The buyer’s journey has changed so drastically over the years that sellers hardly have any control over the sales process until much later. A recent research by Forrester pointed out that up to 70 percent of B2B buyers first come across a product or service through their own research, usually, online. This means, the buyers have probably gathered all the information that’s freely available online about your products/services. They have done their research and are hoping your sales team or channel partners can actually tell them something that they are not aware of. Successful organizations are those that manage to add value to even the well-researched buyer, at any stage of the sales cycle. The goal of sales or partner enablement today is to ensure that happens. With buyers having too many options at their fingertips coupled with a shortened attention span, organizations have to ensure that their direct and indirect sales channels are completely attuned to buyer behavior and preferences at every stage of the sales cycle. Here are some key ways to make that happen.
Start by building a powerful onboarding & training program for your direct and channel sales network
A great onboarding program truly adds value to your sales team and channel partners. A solid on-boarding program ensures your salespeople and channel partners are better prepared to face the market, which, in turn, helps them close more leads and generate more sales for you. A well-drafted on-boarding program prepares your salespeople and partners for every situation.
Offer your salespeople and channel partners a well-guided sales process
Sales enters the buyer’s journey at a much later stage these days. What your salespeople and channel partners really need are plays for different scenarios or plays for prospects who are in different stages of the sales cycle. Sales playbooks fit this need perfectly. Playbooks cover the what, when, and how of prospect engagement—what to say to a prospect, when to say it and how to say it so your salespeople and channel partners can respond to leads anywhere in the sales cycle.
Quick access to important elements
The modern day buyer that your sales team and partners are dealing with is very agile. In order to enable your sales networks to keep in step with their leads, you need to equip them with tools that give them the low-down on their prospects. A powerful sales dashboard that offers one touch access to key metrics is what we are talking about here. What are the key metrics? Lead activity overview, hot lead lists, recent sales campaign success rates, most popular sales assets, to name a few.
Access to the right assets at the right time
Giving your salespeople and channel partners access to the right assets at the right time is a very powerful way to enable them. Sales enablement platforms with asset recommendation engines allow you to map your assets to the lead’s position in the sales cycle and suggest the right assets to your sales teams as they reach out to those leads.
Ability to make that great first impression with personalized (and co-branded) sales communication
Personalized sales communication helps your salespeople break the ice with their prospects sooner and achieve better results. Unfortunately, tailoring sales content for every prospect manually is impossible. Sales enablement entails providing your salespeople with tools that allow them to add a personal touch to their interaction with prospects. Whether it is personal branding of sales materials or customizing them to suit prospect preference, personalization tools can make it happen for the sales team. Not only do these tools make your sales communication more effective, but they also enable your sales team to personalize without straying from branding standards.
On the channel partner front, organizations can engage in co-branding. Co-branding helps companies and partners join forces and use the synergy to market and sell their products/services better. It helps increase brand visibility and awareness as both parties leverage the market presence and brand value of each other. Powerful partner marketing software programs allow the vendor’s corporate marketing department to create all the sales and marketing materials they need, centrally, and then, using co-branding capabilities, automatically customize them to reflect the partner’s branding. Co-branding with partner marketing platforms can extend across multiple marketing and sales touchpoints including
- Email marketing
- Social media posts
- Print advertising
- Web (Microsites and landing pages)
- Sales presentations
- Proposals
- Videos
- Blogs
Give your sales network an integrated set up
Your salespeople and channel partners are too busy trying to sell. They don’t have the time to log on to multiple platforms and tools. For increased adoption of your sales and partner enablement programs, you need to make sure you bring the enablement tools to them and integrate them in the sales environment. For example, integrating your lead management system with the CRM that’s already being used by your sales team or channel partners, or integrating the email templates in your partner marketing automation software with your partner’s email program such as Outlook or Gmail.
Manage the leads for your sales network
As discussed above, your channel partners and salespeople are too busy selling to focus anywhere else. This means, leads that close the quickest and products that sell the fastest get most attention from them. But, what happens to the others? At the organizational level, you can set up a robust lead scoring, lead routing and segmentation process, to to ensure only the right–i.e. “qualified”–leads get passed onto your sales team and channel partners. You can nurture the others through a solid lead nurturing program until they are ready for sales contact, so they close faster.
Help your salespeople understand their leads better
In order to capture prospect’s attention and hold on to it, your salespeople and channel partners have to adopt a hyper-personalized marketing and sales approach. This is not possible without a 360-degree view of the prospect activities and attributes. They need to know what the prospect is up to at any stage of the buyer’s journey so they can tweak their marketing and sales messaging and strategies accordingly.
With the powershift in favor of the buyer, sales and channel partners get a very narrow window of opportunity. True sales and partner enablement is in ensuring that salespeople and partners are well-equipped, trained and supported to create a positive buyer experience at any stage of the sales cycle.
