What is Sales Enablement?

Michele Warg
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In the big picture, sales enablement means you let your sales representatives do their thing to land more contracts. Of course, it's not as simple as that because you must measure your customer relationship metrics, monitor interactions with clients and see how your sales initiatives pay off over time to develop an overall sales strategy. Discover how to enable your team thanks to a little clarity.

Define Your Purpose

Define the purpose of your sales enablement strategy in writing with a charter or some formal document. This should come from higher-level management or the c-suite and trickle down to other staffers since the entire sales team must be on board for enablement services and technology that helps employees do their jobs. A written strategy helps staffers focus resources, time and energy toward the tools that get the job done right.

Having a strategy in place also creates accountability. Written goals teach everyone how to measure success with sales enablement. That way, each person has the same expectations of what happens when people land sales and what happens when people fail. Everyone should judge success or failure by the same standards.

Begin With the Customer Journey

Actual sales enablement starts by measuring and monitoring the customer journey. Your sales funnels bring new customers into the fold, and you need customer relationship management, or CRM, software to manage that progress. See what happens when a sales staffer reaches out with a phone call once a week. Find out what scripts work and which ones don't. Do your staffers have the ability to alter the script when potential customers start to bail on you?

Personalizing the technology entails two main facets. First is that you must have the ability to customize messages to clients to be successful, otherwise potential clients simply don't care about the products or services you offer. Second, you need to give your staffers the right mix of tools, training and coaching to tap into the software successfully. This is so your team members know what trends to follow and which leads to drop.

Create a One-Stop Shopping Platform

When you decide on a strategy and then focus on landing more customers, the entire company needs to have a hand in sales enablement. That's why your technological platform should appear in every aspect of your company's software. CRM software can help the marketing department develop new ad pushes, help accounts receivable see what orders customers placed in the past and help the shipping people know what freebie extras to throw into a box. With just a few clicks, all relevant staffers should have access to as much data as possible regarding customers since these clients are the lifeblood of your business model.

The caveat to this system is that sales enablement may take months or years to implement. The key is to be patient when going from strategy to implementation and then analyzing what to improve.


Photo courtesy of jk1991 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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