An Overview of the Benefits and Tools of Sales Enablement: Marketing & Sales Alignment Strategy
Companies are always looking for new ways to solve their marketing and sales challenges. You’ve probably heard about sales enablement. It’s a hot topic, and for a good reason: business continues to yield benefits by adopting it.
But, what does sales enablement really mean for you and your business?
What It Is
The concept is simple: it’s the process of equipping your sales team with information, high-quality content, and tools, so they can engage with customers throughout the purchasing process successfully.
In action, it involves creating high-quality content, use of sale enablement tools, and training your sales team so that they can engage clients while convincing leads to make a purchase. It also includes data-driven processes, support, feedback loops, and integration with marketing functions.
How It Works
Despite its growing popularity, most businesses misunderstand sales enablement, and they have no ideas of the value it can bring when implemented correctly.
Over the past years, various reports clearly show the value of sale enablement solutions. One report is from Salesforce (in the ‘State of the Connected Customer 2018’) that shows 80% of customers say the experience a business provides is as important as its products and services. The report further states 67% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great experience.
So how does it sales enablement work?
For starters, it helps companies achieve results. To better understand how it works, read on to see the main benefits.
The Key Benefits of Sales Enablement
Does sale enablement need to be a priority?
With every passing year, more companies are embracing sales enablement, and 2020 will be no different. So, what will you gain if you invest in sales enablement programs?
When done continually, it has enormous benefits for your company, including:
- Continually staying in touch with buyers – Randomly following up leads that may or may not be interested in your services is a waste of time. With relevant information and value-based insights, your company will be at the forefront of the lead’s mind until they’re ready to make a purchase.
The process is also about being timely and opportunistic, which means coming up with involves providing the right content at the right time (messages that trigger the specific clients’ touchpoints)
- Understanding buyers’ unique needs and interests – When your salespeople understand the buyer’s behaviors, interests, and pain points, there’s a likelihood of success. Since they know the buyers, they can speak to them effectively, and the chances of making sales increase.
- Tracking the effectiveness of strategies – Effective sales is also fueled by your company’s internal data. Measuring everything allows you to improve and optimize strategies by reinforcing what works and changing what doesn’t.
- Building lasting relationships – When a salesperson has a meaningful relationship with a buyer (knows their name, needs, and concerns), there’s a possibility of closing a deal, unlike when a salesperson tries giving a generic pitch to a random customer on a list.
- More sales conversions that drive revenue – This is the main reason businesses of all sizes are adopting this strategy. All the above benefits allow your salespeople to have more successful sales conversions.
Sales enablement can drive revenue while helping you meet your company’s goals.
- Buyers expect information quickly- Your sales team may not have time to search multiple platforms to gain valuable insights to make sales. And if they try to do so, the prospect will quickly move to the next company that provides the content they expect.
- You don’t have to rely only on a few overachievers- Through the sale enablement process, salespeople can share their knowledge and experience with new sales members. This means everyone can succeed, and ultimately, the company will experience better growth.
- Better communication between your marketing and sales team – The marketing team can receive useful feedback about the performance of their content and outreaches. This collaboration enables marketing to create more helpful content that aligns with the sales goals, and which is crucial for your company growth.
Types of Sale Enablement Tools
Your salespeople can use various tools to organize interactions, prospects, and track the status of deals. There are thousands of tools to help you research, implement, and optimize your sale enablement strategy.
Every business is different. The sales enablement process needs to be personalized to your company. Also, you need to evaluate the type of tools you require to accomplish the needs of your sales personnel.
Let’s look at some of the tools:
- Showpad
Showpad is a leading sales enablement tool. It provides a platform where your sales and marketing team can share powerful analytics and metrics, empowering them to meet the demands of modern customers.
With Showpad, it’s easy for your sales team to discover and share relevant content with buyers at the right time. Also, it’s possible to integrate it with industry-leading training and coaching software and then track how the sales team engage with it.
- Mobile Locker
It’s an affordable yet powerful tool. With Mobile Locker, you can easily upload and distribute your content while monitoring its effectiveness. It also makes it easy for marketers to personalize sales materials and share them with buyers.
- Salesloft
With its automation rules, your sales team can achieve consistency in their sales actions. Executing repetitive prospecting activities such as follow-up emails doesn’t have to be manual any more.
Also, Salesloft gives you a real-time log of activities, their status, and the outcomes such that the admins can get valuable insights to better the sales experience for their customers.
- Mediafly
Mediafly provides sale enablement solutions for fortune-ranked companies in the world. This platform seeks to transform the sales interaction for both buyers and sellers. With Mediafly, the focus is to make face-to-face sales interactions easier for marketers.
The Mediafly team aims at solving boring, uncustomized, outdated marketing content to create a new selling experience where customers can look forward to the next sales interaction.
Other tools include xant.ai, seismic, Highspot, Brainshark, Guru, among others.
Ready to Empower Your Sales Teams?
A large number of entrepreneurs and companies are investing in sales enablement. It is a critical component to generate revenue for a modern business of any size. It assists your teams to gain a competitive advantage and tap unseen revenue opportunities.
And don’t forget, sales enablement tools will speed up the process of organizing information, training a sales team, or tracking performance metrics.