When your sales team thrives, your company thrives. And one of the most important ways to make sure they are thriving is through sales enablement.
Sales enablement is the process by which you give your team the tools, training, software, and materials they need to close deals.
Here is a framework with nine sales enablement best practices that will empower your team, boost your engagement, and improve your business.
As with any new initiative, it’s important to have buy-in from your C-suite. It costs time and money to develop new sales enablement processes, so come prepared with numbers that show the return on investment. But it’s also equally essential that your sales team embraces the changes — so include them as early as possible in the process. You may also need to tap into other internal teams, including creative and learning and development.
Before you start changing things, you need to understand your existing sales enablement practices. These include training, internal materials, playbooks, technology, and customer-facing content.
Think about what a new hire to the sales team would experience. What do their onboarding training and materials look like? What tools are you giving them? What questions are they likely to ask?
The more you know about your customers and their roadmaps, the better you can personalize your sales enablement. For example, think about how hard it would be to market something to all women versus focusing on women from the age of 21 to 35, who live in a specific city, are married, and work in healthcare. That’s just a made-up example, but it’s the kind of granularity you need to have.
The definition of the five phases of the customer journey is:
For each stage, consider their actions, motivations, questions, and barriers. Mapping out the customer’s journey will help you identify speed bumps for your customers and can give you insights about where your sales team could help.
Now it’s time to set up what your sales enablement strategy will be and create the content your sales teams will use. Make sure to write everything down! By documenting your strategy, you can identify which methods work best, which could be improved, and which didn’t work at all. Without documentation, you won’t be able to track your progress.
Your sales enablement playbook should give your team all of the content and strategies they need to close a deal. At a minimum, a good sales playbook includes:
Instead of a traditional physical playbook, consider using a digital playbook built with Tiled.
You also need to decide which metrics are the most important. Here are a few that you might consider:
Each member of your sales team needs to have specific and measurable sales goals. If possible, allow team members to set their own goals. Review them to make sure they are not too lofty or too easy.
Coaching helps improve your team and ensures a unified quality of performance. As part of your sales enablement plan, establish how coaching is going to be implemented and tracked. Everyone on your team should have a clear idea of what coaching looks like, how often it will happen, and what to expect from it.
Sales enablement can include a lot of material. Even the most experienced team members will have to refresh their memories, so sales enablement content needs to be easy to access, read, and update. One of the easiest ways to make it accessible is by making it digital with Tiled. Tiled helps you organize your sales enablement content, making it easier for your team to access the information they need.
Once you finish establishing or improving your sales enablement, there’s a good chance it’s already time to add in something new. There are always fresh and powerful sales enablement ideas to implement on your team. You need to be ready to change what you have to stay ahead of the competition.
With these best practices in place, your sales teams will be flying high in no time. Learn more about how you can improve your sales enablement strategy with Tiled.
