Sales enablement is all about increasing sales productivity to generate revenue. To do this, reps need the right content, training, coaching, processes, tools, and materials to effectively engage buyers throughout any stage of the sales cycle.
In this guide, you’ll dive into the core elements of sales enablement, the benefits, best practices, tools, and so much more. Consider this your go-to resource as you design and deploy an effective sales enablement program for your business.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, training, and coaching they need to successfully engage buyers. Effective sales enablement requires all go-to-market teams (sales, marketing, enablement, revenue operations, customer success, and more) to work together to improve the sales process, increase sales productivity, and enhance the customer experience.
By arming your salespeople with relevant content at the right time while giving them guidance on what to say, show, know, and do in a given customer interaction, you will see a significant rise in sales performance.
Core Elements of Sales Enablement
Sales enablement can be broken down into a few key elements – content management, buyer engagement, sales training and development, onboarding, and sales coaching.
Content Management
The first element of sales enablement is content management, which aims to increase seller productivity by reducing the time they spend looking for the right asset to send a buyer. Strong content management also reinforces a company’s brand and ensures marketing can empower sales with on-brand, up-to-date content that is proven to convert buyers into customers.
Sales reps spend just 28% of their time selling, with the majority of their time spent tracking down, comparing, or revisiting content to send prospects. Sales enablement delivers effective content management that eliminates content chaos by organizing and centralizing content in one place. In fact, 81% of sales executives cited content search and utilization as the top productivity improvement area.
Onboarding and Sales Training
The next key responsibility of sales enablement teams is creating, delivering, and measuring sales training and onboarding programs. Sales training can cover a lot of different areas, including product knowledge, messaging, sales skills, sales methodologies, and how to use different systems like customer relationship management databases (CRMs).
By utilizing a sales enablement platform, you can build effective sales training programs and certify sales reps on key knowledge and skills and then reinforce that knowledge through the same platform. From there, sales managers can efficiently provide high-value feedback, assess and hone skills, and improve performance—transforming struggling sellers into top performers.
Sales Coaching
Sales coaching builds off sales training and onboarding to extend the impact of sales enablement to front-line sales managers. Great sales coaching is about continuous, personalized support that helps sellers apply sales training and knowledge effectively in real-world scenarios. It utilizes highly individualized coaching content that focuses on the unique strengths, weaknesses, and development areas of each sales rep. Comprehensive sales enablement programs deliver sales coaching that drives ongoing improvement and skill refinement over time, which can have a transformational impact on sales effectiveness.
Buyer Engagement
Buyer engagement is another core component of sales enablement because it focuses on creating meaningful interactions between sales teams and potential customers. Effective sales enablement equips sales reps with the tools, resources, and insights needed to understand buyer needs and preferences, fostering personalized communication. By prioritizing buyer engagement, organizations can enhance the sales experience, build trust, and address customer pain points more effectively. This not only helps in nurturing leads throughout the sales journey but also drives higher conversion rates and long-term customer relationships.
The Current State of Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is no longer a nice-to-have—organizations see it necessary to boost sales productivity, streamline sales processes, and increase win rates. In fact, 76% of sales leaders credit their investments in sales enablement as a contributing factor to improvements in sales performance.
So where is sales enablement today? There have been a lot of developments in the sales enablement space, and because of that, priorities are shifting. In the latest State of Sales Enablement Report, organizations are placing an emphasis on sales productivity, post-sales opportunities, and sales training as three key areas that will drive revenue growth.
- Boosting sales productivity: Leaders are looking to consolidate their tech stack to reduce cognitive load and increase sales productivity. They are also infusing AI, such as conversation intelligence and generative AI, into their sales process and sales enablement strategies to reduce manual toil.
- Identifying Upsell/cross-sell opportunities: By investing in enablement for post-sales teams, businesses can forge deeper connections with buyers throughout their journey, transforming them into lifelong customers who are less likely to churn and more likely to continue to grow with you.
