5 sales enablement best practices to help teams win more business

Sales enablement is by no means a new concept. In fact, it’s now common practice among more agile, progressive organisations. Despite this, it can seem overwhelming for businesses that have yet to adopt it, but its revenue potential is immense—especially for sales-led businesses that have traditionally depended on sales for growth. 

What exactly is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is about providing relevant content, ongoing training, and sophisticated tools to help sales teams focus on the most appropriate leads and be in a better position to close deals reliably. It sounds simple, but implementing an effective sales enablement practice takes a concerted, coordinated effort and an ingrained sense of customer orientation.

“Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle.” - Forrester

While technology, psychology, and integrations continue pushing the boundaries of what effective sales enablement looks like, there are five simple best practices that will help you implement a sales enablement strategy that will keep teams ahead of the curve and in a position to provide ongoing value to your clients.

1. Collaborate cross-functionally

Sales enablement involves a joined-up partnership between various departments focused entirely around the customer. Each department (research, marketing, sales and customer service) can bring unique insights and valuable intelligence to support the creation of assets and messages designed to delight the customer.

Departments need to think and act holistically and regularly consider what they know/observe that would help the sales team understand, engage and close a sale, or up-grade or cross-sell an existing account reliably.

Ways to foster a culture of cross-functional collaboration include:

• Break down communication barriers by adopting collaborative, real-time communication and project management tools that all teams can refer to at any time, like Slack and Trello.
• Schedule frequent cross-functional meetings where sales, marketing, customer service, and research teams can share updates, challenges, and insights. This encourages transparency and mutual support.
• Encourage cross-training, where members from different teams spend time in other departments to gain a better understanding of their function, processes, challenges, and contributions.
• Introduce sales training for all teams to familiarise them with basic concepts, practices, and protocols.
• Use a closed-loop communication ideology and not the traditional end-to-end model. Think about circles and not linear lines.

2. Invest in an integrated CMS

79% of sales professionals consider sales content crucial for closing deals, making it essential that relevant content that supports sales initiatives is readily available right when sales need it.

A good sales enablement strategy ensures that all required content is centrally stored in a repository that users can easily access, download, or create links from. This repository is an integrated, easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS).

With a good CMS, branding, messaging, and themes can be consistently carried through proposals, bid documents, fact sheets, white papers, case studies, videos, and more from any member of any team.

Integrating all this with your CRM system also creates efficiencies and saves time. In this way, a sales or customer service representative can instantly access all sales support, meetings, notes, and content performance analytics they need to deliver the right messages to the right potential customer at the right time.

HubSpot's Content Marketing Software, for example, allows you to do this seamlessly.

3. Keep sales campaign deployment simple

When launching a strategic sales campaign, it's best practice to break up deployment into three simple phases with manageable steps.

Developing the campaign

1. Scope out the project plan by agreeing on sales goals and campaign objectives, defining what 'success' looks like, and assigning necessary roles and responsibilities to the team members involved.
2. Decide what content is needed for each stage of the buyer's journey, design it, organise it in your CMS, and ensure those who need access know where to find it and how to use it at each stage of the journey.
3. Implement the necessary campaign dashboards, content pieces, and workflows across all required systems so that all tools, processes and teams are aligned. Automate repetitive tasks that are typically time-heavy for teams.

Launching the campaign

1. Test out the sales material and sequences you've developed with existing customers and prospects to get a sense of how effective they'll be come roll-out.
2. Train all client-facing team members on the available materials to use, how to use them, where to find them, and what the expected outcome is in relation to the campaign goals. Consider creating a sales playbook to streamline this step.
3. Roll out the campaign in a focused manner, keeping teams aligned on the overall objectives.

Operating the campaign

1. Make managing content in your CMS a habit to avoid irrelevant and out-of-date materials being used unnecessarily. 
2. Monitor and analyse performance metrics like click-through, open, and follow-up rates and measure campaign engagement accordingly.
3. Make refinements and improvements based on your performance insights and user outcomes as you go. Eliminate any bottlenecks or ineffective steps in the sales cycle wherever possible.

