By Andy Champ, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA at Highspot
The fundamental purpose of a sales enablement plan is to provide sellers with the tools they need to successfully engage customers throughout the buying process.
It’s a relatively new concept, but one that should be standard business practice, given the significant revenue, sales productivity, and customer experience gains. In short, a robust and well-executed sales enablement strategy is a cheat code to drive growth and anchor your overall business strategy.
A robust sales enablement strategy isn’t dependent on technology, but a sales enablement platform will allow you to execute at pace, get real-time feedback on what’s working and also where the gaps are. in the operational execution of your strategy.
Sales enablement platforms give sales teams the right tools, knowledge, and processes to successfully engage with prospects and customers at scale. It’s the secret sauce that cuts the ramp-up time for new reps by a quarter and gets a fifth more of your reps to their annual quota*.
Why “Traditional Marketing Tactics” Are Disappearing
Too often we hear that marketers produce content without knowing how it is used, when it is used, or if it is even used by the sales team. This lack of communication, data and insight into the return on investment of different content is a common problem in the majority of businesses and is one of the main contributors to ‘content chaos‘ where marketing teams are asked to produce unique promotions for sales to be used in ‘must win’ offers.
Typically, marketers have a very limited view of how their content is performing. Here too, a sales enablement platform can help by ensuring that marketers and salespeople have a single source of truth for all content and media. And by leveraging AI and data analytics, everyone can immediately see what content is resonating with shoppers, generating revenue, and just being left on the shelf gathering dust. .
Find the perfect “sales recipe”
If you adhere to the concept of ‘if you give people a recipe, they will know what to do’, then the first step is where do you go to build your recipe. Experience suggests, just like in a commercial kitchen, we should go to our top performers. To the people on the team who have already figured out which ingredients to mix in which quantities to bake the perfect bread. In the business world, that means watching our top salespeople to understand what they do well, understanding what they say and do to win the hearts and minds of customers, and understanding how they position the value of a way that creates a constraint to act and clean blue water compared to the competition.
The important message here is that data leads to insight. And that this idea is fundamental to the messages and experiences we need to convey to our customers, which will ultimately lead to a purchase. Being able to analyze content and messaging at every stage of the buyer’s journey allows you to see what the good looks like, and therefore create ‘the winning sales recipe‘.
Using sales enablement as a solution
For each person, sales enablement provides a different benefit.
For the seller, they will have a place to go for all the information and content they need, where and when they need it. Plus, they can be completely sure that once found, the content is up-to-date and has been widely proven by others in the business.
Using a sales enablement solution, a seller can also access ‘just in time training’ related to the content they plan to use and which will allow them to obtain it efficiently. For example, via an audio or video clip featuring flawless execution by a top performer or subject matter expert.
For marketers, they gain absolute control over their content with deep insights into adoption and engagement that allow them to make it more impactful over time. A sales enablement platform achieves this by tracking what content is embraced by sales, what content resonates with customers, and conversely, a view of content that is neither used nor effective in influencing revenue. .
What does that mean?
It’s time for businesses to pay attention to the huge potential of marketing insights and implement a sales enablement platform as a cornerstone of their strategy to drive ROI.
High-growth companies are already using software for contextual support, training, and customer engagement with end-to-end analytics and AI.
This will provide your sales team with seamless access to content, training, and ultimately serve as a single source of truth.
Using sales enablement tools to streamline the sales process and maximize sales performance is quickly becoming the industry standard for CMOs and CROs to stay ahead of the game.