that the best companies are more than twice as likely to customize sales training programs by role. Great sales performance is not a matter of chance.

Sales Enablement Maturity

The goal of sales enablement is to optimize the sales process and empower reps with the tools, knowledge and resources they need to maximize their effectiveness. And every company takes a different path to achieve this goal. For example, some companies make good progress on sales content management and centralizing sales collateral, but their sales onboarding program is disjointed and ad hoc.

No matter which path a company takes to achieve sales enablement success, they always pass through a series of stages. Below are three basic stages every organization goes through,  from the

1. The Reactive stage, where most companies begin with sales enablement
2. The Managed stage, a more mature level that reveals a growing understanding of sales enablement
3. The Optimized stage, in which companies take advantage of all sales enablement analytics and build programs that can scale.

Sales Enablement Analytics

Sales enablement has become a data-driven discipline. Many companies’ Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) evolve as their sales enablement programs mature.  Although most companies incorporate KPIs at the managed and optimized stages of maturity, even companies in the reactive stage can benefit from basic tracking. These data offer an early baseline, and will benefit the organization as it grows.

New Hire Ramp KPIs

In addition to measuring usage and completion, companies benefit from measuring both leading and lagging indicators of success in their sales onboarding programs.  Leading indicators of success include the following metrics:

• Sales readiness, as measured by competency and selling dialogue capability
• Net new prospect meetings
• Pipeline ramp in dollars  

Lagging indicators of success provide additional context and insight:

• Time to first dollar
• Sales rep churn
• Revenue metrics, such as average deal size and percentage quota achievement.

Sales Effectiveness And Revenue Metrics

Companies that offer a range of solutions benefit from measuring average deal size, or average contract value (ACV). This is an important indicator of sales enablement maturity, as it highlights a team’s ability to cross-sell and upsell. Both of these are a result of effective sales onboarding programs and strong sales marketing alignment. Other important sales effectiveness metrics include proposal to close ratios, customer win rates, and quota achievement.

Sales Productivity Metrics

Sales productivity is the revenue per seller in a given amount of time, or the rate at which reps hit their revenue targets. One way to improve sales productivity is to increase the time reps spend on revenue-generating activities vs administrative tasks. Companies accomplish this by using sales enablement tools to automate the search for sales collateral. These platforms can also automatically deliver relevant coaching when reps need it most, such as right before an important sales call.

Sales Enablement Tools

Salesforce found 80% of reps on high-performing teams are aligned in one critical area. These reps agree that their companies give them the resources they need to win more deals. Great companies optimize their use of sales technology. And nowhere is this more important than with sales enablement tools.

The sales technology landscape extends across four basic categories. Top companies use solutions from each category in their sales enablement strategies. In order to gain the maximum benefit from sales enablement tools, managers must prioritize their needs as they examine platforms in each category.

Sales Process

These solutions cover every stage of the sales cycle:

• Gather Information – Solutions that address this stage of the sales cycle help reps conduct efficient prospecting campaigns. Tools that target this stage provide prospect contact information and lead augmentation.
• Decide Who To Contact – Software for this stage emphasizes lead prioritization, specifically who to call and when. These tools also help with account-based selling, pipeline management, and account planning.
• How To Contact – These platforms address the practical side of reaching prospects. Email automation, social selling, and online meeting tools all figure strongly here.
• What Reps Need To Sell With Confidence – Once sellers connect with a prospect, how do they convert that lead to an opportunity? Sales enablement tools in this category give reps all the resources they need to take a prospect from new lead to new revenue.
• What Reps Do To Close – None of the previous stages matter if deals stall. Software at this stage helps reps close deals quickly and efficiently. Examples include Cost Price Quote (CPQ) tools and digital signature applications.

People Development

Solutions in this category include sales onboarding, sales training, and sales coaching. These tools deliver information on product knowledge and sales skills.

• Sales Onboarding – The goal of sales onboarding is to get new reps to quota as fast as possible. Optimized sales enablement programs don’t limit these sales training sessions to a company’s products and target market. New sellers also need to practice their team’s sales methodologies and processes.
• Ongoing Reinforcement – Staying competitive means keeping reps up-to-speed on new products, the competition, and more. How do top teams keep their reps well-versed on everything they need to thrive? Aberdeen found the best companies are 15% more likely to couple sales onboarding with ongoing reinforcement.
• Sales Coaching – In an ideal world, managers would coach sellers face-to-face on a regular basis, but that’s almost never the case. Sales coaching tools that streamline this process include features like video coaching and just-in-time learning modules.

Top companies prioritize sales onboarding as one of the building blocks of an optimized sales enablement strategy.  

Administrative Support Functions

These tools streamline activities that complement seller productivity. While many sales process tools are about growing top-line revenue, many administrative solutions aim to cut costs and increase efficiency. Core capabilities in this category include:

• Forecasting Tools  – These applications help managers project sales revenue so their companies can allocate resources more efficiently.
• Quota Management Tools  – This software helps managers set, monitor and manage revenue quota. These platforms can be especially valuable for large sales teams.
• Compensation & Incentives – A close cousin to quota management. These systems allow managers to oversee compensation elements like commissions, bonuses, and sales contests.
• Territory Management – These tools help managers establish sales territories and hire the right reps to grow revenue fast. These systems can be paired with sales onboarding platforms to decrease reps’ time to first dollar.
• Sales Content Management – These applications allow managers to organize sales collateral so reps can find what they need, right when they need it. Good sales content management systems often feature version control and CRM integration capabilities.

Business Intelligence and Analytics

Solutions in this category allow users to extract insights from vast amounts of data. These tools let managers direct appropriate resources to the most valuable sales opportunities. When managers evaluate business intelligence tools, they need to consider two factors:

• Reporting needs – Many sales enablement tools include basic reporting capabilities. But the best sales enablement tools allow managers to correlate content engagement to leading and lagging indicators of success.
• Amount of data – Companies with multiple sales and marketing tools may benefit from business intelligence software. These platforms can analyze data from many different sources to reveal fresh insights.

Selecting the right sales enablement software is an essential part of any sales enablement strategy. Good sales enablement platforms are intuitive, and they merge with sellers’ existing work habits. This way, reps can focus on selling instead of learning new software.

What are the benefits of an intuitive sales enablement platform?

• If it’s intuitive for sellers, this will improve their productivity.
• If it’s intuitive for marketers, this will boost sales and marketing alignment.
• Finally, intuitive platforms make it easier to measure the impact of sales enablement programs.

All these benefits come together to make sellers more effective. The result is a positive feedback loop that leads to greater sales performance and higher revenue.