- Developing seller skills to drive consistent execution: Leaders are investing in enablement platforms to deliver training alongside sales content and guidance, ensuring that learning experiences build foundational knowledge and skills while equipping sellers to take the right actions in the field. Those who leverage technology to power sales training are 50% more likely to improve quota attainment.
What are the Benefits of Sales Enablement
Sales enablement has many benefits, but these are at the top of every executive’s list.
Sales Enablement Increases Sales Productivity
Salespeople spend nearly a quarter of their time looking for and creating content, drawing them away from what they should actually be doing: selling. Investing in an AI-powered sales enablement platform equips your reps with the right tools, enablement resources, and information at the right time. This reduces time spent on non-selling activities, allowing them to focus more on engaging with prospects and closing deals.
Source: G2
Sales Enablement Aligns GTM Teams on Key Initiatives
By centralizing content and leveraging data-driven insights, sales enablement ensures that sales teams can access the most relevant and up-to-date marketing materials while marketing teams gain valuable feedback on the effectiveness of their campaigns. Integrating your CRM and marketing automation tools can further improve the sales strategy and ensure data flows seamlessly between sales and marketing.
Sales Enablement Improves Training, Coaching, and Onboarding
Sales enablement significantly enhances training by providing structured, continuous learning opportunities tailored to the needs of sales teams. It offers a centralized repository of educational resources, including product information, industry insights, and sales techniques, ensuring that sales reps can access the latest knowledge at their fingertips.
Coaching is another critical area where sales enablement drives improvement. By leveraging conversation intelligence and analytics, you can gain insights into individual and team performance, identifying strengths and areas for development. Sales managers can use this data to offer personalized coaching, focusing on specific skills or knowledge gaps.
Source: G2
When it comes to onboarding, sales enablement transforms the process into a more efficient and impactful experience. Traditional onboarding can be time-consuming and inconsistent, but sales enablement platforms streamline this process by providing new hires with a structured, comprehensive onboarding program that boosts sales success. This includes access to essential resources, training materials, and best practices from day one. By reducing ramp-up time and ensuring that new hires are sales-ready, enablement not only accelerates productivity but also enhances employee satisfaction and retention.
Sales Enablement Leads to Improved Buyer Engagement and Better Win Rates
Organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to a 42.5% win rate for organizations without sales enablement. This is because those who invest in sales enablement can engage buyers more effectively. Enablement allows for deeper personalization through digital sales rooms, sales pitches, and content recommendations.
Who Owns Sales Enablement?
When it comes to sales enablement, who designs strategies and coaches reps through the sales process? Clear definitions of ownership and accountability form the foundation of every successful sales enablement strategy.
Sales enablement leaders must prioritize investing in and successfully implementing a platform capable of delivering the content management, customer engagement, analytics, sales training, and sales coaching their organization needs. Their counterparts in sales must commit to the processes and technology that make the system work for them. Sales or Revenue Operations teams must ensure integration with existing tools like CRM and marketing automation. And marketing must be on the hook for achieving high engagement and better-than-benchmark return on investment (ROI) through their content and programs.
The table below illustrates these responsibilities:
| Marketing | Sales Enablement | Sales | Sales Operations (AKA Revenue Operations) |
| Develop, deliver, and measure effective content that increases buyer engagement and increases revenue. | Drive success in content management, customer engagement, performance analytics, sales training, and sales coaching. | Commit to using sales enablement-driven processes and technology in day-to-day business. | Integrate sales enablement technology with CRM, marketing automation, email, and other key sales tools. |
Of course, sales enablement roles and responsibilities will vary based on the size of the company, sales and distribution model, and markets served.
If you’re just getting started with defining sales enablement ownership, you might find it helpful to use the RACI framework. RACI is a common approach toward allocating team roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
- 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
With the RACI framework, roles and expectations for executive, sales, and marketing stakeholders become clear. This alignment and shared understanding support the cross-team collaboration needed to help sales enablement succeed.
What is a Sales Enablement Manager?
