Sales enablement involves providing sellers with the right kind of information and tools at the right time so as to boost sales. It is a way of equipping a sales organization with information and content that will enable them to utilize and seize a sales opportunity.
Sales enablement aims to equip a salesperson with the needed information to engage a consumer throughout the purchasing period. The information provided to the seller may take the form of bestselling techniques, how to approach customers and tools to use in sales just to name a few.
Sales enablement requires the collaboration of both sales and marketing departments.
Attributes of sales enablement
Sales enablement is all about providing a seller with information that will help him/her sell to the buyer, therefore, it is more about the buyer than about the seller; and requires a deep understanding of the target customer. Effective sales enabling, therefore, needs to be customer-centric.
A seller needs to know how to use the information and tools provided. It would be useless and even counterproductive if the seller had no idea how to apply what the sales enabler had delivered. It is, therefore, the work of the sales enabler to educate the seller on how certain information will be applied to increase sales. In short, training and development should be incorporated into sales enablement programs for efficiency.
A seller doesn’t always follow or use the information provided by the sales enabler. This may be because what is provided is not easy to use or because of plain ignorance. A good sales enablement program should, therefore, embark on tracking and enforcing in its latter stages so as to ensure that the provided resources are being utilized. Certain metrics such as the number of sales reps achieving quota, sales cycle duration and mean deal size should be tracked during and after the program.
Importance of sales enablement
The common thing with all sales teams is that there are always sharpshooters who drag the rest of the team to the upper echelons of sales targets. This can never change as there are people with natural talent. Sales enablement, however, comes to remove the reliance on a few higher hitters and enable the more sales reps to hit the quota in a scalable and repeatable way. This drastically improves sales, and morale of employees who now believe that they too can be high hitters. Using the high achievers as tutors to the rest of the sales reps is common in most sales enablement programs.
