To perform at the highest possible level, your salespeople need to be provided with the right tools, information, and resources — and the process of providing these necessities to a sales team is known as sales enablement. 

An effective sales enablement strategy is a critical component of modern sales success. Organizations that have implemented a sales enablement program achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without any formal sales enablement process, according to data from Learn Hub.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at nine proven sales enablement tips that are sure to improve your sales process and help your sales reps close deals at a higher rate.

1. Keep Your Sales Enablement Strategy Simple

Organization and simplicity are two key goals when creating a sales enablement program. Consider utilizing a single platform to store all of your enablement data if possible. 

From there, focus on a few core sales enablement goals, such as simply ensuring that your reps have the resources they need to execute their daily goals, meet quotas, and make progress on broader organizational goals. If you try to do too much at once, you’ll probably only succeed at overwhelming your sales staff, which is the exact opposite goal of effective sales enablement. 

2. Work as a Unified Team

Successful sales enablement requires the ongoing cooperation of an organization’s sales teams, marketing teams, sales ops, and product development teams. This makes it important to involve managers from all of these departments when defining your sales enablement strategy and creating sales enablement content. Your marketing team, for example, will play a key role in developing the customer-facing content that reps can leverage as part of their sales process. 

Meanwhile, your product development team will be able to help create useful product guides that will help reps better understand the key features of the products they are selling. 

And your Revenue Operations team will be able to help strategize rep quotas, productivity and compensation strategies.

3. Automate the Process as Much as Possible

Utilizing tools that automate tasks such as scheduling meetings or sending out follow-up emails can go a long way toward making the day-to-day operations of your sales team more efficient and providing your reps with more time to focus on essential tasks such as building a customer relationship. 

Leveraging automation can also help you better coordinate the efforts of your marketing and sales departments. According to data from Review42, 74% of organizations that utilize marketing and CRM automation have aligned marketing and sales departments. With that in mind, the process of selecting the right sales automation tools and training reps on how to use them is the responsibility of your sales enablement team. 

Here are some of the most popular sales automation tools to get you started: 

  • HubSpot Sales: Hubspot Sales is an enterprise sales CRM that provides a wide range of sales engagement tools as well as detailed sales forecasting and sales analytics. 
  • Outreach: Outreach is a B2B-focused sales execution platform that helps revenue organizations automate their sales engagement efforts, maximize team productivity, and use AI-driven insights to advance deals.
  • Chili Piper: Chili Piper is a scheduling software solution that lets sales teams seamlessly connect with inbound leads, stay on top of meetings and handoffs, and eliminate manual scheduling. 
  • Yesware: Yesware is an email outreach solution that provides robust automation tools for contacting leads via email and tracking engagement. 

4. Provide Powerful Selling Tools

In addition to providing sales reps with tools that automate mundane and time-consuming tasks, it’s also important to provide tools that are designed to reinforce training, provide key metrics and KPIs that reps can use to gauge their performance, offer information about buyer personas, and beyond. 

Clari is one well-known and influential revenue and CRM platform that offers features like automated sales workflows, sales forecasting, and contact management solutions to streamline your entire sales process.

Sales Assembly can also help expand your team’s knowledge and enhance your sales toolkit for sales reps and sales leaders alike. Our Strategy Peer Group for sales enablement teams lets industry peers connect and discuss the latest tools. 

5. Make Your Sales Process Accessible

Your sales enablement program’s tools, resources, and information should be available to all sales team members regardless of where they are located. Today, it has become increasingly common for sales reps to work remotely or spend a lot of time on the road, making this even more important. 

If your sales enablement content is scattered across platforms and only fully accessible when people log into the right ones, it’s not truly accessible. Your reps need to be able to find and use content in times of need without a scavenger hunt. Centralize your content on a single online platform that’s always within reach. 

6. Create a System for Both Good and Bad Feedback

There’s no better way to determine what your salespeople need to succeed than listening to what they have to say. However, consistent, detailed feedback can be hard to come by unless it’s directly solicited. By creating a system that encourages both good and bad feedback, you can ensure that your reps feel comfortable providing the feedback your sales enablement team needs to improve. 

One easy method is to collect feedback anonymously, either through a regular online survey or portal or a good old-fashioned suggestions box. This eliminates the pressures reps often experience when asked to provide honest feedback for their managers, peers, or the organization as a whole. 

Finally, it would help if you created a feedback loop that communicates to your team that their feedback was received and is being acted upon. 

7. Have Resources Available for Extended Learning

According to data from Business 2 Community, 84% of the training that sales reps receive during the onboarding process is forgotten within the first three months of employment. This makes ongoing sales training a key ingredient in the recipe for sales success. In addition to reinforcing important sales tactics and strategies, it is also important to train your reps how to use all of the new technology and tools that your sales enablement team introduces. 

Conducting teamwide training sessions in tandem with one-on-one sales coaching is an effective way to provide your reps with the regular skill-building they need to put sales enablement solutions into action. A Sales Assembly membership is one great resource for providing your reps with ample learning opportunities year-round. 

8. Provide Your Team With Content That Performs

Providing sales reps with the right content is a highly impactful sales enablement goal. 

Reps can direct customers to blog posts, case studies, or other content marketing materials for more information. Product guides can help reps better understand the products they are selling, and templates and scripts for sales calls and emails can help them communicate clearly. 

There is no shortage of sales enablement content that your sales team can utilize to boost their performance. This makes content creation and curation one of the key pillars of effective sales enablement and something your sales enablement team, marketing team, and CRM team should all come together to accomplish.

9. Build Relationships, Not Accounts

A great sales strategy doesn’t just create a high volume of leads  — it also lays the groundwork for robust and long-lasting client relationships. One of our key sales enablement tips is to treat clients like friends rather than accounts. In practice, this means providing your reps with sales content tailored to different buyer personas and training that helps reps deliver value rather than cookie-cutter messages. 

Scale Your Sales Enablement Process With Sales Assembly

Effective sales enablement is something that can empower your salespeople to build lasting customer relationships, close more deals, and ultimately improve your company’s bottom line. 

At Sales Assembly, we are dedicated to helping organizations across all industries develop successful sales enablement strategies through our proven sales training programs. If you would like to learn more about how Sales Assembly can help you develop and scale your sales enablement program, contact us today.

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For more support in Scaling Better, Scaling Faster, and Scaling Smarter, Sales Assembly can help. Contact us for more information.
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