A sales enablement manager supports the sales team by building sales content, sharing enablement best practices, and developing training. Often, the role also manages technology such as the content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) system, or sales enablement platform.
Generally, sales enablement managers will:
- Know where content is stored for marketing and sales
- Bridge the gap between the marketing and sales function
- Understand the structure in which content is organised including the current “content map”
- Proactively implement changes or new process, tools, strategy, etc. for sales
- Have expertise in the sales team’s CRM knowledge and usage
- Depend on sales productivity and performance measurements and analytics
- Improve learning styles, sales strategies, design, implementation, and measurement of methods and approaches
- Provide feedback from sales to marketing
- Work with marketing and sales and identify decision makers, blockers, etc.
The role will vary at different companies and across industries. They may report to sales, marketing, or sit on their own separate sales enablement team. Regardless of these differences, sales enablement managers generally possess the common traits listed above and all share the same goal of enabling the sales team to sell more effectively.
Sales Enablement vs Sales Operations
Companies that have sales operations as well as marketing and sales teams have additional work to do in defining sales enablement ownership. In these organizations, it is important to define roles, responsibilities, and collaboration opportunities clearly to avoid overlap and duplicative work across sales operations and enablement teams.
At a high level, both sales enablement and sales operations teams work to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales team. There are practical differences between the two roles, however. We’ve outlined them below:
| Sales Operations | Sales Enablement |
| Sales rep operations: Territory planning, deal routing, account assignment, team design | Sales training on content, processes, and training events (SKO) |
| Sales administration: Proposal and contract management, contract governance | Content planning, mapping, management, analysis |
| Compensation optimization and administration | Sales communication |
| Forecast reporting and accuracy maintenance | Customer engagement tools, processes, and analysis |
| Systems and data management: CRM, CPQ, SPM analysis | Increasing sales efficiency through process, tools, training, technology, and performance analysis |
In general, sales enablement focuses on activities that drive seller behavior and sales operations on activities that drive sales processes.
Sales Enablement Tools
There are so many tools in today’s market; in fact, the average sales organization uses nearly 10 tools within their sales process. The good news is that you can get started with sales enablement using just a few tools.
CRM
It’s easier to understand the ROI of your content when you tie closed-won revenue information from your CRM with engagement data from your sales enablement platform. Marrying the two allows your organization to see influenced revenue for each piece of content, meaning sales, marketing, and enablement can stay aligned on what’s working and what needs to be optimized.
Sales Enablement Platform
Look for sales enablement software that seamlessly integrates with your existing workflows to help streamline your sales coaching, training, and onboarding initiatives. By investing in a unified, all-in-one platform, you can deliver content governance, sales plays, digital sales rooms, learning management, and real-world coaching, all of which make sellers more productive.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence uses AI to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls, emails, and other communications. It’s like having an always-on coach for your sales reps. Conversation intelligence tools can transform your sales approach, turning customer interaction data into actionable insights. It offers multiple benefits, including improved sales rep guidance, enhanced onboarding, and targeted training opportunities. The leading sales enablement platforms now offer conversation intelligence as part of a unified system for driving GTM initiatives.
6 Sales Enablement Best Practices
Sales enablement will look different to each organization. Each enablement program will have different goals and metrics, and may even measure success in different ways. However, to do enablement effectively, it’s important to consider these best practices.
1. Define Business Outcomes and Goals
Take time to understand how sales enablement will help you achieve broader business goals. Speak to sales leaders, business stakeholders, and sales reps to identify your strategy’s focus areas.
2. Collaborate with Marketing and Sales Leaders
Utilize your marketing teams’ understanding of what content pieces are successful with prospects and keep sales in the loop of what marketing content is being produced. This allows you to see gaps in content coverage or flag irrelevant or outdated content for review. A sales enablement tool that prioritizes sales content management and metrics can assist you in the content creation process.
3. Build Content Around the Buyer Journey
Build and map your sales enablement content to your buyer personas, and keep these five stages of the customer journey in mind:
- Awareness: In this stage of the buying process, the prospect begins to gather information about your product or service and identify the problem they need to solve.