4. Be honest about determining sales enablement goals

Setting clear and realistic sales enablement goals is crucial for aligning your efforts with tangible business outcomes. Without well-defined objectives, sales enablement initiatives can quickly lose focus, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities. By linking your sales enablement programmes directly to measurable sales results, you justify the investment and ensure that your efforts are strategically targeted and budgeted appropriately.

By being honest and precise about your sales enablement goals, you can identify where your efforts are making the most impact and where adjustments are needed. Even a small improvement in sales funnel conversion rates can lead to significant gains in revenue and profitability. This optimises resources and builds confidence within the organisation that the sales enablement strategy is yielding results.

Focus areas for goal setting

To maximise the impact of your sales enablement programme, attention should be focused on several key areas:

• Consistent lead identification and reporting: Ensure teams are equipped and encouraged to identify and report leads and pipeline opportunities. Over time, this will increase the volume and quality of leads entering the sales funnel.
  
  
• Lead scoring: Implement a robust lead scoring system to prioritise leads based on how likely they are to convert. This helps sales focus on high-potential opportunities and allocate their time effectively.
  
  
• Pipeline management: Develop and enforce a rigorous process for moving contacts, companies, and opportunities through the sales pipeline so that no opportunity is overlooked and that each stage is optimised for conversion.
  
  
• Opportunity creation and deal closure: Focus on creating new opportunities within the pipeline and closing deals efficiently. Track metrics like opportunity creation rate, deal closure rate, and time-to-close to gauge effectiveness.
  
  
• Upsell and retention: Beyond closing new deals, aim to increase revenue through upselling and improving customer retention. This drives short-term sales while fostering long-term customer loyalty and business stability.

Signs of sales enablement success

As you implement and refine your sales enablement goals, look for these sales performance indicators that could suggest you are on the right track:

1. Tender conversion rate wins improve: A higher conversion rate in competitive tenders indicates that your sales team is effectively leveraging the tools and content provided by sales enablement.
2. Average deal size increases: Larger deal sizes suggest that your sales enablement efforts are helping the team to better communicate value and negotiate more favourable contract terms.
3. Average margin and Net Promoter Scores increase: Higher margins and improved customer satisfaction, as reflected in Net Promoter Scores (NPS), indicate that your sales processes are not only effective but also creating long-term value for customers.

5. Incorporate a chatbot and, ideally, live chat

A sale isn’t made until a conversation happens. So, make it easier for customers and prospects to converse with you when, where, and how they choose. Chatbots and ‘live chat’ are now commonplace. You’ve probably seen pop-ups on websites. They’re all about being helpful, non-invasive and contextually relevant.

Chatbots and live chat are relatively easy to set up, control, and manage and encourage users to engage with your brand, essentially turning conversations into leads. One source suggests that chatbots lead to as much as a 67% increase in sales.

Whilst they will never replace real people talking, they are great at fostering genuine conversations and engagement and can also be personalised for added relevance and impact.

Why introduce chat?

• A way to immediately engage with a prospect or customer when they want to talk to you.
• They enable you to learn quickly about a pain point.
• They provide a mechanism for you to demonstrate empathy and immediacy.
• Introduction of a clear call to action.
• By incorporating links, buttons and more content, you can nurture and take leads further.

Conclusion

Sales enablement is set to become increasingly common practice in growth-orientated organisations, but implementing it doesn't need to be overwhelming. By fostering a culture of cross-functional collaboration amongst teams, using the right tools, keeping processes simple, and setting realistic, achievable goals, you can accelerate your sales strategy and yield greater sales success.

Want to know more?

Our Sales Enablement eBook can help you understand why sales enablement is now widely used, how to recognise where your organisation sits in levels of sales process maturity, seven top trigger events that create company demand for sales enablement, key questions and answers, benefits for marketing teams, benefits for sales team leaders, top twenty sales enablement tools…and more.

What are you waiting for?

Download the ebook or book a call-back to begin a conversation about how sales enablement can be made to work for your organisation.