Sales require preparation and invention. Selling a product or a service is no longer just about cold outreach. Today, The overall efficacy of the sales process also depends heavily on the kind and amount of resources accessible to sales reps. Sales enablement process ensure that the right sales content, case studies, market research training, product guides, and customer service tips are in the hands of sales reps at the right time to help them with quota attainment.
Sales enablement comprises all of these resources and more to close deals more effectively and efficiently.
Sales enablement is changing the way sales reps can garner customer satisfaction and increased sales revenue through comprehensive sales training. So having a robust sales enablement process ensures your sales team feels prepared before making their next cold call.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing relevant information, documentation, and resources regarding the product or service that your sales reps are pitching to customers. It is quite literally the enablement of the sales process through data, tools, and sales playbooks.
Sales statistics show that up to 42% of sales reps feel like they don’t have the necessary tools and information before pitching their products.
Sales enablement allows for a better understanding of the product, which helps sales reps sell more efficiently and authentically. When your team has the complete picture of the buyer’s journey and a solid knowledge base about what exactly they’re going to sell, they are more likely to answer questions and engage effectively with potential customers leading to higher satisfaction levels.
How does sales enablement process improve win rates?
It’s pretty straightforward – wouldn’t you feel more confident in your role if you had the know-how and understanding of what the role demands? The same goes for sales reps. To sell a product or service, they need to be aware of the prospect’s need, USP, and features before they try to make a sale. This is where a solid sales enablement process with the right tools in place will help.
Sales enablement tools improve almost every aspect of the sales process. These include:
- Providing extensive sales training and content
- Improved internal knowledge base
- Enhanced customer service
- Improve sales productivity and onboarding experience
- Better chances of meeting sales goals like win rates
Here are the top three ways in which sales enablement helps sales reps sell better:
1. Connects Sales content and training
Sales leaders have found a comfortable spot in how they train and guide new salespeople to sell fast and sell more. But there is an inherent discord between the content of the onboarding training program and the way to sell to the modern customer. Most sales executives feel that they do not have the right sales enablement content to pitch even after training is complete. Often, businesses can see success by reviewing and replacing unusable content with case studies and sales strategies that have worked for others. Sales enablement process can help provide comprehensive and relevant content in different formats such as product catalogues, buyer guides, user personas, and business case studies.
2. Renews focus on the customer journey
A sales job is one of persuasion and confidence. But both these skills can become inherent selling traits only when the sales rep has faith in what they’re selling. The most effective selling takes place when the journey of the customer aligns with that of the salesperson. A sales enablement process facilitates this alignment by providing information to sellers regarding:
- Purchasing and decision making
- Target buyer personas
- Core beliefs and characteristics of the customer
- Needs of the customer and solutions available in the market
- Ways of communication and limitations of the sales process
3. Aligns marketing and sales through a feedback mechanism
We’ve all heard this a dozen times, “Sales and marketing are poles apart.” Well, no.
Both sales and marketing work towards common goals such as increasing customer base, improving business ROI, and creating a niche. By aligning these two activities based on goals, roles, and systems, sales enablement helps develop a feedback loop between the two essential departments. This leads to a more cohesive sales process and space for transparent and open communication channels.
Source: G2.com
Rise of automation in sales enablement processes
While the digital era has led to semi to complete automation of most organizational processes and workflows, core business activities such as sales and sales enablement are relatively unchartered territories when it comes to automation. But that is changing quickly.
Automating sales activities and sales enablement is crucial and beneficial for business growth and meeting sales targets. It can reduce the time and effort that goes into making sales but also helps improve individual and team performance.
What is sales automation?
Sales automation refers to the use of software, digitized tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and sales automation engines to automate the manual tasks of the sales funnel.
According to McKinsey, almost a third of all sales activities are automated. With sales automation, sales reps can simplify all activities right from email scheduling to order management. This saves tons of hours for better productivity and guarantees higher returns by streamlining manual administrative tasks.
Benefits of automating sales enablement process for a business
Several kinds of software can help automate and manage day-to-day sales tasks: these range from CRM software to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) for prospecting and engaging leads.
1. Improved lead analysis
Wouldn’t it be great if all your potential prospects converted to actual customers? Automating your lead identification process can help you achieve exactly this. By employing different filters, interested customers can be broken down into distinct criteria to fill the gap between what they are looking for and what you can offer them. This is done through sales analytics, usually by the sales operations team, to help capture user-profiles and their overall sentiment towards your product.
