The global sales enablement platform market size was valued at $4.02 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.8% from 2023 to 2030. In short, if you aren’t making the most of sales enablement now, you will be left behind during the coming decade.
But let’s hold up a sec. What actually is sales enablement?
What is Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is the process of providing your team with various resources to help increase the number of closed deals they attain. It can include informative content, sales engagement platforms, and expert knowledge that help you effectively sell your service.
Sales enablement is critical because it benefits your team with better sales training, increases your metrics like win rates and conversions, plus it adheres to multi-department collaboration like marketing and sales.
If you want to know a bit more about sales enablement, just check out this infographic below…
Who Can Benefit From Good Sales Enablement
A good sales enablement strategy benefits nearly everybody. 76% of organizations see an increase in sales between 6% to 20% after implementing sales enablement tools. Not only does it help you sell better, but sales enablement boosts everybody’s morale and empowers the whole team to elevate their performance. When you implement sales enablement software, you can be more confident in the process which rubs off on your team.
Let’s explore a few hypotheticals about the impact of sales enablement.
Small Business: Tech Startup
Without sales enablement:
- Sales. There’s a lack of consistency with processes, especially messaging and having the most up-to-date product information.
- Marketing. The content that’s produced often goes unused as it doesn’t align up with the sales team’s request.
With sales enablement:
- Sales. Sales enablement gives you access to the very best resources, sales playbooks, best practices, and all the latest product information.
- Marketing. With sales enablement you get feedback from the sales team, helping them align with the content, making it more targeted and impactful.
Medium Sized Business: Manufacturing Company
Without sales enablement:
- Sales. Without sales enablement, the sales team faces challenges with onboarding new clients due to the lack of consistency and structure of the training plan.
- Productions. New products are released without a targeted approach or any input from the sales team. Misunderstandings and missed opportunities to market the product will be displayed.
With sales enablement:
- Sales. A structured onboarding program will be installed, helping your clients get up to speed with your product more easily. Consistency with presentation and business ethos will ensure the product is popular.
- Productions. The production team will work closely with sales enablement software to make sure that all the features are communicated correctly and regular updates are provided. In turn, this allows your team to leverage this information effectively when pitching.
Large Business: Finance Company
Without sales enablement:
- Sales. Operates in a bubble, all different departments with their own strategies and sales processes. Lack of collaboration is a problem with larger corporations.
- Training. Without sales enablement, there is no unified approach, so it makes the quality of the training less consistent.
With sales enablement:
- Sales. Sales enablement boosts collaboration and unifies the materials and processes used across every branch. A cohesive sales strategy will lead to longer-term success throughout the business as a whole.
- Training. A unified approach will ensure all your reps from every division get the same level of quality training, improving the business as a whole.
Who owns Sales Enablement
For businesses of all varieties, sales enablement is usually driven by sales and marketing. Together the two go hand in hand like two peas in a pod. Depending on the size and resources available at the organization, you’ll sometimes see entire sales enablement departments that work independently.
Having an expert on all things sales enablement is becoming a common theme. ‘Sales enablement specialist’ was the 6th fastest growing job title on LinkedIn last year! This goes to show the importance of sales enablement and what it can do for your business.
Sales
Under sales department leadership, sales enablement will improve the coherency between sales and marketing, streamlining efforts and keeping both teams on the same page. Sales reps can quickly provide feedback on the effectiveness of the training, content, and tools provided too, allowing for rapid adjustments to the strategy.
As sales is this team’s bread and butter, sales leaders typically have a deep understanding of the day-to-day challenges and needs of their teams, leading to more practical and relevant enablement solutions. Essentially, they know what they’re talking about the most, making the sales team the ideal candidate to take charge of sales enablement.
Marketing
Marketing teams excel at creating compelling content and messaging. When marketing runs sales enablement, it ensures that sales reps have access to high-quality branded content. This keeps the company’s external voice present in all sales training, making a consistent and coherent organization.
