Whether you’re creating a sales enablement strategy from the ground up or fine-tuning an existing one, developing a successful approach can be challenging. CSO Insights reports that nearly 40-60 percent of reps failed to make quota, which is impacted by poor sales enablement strategies.
Companies who do get their strategy right see the benefits. Those who invest in their sales enablement strategy see an 8% increase in quarterly revenue and a 49% win rate on forecasted deals.
A great sales enablement strategy is essential for:
- Creating collaboration and alignment between sales and marketing teams
- Streamlining the sales process
- Improving sales rep productivity
- And much more
Your strategy should clearly define roles within your team, goals and business objectives, and a tech stack that makes it all possible. If you’re looking to create a winning strategy but aren’t sure where to start, you’re in the right place. You’ll discover the key components of a successful sales enablement strategy, how to develop one, and how to ensure it aligns with business goals.
What is a Sales Enablement Strategy?
A sales enablement strategy is a comprehensive plan designed to equip a sales team with the tools, resources, knowledge, and processes they need to effectively sell a product or service. It encompasses the who, what, how, and why of sales enablement. In essence, it helps you better define sales content, training, coaching, as well as the tools you need to improve your sales productivity.
Why do you Need a Sales Enablement Strategy?
The most recent edition of the State of Sales Enablement Report shows that 76% of leaders credit their investments in sales enablement as a contributing factor to improvements in sales performance.
A great example of improved sales performance comes from when Allianz implemented a sales enablement strategy and platform, ultimately kickstarting their enablement efforts. Allianz was now able to measure the ROI of content as well as KPIs related to content adoption. Ultimately they saw a 20% increase in quota attainment and a 10% increase in win rate.
Key Components if a Sales Enablement Strategy
Developing a sales enablement strategy will typically consist of four main areas. By leveraging these focus areas, you will better equip not just your sales team, but your entire go-to-market function.
- Sales training and coaching
- Content creation and management
- Technology and tools for sales enablement
- Cross-departmental collaboration
Sales Training and Coaching
No matter how well-crafted your sales enablement strategy is, it won’t work if your sales reps aren’t provided with the training and coaching they need to execute it properly. Reps should have access to coaching and training to ensure they are using systems correctly and are sharpening their sales skills on an ongoing basis.
Studies show that 84% of sales training is forgotten within three months. To ensure knowledge retention and help reps refresh skills they may have forgotten, it’s essential to foster a culture of continuous coaching and training.
By providing ongoing training and coaching, sales reps will continue to sharpen new skills, efficiently navigate the ever-evolving sales process, and consistently reach quota attainment. In fact, companies that invest in sales and training programs average 353% ROI.
Content Creation and Management
Reps spend a lot of time on non-selling activities like searching for the right content to use, or worse, creating their own. Nearly 52% of marketing content goes unused, meaning your sales reps might either not know it exists or it doesn’t align with your reps’ needs. Your sales team needs to have access to content at every stage of the buyer journey.
Sales content management ensures that all sales material is organized in a central repository and easily accessible by sales reps. You can categorize content by content type (article, blog posts, webinar, etc.), buyer journey, or sales cycle stage, making it faster for reps to find what they need when needed.
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement software and tools make everything easier. Imagine automating sales content delivery to a prospect or delivering sales training right in your reps’ workflow. With the right tech stack, you can achieve this.
Your tech stack should include tools like a Content Management System (CMS), knowledge base, Learning Management System (LMS), analytics and reporting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and any other software that will streamline manual sales tasks and enable reps to sell better.
Collaboration Between Revenue Teams
Fostering collaboration among your revenue teams is essential to sales enablement. Marketo reports that alignment between your revenue teams can help businesses become 67% better at closing deals.
A successful sales enablement strategy requires proactive, two way communication, and tightly aligned sales and marketing teams. Sales and marketing leaders should schedule regular meetings together to analyze important metrics and topics such as customer journey mapping, lead generation, conversion rates, inbound sales tactics, revenue goals, win rates, key performance indicators (KPIs), and messaging.
Build a Sales Enablement Strategy in 7 Steps
1. Identify sales goals and objectives
Before developing a sales enablement strategy, you should determine and break down your goals into objectives. This gives you a clear overview of what you’re working towards and how to tie your enablement strategy into it.
Tip: Consider using the SMART goals approach when developing your objectives.
2. Assess current sales processes and materials
To reach your sales enablement goal, you must assess your current state. Are your current sales processes and sales materials healthy?
After establishing your sales goals and objectives, it’s easier to determine whether your current sales processes match your goals. Don’t forget to audit your content, too. Make sure that your salespeople have all the content they need and that it’s easily accessible.
3. Build a Sales Enablement Charter
Clearly outline your organization’s sales enablement charter so that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re responsible for. A charter serves as a blueprint that details the mission, key stakeholders, and desired outcomes of your sales enablement program.
Since the expectations for a sales enablement strategy can differ across companies, it’s crucial to align on a shared vision early in the planning process. Whether you’re seeking a leader for your learning and development initiatives, refining your onboarding processes, or centralizing cross-company communication, all these elements can be part of your charter. The key is to have everything clearly documented and outlined, creating the groundwork for a scalable strategy that will endure over time.
4. Align your sales and marketing teams
In many businesses, there is a disconnect between sales and marketing. Marketing often owns the top of the funnel while sales owns the bottom of the funnel. Consequently, marketing teams may create materials that sales professionals might not need, and sales teams may not know how to use the materials given to them.
