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Sales Enablement is a combination of multiple sales functions. It involves the training and on-boarding of new employees and building a solid foundational experience that will lead to long-term success. Sales enablement is also about making sure that your sales team members have access to sales tools, templates, and processes. This ensures that a company’s messaging and positioning is deployed consistently to prospects and customers.
To put it succinctly, Sales Enablement is about getting the right people with the right tools in the right conversations with the right decision-makers in the right way. This leads to increased revenue.
When you equip your sales reps uniformly with proven sales enablement tools, your business becomes less dependent on a few of the top performers to engage potential customers and deliver. This support helps everyone on the sales team to reach their quotas and helps identify the under-performers as well.
One of the foremost objectives for sales enablement initiatives is quicker deal closure, and this is a decisive one for all businesses across the board. When equipped with better data and tools, sales reps tend to access the required assets faster, and this empowerment leads to more engaging conversations. A study by Aberdeen a few years back found that sales reps were spending up to 43 hours per month researching, pointing to widespread room for improvement.
The sales process of a company is highly enriched by the optimal use of supporting content. It is often a key component in the enablement equation. Those sales agents are most successful that can provide prospects and leads with the right information collaterals at the right time. Without a doubt, strengthening the relationship and collaboration between sales and marketing is a major aspect of sales enablement, offering a full range of benefits for all involved stakeholders.
Whenever a sales agent interacts with an existing or a prospective customer, they’re directly representing the business and any impression that results from this interaction is of considerable importance. When salespeople are informed, responsive, and helpful, it reflects well on their organization.
A sales enablement software is a platform or system that provides an overview of the sales content lifecycle. With powerful search, scoring, and syncing, a sales enablement tool bridges the gap between marketing, sales, and customers, and helps teams with the end-to-end tracking of content performance.
Sales enablement is an important part of maintaining healthy, successful sales operations. With heightened competition due to lower entry barriers and more empowered buyers, sales enablement saves sales and marketing teams valuable time by keeping them aligned and in tune to content performance.
Today, the way that buyers evaluate and make purchase decisions has changed. Modern buyers have become more independent and traditional sales and marketing techniques no longer work to win and retain these customers. Today’s buyers have a strong preference to buy from sellers that can add value and help them with their purchase decision. In fact, 74 percent of buyers choose to move forward with the sales rep that’s the first to share value and insight.
To adapt to these new expectations, strong sales enablement is a competitive necessity. Sales reps need to have the right content at the right time in order to keep buyers engaged.
Sales enablement solutions give sales reps access to the content they need.
Every sales enablement solution has clearly defined roles of ownership and accountabilities. Sales enablement leaders must hold themselves accountable for successfully implementing a platform capable of delivering the content management, customer engagement, analytics, and sales training content their organization needs. Their counterparts in sales must commit to the processes and technology that make the system work for them. And marketing must be on the hook for achieving high engagement and better-than-benchmark ROI. The RACI ownership model is widely followed in sales enablement:
Responsible
Sales enablement lead
Accountable
VP of Sales Enablement or VP of Marketing
Consulted
VP of Sales, content creators, sales operations
Informed
The broader sales enablement team, sales reps, and other senior marketers
This framework clarifies the roles and expectations for executive, sales, and marketing stakeholders. This alignment and shared understanding then supports the cross-team collaboration needed to help sales enablement succeed.
There are some other frameworks too, but they are few and far between.
We recommend that you follow the steps on this checklist while choosing a solution for sales enablement and CRM:
Collect requirements:
Gather team pain points and needs.
Inventory available options:
Research available sales enablement tools.
Check testimonials:
Pay special attention to stories from businesses like yours.
Assess compatibility:
Check CRM and social selling integrations.
Ensure scalability:
Plan for growth and compare pricing options.
Test content management:
Organize content and confirm multimedia support.
Confirm cross-team workflows:
Try out the sales and marketing collaboration features.
Inspect analytics:
Examine the data you get from content tracking and measurement.
Review mobile experience:
Audit ease of use across devices and on mobile vs. desktop.
Stronger Sales Data
Thanks to the universal surge of B2B commerce online, sales enablement technology is a huge buzz nowadays. So from collecting data, organizing it, to making it easily accessible for the sales team, sales enablement is truly powerful. Actionable insights about buyer preferences, pain points, and personas help sellers reach prospects with a more customized approach, and this is crucial at a time when a large number of B2B decision makers prefer personalized communication.