Marketing teams often have deep insights into customer behavior and preferences too, helping to inform more targeted and effective sales strategies and materials. It can also lead to better-integrated campaigns, streamlining the customer journey and smoothing out any bumps in the road.
Sales Enablement Department
As mentioned, if your resources can take it, setting up a sales enablement team to have control is becoming a common practice. Having a standalone SE team, or even just a manager, will create a neutral within your business to oversee anything sales enablement.
If you want to take your sales enablement to the next level then setting up a sales enablement team is the way forward. This route creates specialized strategies, tools, and training programs tailored specifically for your sales team. Because the sales enablement team can take a step back and view things from a different perspective, it’s often the best method for bridging the gap between sales, marketing, and other departments.
Sales Enablement Strategy: How To Build an Effective one
If you’re building your sales enablement strategy from the very start or trying to perfect a system that’s already in place, ensure you follow these steps and you can’t go wrong!
Sales Enablement Team
Create a Solid Structure
Without a solid structure in place, you have nothing to follow, so that should be your first priority. You might have plans for your strategy, but without a structure, those plans could easily fall apart. In this first step, plan content, and identify key tactics that are going to shape your strategy.
The first step to doing this is summarizing your current sales processes, tools, and resources. Which ones are working well? Which ones need to be replaced or upgraded? Identify gaps and opportunities in your current sales strategies and then brainstorm different ways you can fill them.
Set Clear Objectives
To ensure sales enablement success, set clear and measurable goals that are aligned with your business objectives. What KPIs do you want to improve? Identify them and set targets. Now you can choose content and training that are catered towards your specific goals.
Enable Your Sales Team
When the structure is sorted and the objectives set, your tactics are ready to be applied. Provide your team with the sales enablement content that you’ve chosen. This can include videos, case studies, and the most up-to-date content. This also includes nugget-sized coaching programs and informal training schedules to help boost your team and gain more skills in real-world situations.
Just remember; you’re the leader and the facilitator so you have to cultivate the environment and ensure everything’s running smoothly. This means gathering feedback from your team to which areas need enabling and working with them to provide the necessary resources.
Put Your Strategy Into Action
Once you have applied the enablements, knowledge, and skills necessary, you can start measuring the effectiveness of your sales enablement. You can do this by keeping an eye on important KPIs you set for your team. Whether these are increased conversion rates or higher customer retention rates or something else entirely is completely up to you and your overall business objectives.
You’ll also want to gather feedback from your team on how the new strategy is working and what might need adjusting. Remember this is a team effort and if your structure, strategy, and training schedule are planned and executed perfectly then you can’t fail.
Keep morale up by commending your team, recognizing their efforts, and keeping momentum running throughout the whole business. At the end of the day, continuous learning and development should be encouraged at all times to ensure your business is achieving maximum success.
Monitor and Repeat Your Sales Enablement Processes
Sales enablement should always be an ongoing process. Practice makes perfect and there is always room for improvement. Continuously monitor KPIs and individual performances to see if sales enablement is having the right effect on your team.
Evaluating these metrics allows you to refine your sales enablement strategy over time, pinpoint strengths and areas for improvement, and develop a plan that aligns with your sales objectives.
Sales Enablement Tools
There are lots of tools and technologies that greatly enhance sales enablement, streamline sales processes, and improve communication, not to mention the insights that tools like CRM platforms provide… They’re invaluable!
82% of companies currently use or plan to use sales enablement technology. This demonstrates the importance of sales tools, specifically sales enablement ones that can maximize your sales team’s potential.
Let’s take a look at some of these tools in more detail…
Customer Relationship Management Systems
Customer relationship management, CRM for short, gives you complete access to centralized customer data. This makes it easily accessible for your sales teams to leverage to enhance their sales engagement. CRMs also automate your repetitive tasks like follow-up emails, leaving you more time to focus on selling.
In addition, CRMs are also perfect at managing your pipeline, assisting you to track the progression of certain deals. The beauty of CRMs is they provide you with data-led insights, helping you strategize and make important decisions to boost your sales.