- Consideration: A prospect is most likely comparing your product or service to many other competitors, assessing case studies, product demos, eBooks and whitepapers, and pricing.
- Purchase: The prospect is ready to make their purchase, but there may be additional internal needs that arise, including presenting to additional decision-makers for buy-in, security, or funding.
- Retention: Your customer has experienced the new product. This stage sometimes requires proper guidance from the sales organization to assist with any issues and build brand loyalty.
- Advocacy: This stage is where the existing customer shares their experience with your company with others, earning you more sales and better reviews.
Planning and creating content that follows the buyer’s journey will significantly improve the customer experience. Once you have your content mapped out and created, it’s important to implement a governance model to ensure all content is up-to-date, on-brand, and converting.
4. Continuously Educate and Coach Sales Teams
Your enablement strategy should provide step-by-step sales playbooks and plays, pitch practice sessions, role-playing games, and sales methodologies that you can integrate effortlessly into the sales process.
Identify top-performing reps and their selling behaviors, and use this information to outline lessons, plays, and sales coaching opportunities that will help elevate the rest of your sales force.
5. Measure and Optimize Your Sales Enablement Process
Align your sales enablement strategy with sales metrics, goals, and results. The true ROI of sales enablement should be evaluated based on quantifiable results produced by your reps. These metrics may include:
- Average length of your sales cycle
- Win rates and number of closed deals
- Average deal size
- Customer retention rates
- Buyer engagement by channel (LinkedIn vs. email vs. sales call) and content
Such data will be critical to keeping sales enablement as agile and up-to-date as possible. Although measuring your process and success can be difficult, many sales enablement tools have built-in analytics, allowing data-driven decisions to be easily accessible and tracked while implementing enablement.
6. Select the Right Sales Enablement Tool
By mapping out your goals and initiatives, you can identify which sales enablement solution will help you achieve your business objectives. The most effective sales enablement tools will help reps search and surface content for any selling scenario, provide visibility across the entire sales workflow, align sales and marketing, and, lastly, enable you to track data and manage sales performance.
How to Get Your C-Suite to Invest in Enablement
Getting your C-suite to invest in sales enablement involves demonstrating its value and aligning it with the organization’s strategic goals and KPIs.
Start by presenting clear benefits and identifying a specific and measurable revenue goal that you can tie back to sales enablement efforts. By defining the outcome you are driving toward, you are more likely to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. For example, “grow top-line revenue by 10%” is not specific enough to connect with any one particular GTM initiative. There are many ways to grow revenue. A better outcome metric is directly tied to the change you are trying to drive.
By clearly identifying the outcome you are driving and how you will measure it, each function understands why the change is necessary and how to know if it happened successfully.
At the end of the day, it’s costly to create content, plays, and training. Is it delivering the business impact you need? Measure internal engagement (whether the intended audience used the content, viewed the play, completed the training). For customer-facing assets, measure external engagement and impact—whether it was used with customers, whether it engaged them, and how much revenue it influenced
Once you’ve demonstrated sales enablement’s effectiveness, start small by offering a pilot program. Too often do enablement efforts fail because of scaling too quickly. Gather input from your sales reps, tailor the enablement program to their needs, and ensure their support.
By demonstrating how adoption leads to improved performance, leveraging analytics to prove how your programs drive sales outcomes, and highlighting stakeholder feedback, you can create a compelling business case for enablement.
Enable the Impossible with Highspot
At its core, sales enablement helps drive sales productivity by arming sales reps with the content, guidance, training, and coaching they need to successfully engage buyers. By placing enablement at the forefront of your GTM initiatives, you’ll not only surpass quota attainment and decrease sales cycles, but also increase win rates. At a time when sales organizations are desperate to increase sales performance, leaders need to look no further than sales enablement, a function that allows you to do the impossible.
Highspot’s sales enablement platform is the most powerful, unified solution that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. Enable the impossible with Highspot.