Some user analytics favorites include Sisense, Oracle Business Intelligence, and SQL Server Reporting Services.
This enables you to contact new prospects that are much more likely to engage with you and your service, thus increasing your chances of converting them.
2. Planning and prospecting
The sales funnel doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds. With the right market intelligence tools such as Lead 411, and ZoomInfo, you can better monitor the way the customer journey changes within the market. This, in turn, is beneficial as it enables you to plan, reducing the churning rate.
3. User engagement and retention
User engagement and retention are the #1 priority for any small business or enterprise. AI-fuelled sales chatbots are revolutionizing the way users interact with sales and relationship managers. Chatbots are everywhere, and they’re serving two purposes at once: spreading joy and making sales an efficient process by eliminating the time and effort required for manual tasks.
- Data storage and retrieval: Data retrieval is another primary feature that helps in easy access to data across databases and management systems. One of the best things about AI-driven sales chatbots is that they have incredible storage capabilities. This allows for transparent and accurate communication while paving the way for cross-functional collaboration.
- Smart task administration: Sales reps are often caught in repetitive tasks such as report/proposal preparation, generation, and distribution among stakeholders. Sales enablement automation can help automate these processes, including creating sales contracts, quotes and agreements through information feeding mechanisms. Furthermore, customers and sales representatives can also opt for regular reminders on expiration dates and contract renewals. This ensures that deadlines are not missed, and regular follow-ups are scheduled and maintained on contract evaluations and subsequent renewals. Sales enablement software can also help track better sales enablement metrics.
- Refined customer service interactions: “Good morning; how can I help you today?” I don’t know about you, but these greetings with a smiling face help make me feel better during customer service interactions. A unique feature of sales bots is that their core processes are led by natural language processing (NLP), which ensures that they understand the user’s changing needs, making them perfect for customer interactions.
- 24* 7 support: Let’s be honest; humans are not omnipresent. Chatbots can make up for it. If your business struggles with keeping pace with customer queries and providing real-time support at various stages of the sales process, sales enablement chatbots can change things around. Real-time alerts, push notifications, and helping with data requests on product growth, market analysis, and trends are some ways to help remove the need for 24*7 human presence. Freshdesk Messaging helps salespeople connect with customers on the channels they love and easily guide them to find answers fast. The AI-powered chatbot can be deployed on the front lines that guide customers to resolve their questions fast – from informational to transactional, regardless of the channel they’re on.
4. Streamlined pricing modules
When it comes to negotiation and product pricing, things can get tricky pretty quickly. With sales enablement automation, proposals and pricing reports can be regulated and automated with tools such as Prisync to ease this complicated process. Workflows relating to discounted pricing scales can also be integrated into payment systems using RPA, ensuring that trust and transparency are maintained between involved parties, and orders are managed seamlessly.
5. Order tracking and pipeline management
Tracking orders is definitely a big pain point in the sales funnel. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can also be tracked to gauge the inventory with each sale. Sales automation tools are also great for businesses looking to cross-sell products across verticals after closing customer orders. New product recommendations are made automatically once an order is placed to boost retention and loyalty.
Sales enablement process coupled with sales automation to help sell better
When you equip your sales team members with the right tools and templates, you are directly preparing them for success when interacting with customers, improving the customer experience, making product pitches, and assisting customers to reach the end of the sales funnel.
Your CRM is the life force behind your sales enablement strategy. You developed training and coaching sessions to ensure your people know how to use it. But are they? The only way to find out is to measure the percentage of users using the CRM. You want your sales teams to make the most of this tool because it can streamline their efforts and boost productivity.
Some of the metrics you want to look at to determine this include:
- Users not logged in within the past month
- Accounts created within the past month
- Contacts created or modified in the past month
A CRM also helps in tracking if prospects have even opened or clicked on content shared by your sales reps. Sales enablement metrics can be measured via a CRM like:
- Email open and click rates
- Video views
- Content shares and downloads
Tracking this can help you identify which pieces of content perform better than others, so you can duplicate that success.
Sales enablement thus is essential to formulating and implementing sales plans to further cross-selling, up-selling, and product activation activities.
Sales enablement automation goes a step further in allowing sales strategies to work with quota attainment, business goals and overall business growth. It uses the advanced technologies available to support sales teams across all boards to make their jobs more efficient and effective.
