Sales Enablement

4 Tips for Building a Sales Enablement Strategy to Drive Revenue

A high-quality sales enablement strategy can help equip sales reps with everything they need for effective sales.

A sales enablement strategy properly equips sales teams with everything they need to successfully and rapidly close deals. While developing and enacting a sales enablement strategy is often underprioritized, it’s an essential aspect of effective sales. Providing sales teams with the resources and tools they need to confidently communicate with buyers helps improve win rate and drive revenue. Organizations who prioritize sales enablement strategies accomplish a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to a 42.5% win rate for those without. This distinction shows an unmistakable advantage of sales enablement, as it significantly increases sales reps' ability to close deals and drive revenue. 

Building an effective sales enablement strategy ensures the sales team has all of the support they need for success. Sales enablement programs often include collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and leadership. While it may seem intimidating to begin constructing the perfect strategy, it’s much simpler than it appears — it just takes time and attention to detail to find the right approach. To make creating an effective sales enablement strategy easier, we’re sharing four of our best tips.

1. Develop a Sales Playbook to Standardize the Sales Process

Developing a sales playbook instantly helps the sales team by providing them with a standardized process to look to and use when navigating deals. A sales playbook serves as an enablement tool by defining best practices for reps when presented with tough sales situations, unexpected deal outcomes, or other difficult-to-navigate interactions with clients. 

A sales playbook should define the usual process and methodology used by reps, from initial contact all the way through to deal closure. Along with the general sales processes, a high-quality sales playbook should also address other outcomes or responses from the buyer. The modern buyer’s journey no longer occurs in the classic linear fashion, so the sales playbook should offer approaches for various changes, setbacks, and decisions within the buyer’s journey. Courses of action within the playbook must map to the stages of the buyer’s journey, offering sales reps a multitude of ways to approach the buyer at each stage of their purchase journey and how to foster a strong buyer/seller relationship along the way. 

Essentially, a sales playbook helps to build out a sales enablement strategy by standardizing the sales process throughout the entire team. Instead of reps working through their own methodology with varying levels of success, each rep understands their next best move and how to proceed. This helps increase revenue, ensuring reps consistently follow best practices and have the know-how to move forward with their prospects. 

2. Prioritize Sales Training to Improve Sales Techniques

For an effective sales enablement strategy, investing in sales training to inform all reps on company-wide sales methods is key. Standardizing the sales process helps sales managers train reps on best practices to improve their sales techniques. Sales training is critical to preparing sales reps for success: in organizations with training programs that “exceeded expectations,” reps had a 52.6% win rate, whereas those who met expectations had a 48% win rate. Thus, extensive, high-quality training directly correlates to reps’ ability to close deals. 

Sales training works as a key part of any sales enablement strategy. For individual reps, training not only prepares them for the job but continues to build upon their experience by providing them with the knowledge and skills to perform at their best. Building upon initial training helps all reps — not just new hires — feel adequately prepared for their jobs, especially in the ever-changing realm of digital sales. Crafting individualized training to address areas of improvement can help increase performance, even in seasoned reps. For example, when a SaaS company adds a new product enhancement, providing reps with product collateral, offering additional training, and crafting effective talk tracks helps ensure all reps are prepared to speak with buyers about the new enhancement. Sales enablement technology like a digital sales room can easily track each sales rep’s performance, providing insights into areas of improvement to invest in and create individualized training programs. 

3. Maximize Your Sales Enablement Strategy with Enhanced Content Management

For digital sales especially, effectively managing all content and sales materials is crucial to maintaining efficient communication with buyers. In an era where over 80% of B2B buyers prefer digital self-service when making purchasing decisions, enhanced content management has become key to selling efficiently and effectively. Enhanced content management is critical to any digital sales enablement strategy, providing sales reps with the tools they need to provide the buyer with the right content at the right time. 

A digital sales room (DSR) offers the perfect platform for complimenting content management in digital sales. One link leads all decision-makers in a deal to a single location in which they can find all relevant content the rep shares, eliminating the need for lengthy email chains and a barrage of links buried within. With a DSR, there is no need to worry about buyers missing information or accidentally sharing the same information twice. A DSR even offers data insights into what the buyer engages with — empowering reps to better understand what content to share and when. 

4. Track Sales Enablement KPIs to Monitor Sales Performance Over Time

Much like a great sales approach, a quality sales enablement strategy should develop and evolve over time. Tracking KPIs, like the time spent selling, lead quality, quota attainment, and more can indicate how well an enablement strategy is working at helping the team close deals. 

Monitoring these KPIs can help determine areas of improvement in an enablement strategy. For example, noticing that the time spent selling has grown while quota attainment has dropped indicates the team likely needs help. In this case, perhaps taking another look at the sales playbook, investing in more training, or implementing a DSR to improve content management can improve the team’s ability to sell. 

Final Thoughts

For the best outcomes and increased revenue, equipping sales reps with all the tools they need through a sales enablement strategy is key. With the ever-changing landscape of digital sales, reps need all the support they can get to effectively communicate with buyers and close deals. Training, sales playbooks, effective content management, and KPI tracking can help build and improve upon sales enablement to best prepare reps for each buyer interaction. 

Interested in bolstering your sales enablement strategy with a digital sales room? Book a demo and see how a DSR can help your team sell more effectively.

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