True sales enablement involves complete enablement of your direct sales team at every stage of the sales cycle from the time an opportunity is created until the time the lead is closed, and sometimes beyond that. While marketing automation platforms do a decent job offering marketing support to salespeople, investing in a marketing tool alone leaves many loose ends. What your salespeople really want is a tool that will help them walk the last mile confidently and close the leads–solid support on the sales front with tools that help them sell. For sales enablement to work, companies need to look beyond the obvious and handhold their salespeople throughout the buyer’s journey. Key elements include guided sales processes, tools that take the guesswork out of what to say, when to say it, and how to say it to a lead, and the ability to reach out to leads at the right time, with the right message. True Sales Enablement entails all these, and more. In short, it is all about bringing those elements together that makes it easy for salespeople to sell.
Typically, companies provide salespeople with a bunch of leads (which marketing usually deems qualified for sales exposure), a couple of sales, perhaps a few brochures, sales presentations, a couple of emails, and a call script, and expect them to work magic. Expecting your salespeople to put random information/assets to use and close deals just because they are ‘salespeople’ is like expecting a penguin to fly just because it is a bird! Without a guided sales process, your sales revenue will not take flight.
Sales playbooks–discussed earlier–play a role in the creation of a guided sales process. A playbook lets you map your sales assets to the relevant point in the buyer’s journey and gives your salespeople easy access to all the sales and marketing assets they need when reaching out to their leads. Unlike shared folders or drives on the cloud, sales playbooks are less complicated and specifically created for sales teams. They are not a random asset dump and work as a great mechanism to share internal sales knowledge.
Create playbooks for different plays, different sales cycle milestones, and even different prospect personas, verticals, and pain points. Once you give your salespeople the answer to the when what and how of selling, you will make it a lot easier for them to sell.
Liked what you read? Check out our whitepaper, The Ultimate Guide to Enablement of Direct Sales Teams for more.