Consider taking a smarketing approach. Smarketing, a portmanteau of sales and marketing, refers to sales and marketing teams that are so aligned they function as one organization. Simply put, it’s a way of approaching how you think about integrating sales and marketing, including which goals, processes, and communications overlap, and how you can optimize them together.
5. Develop a sales enablement content strategy that aligns with the buyer’s journey
For each stage, from awareness to decision, a prospect needs personalized content designed to move them closer to the purchase decision. Your sales enablement content strategy should be aligned with the buying journey.
For example, at the prospecting stage, you should have blog posts highlighting common pain points your prospects deal with and how they can be solved. Closer to the decision stage, you should have assets like case studies and product demos that clearly showcase how your product or service can solve their pain points.
6. Use sales enablement software
Sales enablement software can help streamline your sales enablement strategy by giving you access to tools for creating sales content, collaboration, CRM integration, analytics, alternative CMS platforms, and more.
Use sales enablement software to provide enablement in your rep’s flow of work and help them stay organized and sell better with tools like:
- Knowledge and enablement: A centralized platform to onboard, train, and coach reps without disrupting their productivity.
- Sales content management: Enable reps to find, share, and track sales content with buyers easily.
- AI: An AI-powered content creation assistant to help you create sales content in seconds
- Integrations: Integrate your tools to enable your reps to access everything they need while keeping them in their flow of work.
- Conversation Intelligence: Automatically transcribe meeting recordings across multiple languages and surface important patterns, so you can quickly analyze, improve sales calls, and create better customer experiences.
- Digital Sales Room: Engage buyers more effectively by providing prospects with a personalized micro-site or digital sales room. Share meeting notes, sales content, and deal communications within one place. Easily track engagement to understand what resonates with your prospect.
- Analytics: Prove the effectiveness of your sales enablement strategy with built-in analytics.
7. Create training, onboarding, and coaching plans
Your sales team will implement your sales enablement strategy daily, so they should be equipped with training, onboarding, and coaching that helps them effectively use the strategy. If you’re going to integrate new tools, offer walkthrough training, and if you want to empower your reps to engage customers better, create coaching programs where you offer one-on-one customer engagement and negotiation coaching to your reps.
Sales Enablement Strategy in Action
Now that you understand how to build a sales enablement strategy, let’s put this into practice through the lens of a product launch.
Define Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
- Objectives: Establish clear goals for the product launch, such as revenue targets, market penetration, and customer acquisition numbers.
- Key Results: Identify specific metrics to measure success, like the number of leads generated, increases in deal size, conversion rates, and customer feedback scores.
Understand the Product and Market
- Product Knowledge: Develop in-depth training materials covering the product’s features, benefits, use cases, and unique selling propositions (USPs).
- Market Research: Analyze the competitive landscape, identify target audiences, and understand customer pain points and needs.
Create Buyer Personas
- Identify Personas: Develop detailed buyer personas to understand the demographics, preferences, and behaviors of your target customers.
- Tailored Messaging: Craft messaging that resonates with each persona, highlighting how the product addresses their specific needs.
Develop Sales Training Programs
- Comprehensive Training: Create training sessions that cover product features, competitive advantages, objection handling, and effective sales techniques.
- Role-Playing: Incorporate role-playing scenarios to allow the sales team to practice pitches and responses to common objections.
Provide Resources and Tools
- Sales Playbook: Develop a sales playbook that includes scripts, objection-handling techniques, and FAQs.
- Digital Assets: Create easily accessible digital assets such as product datasheets, presentations, templates, videos, and case studies.
- Sales Tools: Ensure that the sales team has access to CRM systems and tools to track leads and measure success.
Align with Marketing Initiatives
- Collaborate with Marketing: Work closely with the marketing team to align on launch campaigns, including social media, email marketing, and events.
- Coordinated Messaging: Ensure that sales messaging aligns with marketing communications to maintain consistency and reinforce key points.
Measure Success
- Track Metrics: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sales numbers, lead conversion rates, and customer feedback.
- Adjust Strategy: Be prepared to adjust tactics based on performance data and feedback from the sales team.
How to Align Your Sales Enablement Strategy with Business Objectives
Aligning your sales enablement strategy with business objectives begins with a deep understanding of your company’s overarching goals. Whether the focus is on revenue growth, expanding into new markets, or improving customer retention, the first step is to break down these objectives into specific, measurable targets that your sales team members can pursue.
By setting clear sales targets that directly correlate with business goals, the sales team can focus their efforts on the areas that will have the most significant impact on the company’s bottom line.
Next, you need to tailor your sales enablement resources to support the objectives you outlined. This means developing content, sales training programs, and tools that are specifically designed to help the sales team succeed in areas that are critical to the business. For example, if the company is launching a new product, the sales enablement strategy should include detailed product training, competitive analysis, and customer-facing materials that address the unique value proposition of that product.
As market conditions, customer needs, and business priorities evolve, so too should your sales enablement approach. By creating a culture of continuous improvement and maintaining open lines of communication across departments, you can ensure that your sales enablement strategy remains a powerful tool for driving the company’s growth.
Create a Winning Sales Enablement Strategy with Highspot
If you’ve already identified the tools, content, and resources you want to provide to your sales team but are struggling to develop an effective enablement strategy, your first step should be adopting a sales enablement software.
A platform like Highspot serves as a centralized hub for all your enablement activities. You can use it to create and store sales content, onboard and train reps, and monitor the effectiveness of your strategy—all in one place.