Additionally, you can collect customer data here from numerous teams, not just sales and marketing. Customer success/support and user research teams can also contribute to the customer profiles on your CRM, giving your entire organization a central source of truth on all things customer-related. They’re especially perfect for customer-centric product teams.
Sales Enablement Platforms
Sales enablement platforms provide you with the most up-to-date and very best sales content, ensuring your team has the most effective materials relevant to their prospects.
Some of these platforms provide sales training tools to ensure your team is always prepared for any challenges that might come their way. What’s great about sales enablement platforms is that you can keep an eye on how effective the training is by tracking it on the platform, ensuring that the right strategies are being implemented for each individual member of your team! In short, it helps you personalize and tailor your sales training.
Content Management Systems
CMS (content management system) tools provide you with the platform to manage, create, and store the latest marketing content. The system allows your team to efficiently source the latest updated materials, such as marketing presentations. Content management systems have an abundance of collaborative features, enabling your team to create the very best content for your customers! A headless CMS separates the frontend from the backend, allowing you to manage content from a single location and deploy it on your channels of choice.
Sales Intelligence Tools
Intelligence tools provide you with the most up to date information in relation to your prospects and the companies you’re targeting! With precise information, you can personalize your communications creating a more effective outreach.
These tools help you prioritize and identify the most important leads using lead scoring based on insights provided by the platform. This then aids you in making data-driven decisions to improve your sales game and reach the right prospects more effectively.
You can also use your AI meeting recorder to coach your team on their sales skills and send scheduled reports to your inbox at regular intervals. tl;dv even comes with several playbooks and suggestions for objection handling.
Training and Development: Empowering Your Sales Team
Training and development is essential to equip your sales team with the skills and knowledge needed to pitch to your customers and seal the deal effectively. The very best training will enhance your team’s productivity by infusing them with product knowledge, the latest market trends, and what your customers need.
Let’s explore in more detail…
Onboarding
- Onboarding programs. You should develop a structured program that covers the company’s ethos, up-to-date product knowledge, and a complete market overview. Doing this will help your new employees get up to speed with the system more quickly. The best sales onboarding programs help new sales hires become productive 3-4 months sooner on average. This statistic shows the importance of a structured and well-implemented onboarding program.
- Mentorship and coaching. Pair up your new employees with experienced members of the team to provide the very best support and guidance during the onboarding process.
- Interactive training. Use interactive learning methods such as role-playing to make training more exciting and engaging.
Ongoing Education
- Regular training days. If you schedule regular training sessions, you’ll keep your team updated on the latest products, market trends, and any new sales techniques that have come up in your niche. 84% of training is forgotten in the first three months, further overstating the importance of regular training days. This includes online workshops and e-learning materials.
- Collaboration. Make sure you encourage teamwork between all your departments so everyone is working from the same page and collaborating to do the best for your customers.
- Sharing information. If you create a platform or area where your team can share knowledge, they can all leverage the very best practices.
Skill Development
- Tailored training. Develop tailored training plans that are specifically made for each member of your sales team. If the learning is personal then you can address specific areas for improvement.
- Advanced learning. Offer your team advanced learning workshops to boost their sales skills, such as negotiation tactics.
Personalized Learning Paths
- Individual growth. Personalized learning paths will adhere to your team’s strengths and weaknesses. It will also help each team’s individual development.
- Better engagement. If the training you provide is more personal and tailored to specific needs, your team will have better engagement.
- Increased performance. Personalized learning paths address specific skill gaps, leading to your team being better equipped to sell.
Continuous Improvement
- Feedback. By getting continuous feedback from your team you can maintain the effectiveness of your training programs and adjust any areas that need improving.
- Performance metrics. Track performance metrics to measure how impactful your training programs are when it comes to your sales strategies.
- Continuous learning culture. Ensure you’re encouraging a culture of continuous learning. Ongoing education and development of your team’s skill sets is paramount to being successful.
