6 ways to transform the way you enable sales at your business

In a typical day, the average salesperson is likely to spend less than one-third of their time selling to prospects. Their time is usually consumed with other duties such as sending out emails, scheduling meetings, joining internal syncs, as well as making contact with leads. A mere tenth of their time is devoted to training... If they're fortunate.

Considering how packed the calendars of sales reps are, it's no wonder the results may stagnate until new reps are added on to your team. What if there were alternatives to keep your sales staff constantly growing? What can you do to spend the 10% of your training time to improve the outcomes sales reps can see from their limited time selling?

That's the question the sales enablement team of our company regularly, and is one that's helped our sales team increase their performance across all departments.

Before we get into several ways that you can do the same we'll go over the basics.

In this article

•    What is sales enablement?
•    How to build an effective sales-enablement strategy
•    Six suggestions to design your sales enablement plan for a high-performing sales team

What is the term "sales enablement?

The sales enablement process is a key strategic process that is used across an organization to arm customer-facing teams with the tools, training and support they require to successfully support a company's marketing strategy. Every piece of sales enabled content is created to assist employees to engage in the most productive conversations possible with customers from outside.

Three key pillars of sales-enabling content

We generally divide our content on sales enablement into three main components.

New hire onboardinggets new sales reps business-ready. Sales enablement content for new hires might include:

• A self-paced learning path in a learning management system
• In-person workshops that let participants practice using what they've learned
• Cheat sheets and reference materials specifically designed for specific industries, individuals or persons

Ongoing training and development keep existing teams updated on current the latest sales techniques, best practices as well as any brand new products or services. This usually includes:

• The coaching program focuses on new sales methods and sales skills
• Virtual interactive workshops as well as the AMA's (ask me anything)
• Video demos showing off new features

Communications channels as well as cadence ensures that our sales reps get the data they require whenever they need it. That means surfacing, when they need it using communications channels such as:

• Weekly Newsletters
• Just in time Video Updates
• Monthly Sale All Hands
• Annual Sales Kickoff (SKO)

If sales enablement is the surgeon on the table at surgery, you could think of sales enabling as the nurse handing their scalpel at just the right time, the hospital benefactor giving them new equipment as well as the medical college giving them ongoing education.

How do you create an effective sales-enablement strategy

Sales enablement teams work in conjunction with multiple teams within the organization since it has a wide range of aspects. It supports a company's go-to-market strategy. Therefore, leadership must be included; this includes onboarding and training, that overlap the work of Human Resources; and sales enablement needs to work closely with Sales Operations, marketing and marketing for products to make sure they have all necessary tools and resources that they need to be successful.

Because sales enablement can be so broad, it's essential to build a sales enablement strategy in a methodical manner. it all begins with the laying of the base.

1. Create a team charter.

While this step might seem elementary, a team charter helps set the tone for the tasks ahead, and serves as a reminder of keeping your day-to-day work aligned to your North Star.

Below are some of the details that you could think about when you draft the team's charter:

• Your mission and your vision
• The roles of the team and their responsibilities
• What will you define and how will you measure the success
• What team members do

2. Learn about the current state of the Union.

Before you build your sales-enablement plan It is essential to thoroughly know your business's specific goals, challenges, and opportunities. It's about getting all the relevant people in the room conducting a thorough analysis of your go-to-market strategy, and taking note of all your current data on sales.

Some of the questions you'll need to ask during this time include:

• What are we trying to accomplish with our go-to-market strategy?
• What is currently working well? What's not?
• Where can sales enablement be an essential element to help us achieve success?

This step is critical, because every business faces unique obstacles and opportunities. One strategy that has performed well for one business could not work in an entirely different one, so don't believe that it's easy to "lift and move" the strategy of a different company.

3. Make a plan.

Your conversations with stakeholders will likely reveal a ton of opportunities and challenges- definitely far greater than what you can realistically take on in the course of a year. However, rather than considering each challenge or opportunity separately, look for the common threads that arise from these conversations. These will form the building components of your road map.

The ideal plan should include no more than three to four chances or problems that you can tackle in the next year. If you spread yourself too thin or try to deal with too many issues problems, you'll not make any meaningful improvements on any one of them.

One of the initial challenges we took on as a sales enablement team was to enhance our onboarding of new hires. During our exploratory phase, our main concern was "It's taking our reps far too long to bring them on the right track." As we dug through the information it was apparent that we'd planned to employ more than 140 sales reps in the next few years, yet our onboarding program was still monitored in an Excel spreadsheet. It wasn't scalable and wasn't delivering the desired results.

