Did you know that, according to Finances Online, sales agents don’t actually spend a majority of their day speaking to prospects? In fact, only a third of it is taken up by this activity, with the rest of their day devoted to researching leads, entering data, and more.
Considering this, you must bolster your sales team’s marketing strategy with sales enablement.
But what is sales enablement, exactly? And how can you use it to boost the performance of your sales team? If you don’t have the answers to these questions, you might be confused or stressed about getting started.
That’s why we’ve put together this guide. In it, you’ll learn all about sales enablement and the tips you can use to make it most effective for your sales team.
Finally, you can have an effective sales team, making more sales and more money than ever. Read on to learn more.
What Is Sales Enablement?
If you want to increase the productivity and success of your sales team, you need to implement the right sales enablements tips. But if you don’t understand what sales enablement is, you won’t be able to put these tips into action.
Basically, sales enablement is a series of processes you follow and tools and information you use to enable your sales team to be more effective, building the relationships they have with leads already and converting them.
By providing your sales team members with guidelines and processes to follow and giving them the data and information needed to make informed decisions when connecting with leads, you’re empowering them with sales enablement.
Sales Enablement Tips for Your Marketing Strategy
Now that we’ve reviewed what sales enablement is, we’ll move onto the different tips you can use to make your business plan the best it can be for your sales team. These tips include having a mission, defining responsibilities clearly, and more.
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Have a Mission
One of the most important marketing tips for any sales team is to have a mission. When you do this, you’re providing your sales team intending to work toward any time they’re communicating with a client on the phone or online.
This will also help you determine what sales goals you want to reach for your company.
Additionally, this will make it possible for you to provide your sales team with goals regarding the number of sales, leads contacted, and long-term numbers.
To come up with a mission, think about your product, experience, and brand. This will help you come up with a value proposition around which you can center your mission.
Once you have a mission, you can share it with your team.
You can also use it to put together training documents, decide which channels to use for contacting leads, and deciding if you need additional technology to make your mission possible.
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Define Responsibilities Clearly
When you have a sales team, it’s easy to make the mistake of offloading all the responsibilities to every person on the team. However, as sales teams take on additional sales content and business marketing responsibilities, this can get messy.
Instead, you need to decide what the responsibilities are and define what each person does clearly. These responsibilities might include:
- Managing the sales methodology and process
- Onboarding software
- Onboarding strategy
- Sales playbook
- Sales content
- Sales tools and technology
By defining these responsibilities clearly, you’ll not only be able to have a better-organized sales team. You’ll also transform your marketing goals into specific responsibilities within the sales team, combining marketing tips with sales ones.
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Provide Training
Once you’ve defined the responsibilities according to your sales mission, you’ll want to provide training to your sales team. This way, they’ll be able to effectively carry out each responsibility from day one.
Always have training available to new hires. The better you train them from the beginning, the more effective they’ll be at their jobs. It’s worth putting in this time and money before having them complete sales tasks for you.
Additionally, once you measure your goals (which we’ll get into in the next section), you should revisit your training processes and train your entire team every quarter or so.
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Set Targets and Use the Right Data to Measure Your Success
The best way to make your sales team as effective as possible is by setting targets. This way, every member on your team will know exactly what goals they should be moving toward as they contact leads and make more sales.
One of the most effective target-setting strategies is to use key performance metrics, popularly known as KPIs.
Metrics worth tracking include customer acquisition, attainment, and productivity. You can see how you are doing these now and set new goals accordingly as you improve your sales enablement efforts.
By tracking consistently, you’ll be able to measure where your sales efforts are working and where they aren’t. Over time, you can shift your strategies based on metrics to improve your efforts.
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Provide Guiding Documents and Information
Another way to guide your team is to have every process documented to follow what is standard at your company. These should be provided in your training, after which your employees should be provided them and asked to review them regularly.
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Give Your Team the Best Tools and Technology
However good your sales team is, they’ll do even better if they have tools and technology that can help them retain customer information better, streamline their strategies, and have improved communication across the sales team.
Automated Prospecting
Sales representatives spend a large part of their time looking for prospects. When you make this process shorter, you allow them to focus on their job responsibilities, such as closing sales.
Think about getting software that helps with prospecting. By automating this process, your sales team won’t have to worry about sending emails after contacting a lead. You can also automate calls and meetings.
Many customers prefer to schedule meetings on their own time, and it’s easier for them to do it fully online.
Instead of calling and waiting for someone to pick up the phone, they can automatically schedule a meeting and receive an automated reminder closer to the time.
The easier you make this process for leads, the more likely they’ll be converted into customers.
Sales Enablement Software
If you want to use software that can help you with sales enablement holistically, you can use sales enablement software. With a sales enablement platform, you can easily store all your documents and information in one place.
Additionally, you can put all your tools and resources somewhere where they’ll be accessible to every member of your sales team.
Finally, with this type of software, you can communicate between team members and between employees and customers completely streamlined and effortless.
Email Templates With Sequences
With the right email template software, you can create specific stock emails for different situations. This will make your sales team seem friendly and professional in every email they sent out, which will contain the information the client needs.
These email templates can follow the sequences of the customer journey. For example, your team will be able to choose between sending a transactional email, direct marketing email, or an email thanking them for their recent purchase.
Direct Messaging
Direct messaging can be a great software if many of your customers are millennials. This is because this generation prefers to communicate via text, whether on a social media app or their phone. If you want to reach them, offer direct messaging.
Additionally, this might make anyone who’s checking out your website but not yet ready to make a call more inclined to get in touch.
Depending on the software, you can have automated messages sent out before they speak with a sales representative.
Need More Information?
Now that you’ve learned about the best effective sales enablement tips to use alongside your marketing strategy, you might need more information. Maybe you want to learn about other types of technology you can use to make your business processes more effective.
Or maybe you want to learn what training techniques you can use to help your sales team learn fast during the onboarding process.
Whatever information you need, you can find it on our blog. Go to the Business Products & Services section, where you can learn about more tips, strategies, and technology.