Creating and Utilizing Sales Enablement Content
There are tons of sales enablement content types out there within easy reach. Let’s take a look at some of them below…
- Case studies
- Customer testimonials
- Sales playbooks
- E-Books
- White papers
- Training materials
- Informational blog posts
- Slideshow presentations
Tips For Creating Quality Sales Enablement Content
- Understand your target audience. Know who your buyers are and what they need to tailor your content. Tailored content will address specific pain points and interests.
- Ensure your content is applicable to use for sales enablement purposes. Create content that directly supports your sales process, helping your team engage and educate potential buyers effectively.
- Use various forms of sales enablement content. Diversify your content types (videos, e-books, case studies) to address different stages of the buyer’s journey and various learning preferences.
- Work together with your sales and marketing team to create content. Collaborate closely with both teams to ensure the content is relevant, accurate, and aligns with the overall sales and marketing strategy.
- Regularly review and update your content. Keep your content fresh and relevant by regularly evaluating its effectiveness and making necessary updates based on any feedback you receive.
Sales Enablement Best Practices
Shared Goals and Objectives
Ensure all your departments are working toward the same objective. By leveraging the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) strategy, you can aim for the most refined goals that fit all departments. You can also organize joint planning sessions, where all your teams strategize with one another! This further ensures everyone’s on the same page and moving forwards as a unit.
Regular Communication
Ensure to schedule regular monthly strategy meetings to discuss your objectives, any progress made, and the challenges your team faces. All these meetings should have clear agendas and items that are actionable! You can also utilize tools such as Slack and other collaboration tools to adhere to real-time communication.
Even better, record your meetings with tl;dv and create bite-sized clips that you can share with non-present team members to update them on the new strategies.
Integrated Workflows
It’s essential you unify workflow processes that your sales and marketing departments can collaborate on. Activities such as content creation, campaign management, and lead generation can all be improved through teamwork.
Furthermore, using technology such as a CRM platform will grant you access to the very best insights into the entire customer journey. This integration in particular will streamline your team’s workflows and ensure everyone has access to the same data.
What Are the Challenges To Good Sales Enablement?
When you implement any kind of software, it isn’t always going to be sunshine and smiles. Challenges arise and you have to adapt to ensure that you can rise above them.
Let’s take a look at some potential obstacles you might face and the solutions recommended to address them.
Resistance to Change
Challenge: Your team might be stuck in their ways and have a preference for traditional methods. This makes it a challenge to implement any kind of change. You might face resistance when trying to adapt to new sales enablement strategies.
Solution: Introduce “change champions” to your company and ensure you have a select group that helps empower change and advocate for the new program! You can also provide comprehensive support and training to ensure everyone is comfortable with the sales enablement strategies.
Lack of Resources
Challenge: Your business might have a limited budget or you might not have enough time on your hands to implement the sales enablement program.
Solution: If you can identify the most important components of the sales enablement program, you can prioritize accordingly, making sure you get the highest possible impact. Furthermore, your sales enablement doesn’t all have to roll out at once. You can implement the process in phases to allow for a better allocation of resources further down the line.
Communication Barriers
Challenge: There might be a serious lack of communication between each department within your organization. Lack of communication and transparency between your sales and marketing team for example, can lead to misalignments in the sales enablement process.
Solution: Set up regular mixed department meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page. Any progress or challenges with the sales enablement program should be discussed openly. Make sure all these meetings have clear agendas and actionable items in the itinerary. Again, you can record them to enhance company-wide visibility and ensure accountability.
Boost Your Sales Now!
Sales enablement is an essential part of modern sales as it empowers your team to perform at their peak. If you spice up your sales content, address common adversities, and implement sales enablement software smoothly, your business will achieve more sales success and boost your revenue in the future.
Not only that, but your individual sales reps will improve at their job, opening doors for them and fostering an overall sense of positive energy and high morale within your organization.