Therefore, one of our major challenges was to create a brand new, scaleable onboarding program which reduced the amount of time it took new sales reps to become income-generating. We therefore built distinct learning paths for each role and will continue to improve the program based on feedback from reps and managers.

Six tips to build your sales enablement plan for an effective sales staff

Once you've created your strategy you'll need to decide the best way to implement it which means creating content and distributing it to sales representatives. What you do to implement that could be crucial in the effectiveness of your plan.

Deliver content in context

Sales enablement content is useless if sales reps can't find the content, therefore make it easy for sales reps to find your content easily.

One method to make the sales enablement information more easily accessible and searchable is by creating a sales portal that serves as a library of content for your reps.

We've re-organized the sales portal in line with our GTM planin a way that makes it context-specific. If you're searching for content by content type or product, use case or even a persona, you can get what you want effortlessly.

Time your delivery

It is here that the third component of content to help salespeople succeed --- the communication channels as well as cadence -- comes in. Go beyond simply organizing content with ease by actively providing your sales reps with the appropriate data at the appropriate moment.

What exactly does this mean in practice? When a sales representative calls customers, you do not need them access to your sales portal in search of a certain asset or information regarding rivals. Instead, present the data directly to the customer and present it in a way that's seamless and beneficial.

For instance We use, for instance Salesforce as our customer relationship management tool. We also utilize an additional sidebar to align the content's delivery with the phases of the sales cycle within Salesforce. If a sales rep happens to be on a discovery call we'll provide information that includes questions for discovery or a checklist for technical validation, or a demo video that the customer can view. If the type of buyer has a certain use case that we frequently see at  an event, we'll show the case study as a video which could be shown to the buyer.

The goal is to serve content up within a salesperson's working routine when it's most helpful for the salesperson.

Don't forget about change management

For any process that is new, there's a behavior change element that you must be aware of. If you're going any kind of change or introduce new processes to a team it is important to know what it means to the organization, your customersand them. Get the buy-in of the leadership team, and then communicate the importance of the process to their employees.

Have fun !

Any enablement professional needs to consider maintaining content that is fresh and interesting as an essential part of their work. In the end, the more captivating a piece of content, the higher chance an viewer will remember the content.

Gather feedback continuously

When we launch the new course or certificate We always ensure that we send out surveys to sales reps that had completed the training. We also have meetings with sales executives to gain an idea of how the groups have responded to the material. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad or neutral, the feedback is an opportunity to learnand it helps us understand the things we're doing right and what we could do better.

It's also important to take your time when evaluating the comments you get. The sales team is extremely happy with everything we've done to help them do their job better and are always looking for more which is great!

We must stay focussed on the resources we have We look for themes within the feedback we receive.

As an example, when we receive feedback from sales, we search for patterns such as

• What is it that we are hearing repeatedly?
• What could we implement to move the dial?
• What are some quick wins that could also last for a long time?

Recognizing these patterns can assist us in evolving our sales capability in the coming week, month, quarter, and the whole year.

Keep track of and take measurements often

One of the most appealing aspects about sales enablement is it's a continually iterative process -You don't "set it and forget it." Monitoring your progress and monitoring your results helps to create a sense of continuous improvement within your sales enablement team.

There are so many different aspects that are covered within sales enablement, and every program has its own metrics -- from times to ramp to deal size, to the percentage of reps that are meeting quota.

Of course, sales enablement isn't the sole team responsible for impacting those metrics, but we use them as guideposts that indicate we're following the right track. Each function needs to prove the ROI of their investment which is especially important when you're eating into salespeople's precious time.

Following the launch of a new program it is also important to monitor the customers' reactions to the change. Sales enablement works alongside reps, the work we do is ultimately meant to ensure that customers have a great experience. It's about looking for indicators that help us understand whether we're in the right direction or if we have to change up the messaging or approach we're training reps in.

We also consider the retention of sales teams. The content we provide to sales enablement should not only improve sales performance but also ensure that sales staff feel they've had a great introduction experience, and they're being recognized for their achievements, and that they're getting regular opportunities to grow to develop and advance into new roles. Each of these factors helps create a culture within the company that employees want to stay in.

Empower your teams with engaging sales-enablement materials

Sales is all about relationships -with engaged sales reps they won't be able to create satisfied customers. It's not surprising that firms with engaged employees get 21percent higher profitability. When sales reps feel excited and motivated to continue improving their abilities, everybody benefits.