The Only B2B Sales Enablement Guide You’ll Ever Need
You’ve got an incredible solution to offer your clients. You’ve built a powerful lead-generation system, but something’s not right. The sales aren’t flowing. There isn’t an obvious problem you can solve — the issue feels more… systemic.
- Are you struggling to adapt to today’s digital-first, circular buyer journey?
- Do your sales and marketing teams frequently trade blame for sluggish sales?
- Is it difficult to convert the data you collect into actionable insights?
- Are you experiencing challenges developing and using buyer personas and ICPs?
Download TPM’s Complete Guide to B2B Sales Enablement
B2B Sales Enablement Contents
What is Sales Enablement?
First things first: what the heck are we even talking about when we say sales enablement?
Why is Sales Enablement Important?
Remember the days when buyers moved neatly down the sale funnel, identifying themselves early as prospects so that sales teams could make contact and answer all their questions? (Yeah, me neither. But it happened, apparently.)
By the time today’s sales reps engage with prospects, those potential customers know a lot more about the company than reps do about them. They’re already armed with the knowledge and questions to expose every flaw in your solution. The old sales tactics and marketing materials won’t cut it. Sales enablement is about arming your team with new tools. The challenge is multiplied in the B2B space, where decisions are made by teams of people, each of whom has their own goals, objections, and challenges to address.
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What Is Sales Enablement?
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How to Build a Sales Enablement Framework
Building a Sales Enablement Framework
Recognizing the value of sales enablement is an important first step. But once you do, where do you start? Your sales enablement strategies will evolve as your goals change, but these three things should always be top of mind as you build and iterate your system.
People
Teams and third-party agencies required to support the strategy
Processes
The shared systems that align sales and marketing teams, create accountability, and set goals to measure the success of the strategy
Technology
The tools that support sales enablement processes, automate manual tasks, and free up time to spend on high-value sales enablement activities
The form your framework takes will depend on your organization’s sales enablement maturity level — teams where enablement tasks are largely a side quest for marketing will not be jumping into the same strategies as companies with a dedicated sales enablement team.
Once you’ve identified where you stand on the maturity scale, you can begin building your framework (with people, processes, and technology in mind) around these five key pillars:
- Collaboration across all customer-facing teams
- Strategies to ensure all teams deliver consistent support and service
- Automation to create repeatable processes
- Development of key sales skills
- Creation of content and tools that add value to every customer interaction
Identifying Your Most Likely Customers
Understanding which prospects are most likely to buy — and keep buying — from you is a pretty vital part of sales enablement. Trying to be everything to everyone, regardless of whether your solution meets their needs, is a recipe for failure and frustration. Identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) can help you refine your offering so that it offers maximum value to your target audience.
How to Build an ICP
Start gathering data on your best customers. Dig into your CRM, ERP, win/loss analyses, and marketing interviews to start building a picture of your ideal customers.
Who are your best customers?
They could be the ones who buy the most, have stayed the longest, have recommended you the most, or some other factor.
What do they have in common?
Look at demographics like company size, maturity level, revenue, budget, geographic location, industry, etc.
How did they find you?
Did they hear about you from another satisfied customer? On social media? Did they find you through a Google search?
What are their biggest pain points or challenges?
What prompted them to seek you out?
What are their goals?
What do they hope to achieve by working with you or leveraging your solution?
Pro Tip: ICPs and buyer personas are not interchangeable. There is a lot of overlap in creating them, but understanding the differences is critical to your sales enablement strategy.
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Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Did You Know? Organizations that prioritize sales and marketing alignment are almost 300% more likely to exceed customer acquisition goals.
The old way of doing things — where marketing owned the top of the funnel and passed leads to sales as they reached the bottom — just won’t cut it in today’s increasingly complex customer journey.
Image source: https://www.facebook.com/hubspot/posts/10159479850589394
Avoid clunky handoffs and overlapping communication that can cost you a sale by regularly checking that your sales and marketing teams are on the same page.
1. Agree on unified goals.
Marketers tend to focus on the long term, while sales looks at short-term goals. Make sure your metrics for success match up.
2. Standardize lead qualification.
Disagreement about what constitutes an SQL can derail all your sales enablement investments.
3. Connect with shared technology.
Use tools that give both sales and marketing a complete picture of buyers’ journeys so vital details are never missed.
4. Empower your team.
Give marketers access to sales team insights so they can refine content and ensure sales reps are adequately trained on how to use marketing assets.
Bouncing Back when Sales Enablement Goes Sideways
Noticing tension between your sales and marketing teams? Is lead handoff clumsy? Are your content and lead generation metrics low? Have you invested in special tools but have yet to see a return on your investment?
Do any of these situations sound familiar? If so, don’t be discouraged.
B2B sales enablement is a complex function with lots of moving parts so if you start noticing it go off track, it’s ok. There’s always a way to get back on course when things go askew. Here are the top four sales problems organizations face when executing their sales enablement strategies.
Sales Content Isn’t Aligned to Buyer Journey
Sales Lacks Support to Successfully Engage with Leads
Automated Processes Too Soon
Sales and Marketing Are Out of Sync
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Optimizing Sales Performance with Sales Enablement
No matter the sales process your organization adopts, sales enablement will fit right in. Acting like a chameleon, established sales enablement activities blend into your organization to play a key role in supporting your sales process.
There are literally dozens of proven sales methodologies and each brings their own qualities to streamline the sales process and build mutually beneficial relationships with customers. Known for their impact on B2B sales, the ChallengerTM sales approach and the Sandler Sales Method are just two examples that illustrate how sales enablement processes contribute to their execution.
Optimizing sales performance is most successful when you keep your prospect top of mind, orienting B2B sales enablement activities around continuously meeting their needs. And no matter your way of selling, we’re confident they will fit right in.
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Creating Sales Enablement Content
Content plays an important role in sales enablement. From eBooks and infographics to competitive intel battlecards and sales playbooks, effective sales enablement content helps salespeople attract and engage buyers, address their concerns, handle objections, and ultimately close sales.
While both marketing and sales enablement teams focus on content creation and management, they differ when it comes to their primary audience. Marketing creates and manages buyer-facing content, whereas sales enablement teams create sales-facing content — with the shared goal of supporting salespeople with what they need to effectively engage with customers.
With this top of mind, consider these best practices when creating B2B sales enablement content.
Map content to buyer journey
Develop a system to store and manage content
Keep content relevant and up to date
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Implementing a Successful Sales Enablement Strategy
Hitting a home run in sales enablement isn’t an easy feat. Implementing a successful B2B sales enablement strategy is like playing a puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving. Key people, processes, and technologies are constantly in flux, and it takes a collective effort to get the pieces to fit together just so.
But just think of the reward on the other side of the challenge:
- Reaching your goals faster with more precision
- Accelerating revenue growth
- Having more confidence in your business decisions
As you carefully plan and build your sales enablement strategy, take these best practices along with you for the ride.
Align Your Teams on a Clear Goal
Focus on the Behavior of Buyers Most Likely to Buy from You
Change the Way Your Company Thinks About Content
Leverage Resources Across the Buyer’s Journey
Nurture Alignment and Collaboration Across Stakeholders
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Set yourself up for success and apply these key elements of successful sales enablement strategies.
Including Partners in Sales Enablement Strategies
In the world of B2B, partners and resellers form the most lucrative distribution channel to help you reach new customers. When channel partner relationships are managed correctly, partners can act as an extension of your organization, helping to quickly expand and grow your audience.
“Partner enablement is the practice of supporting your partners with the proper training, materials, and information to execute your sales process and sell your product or service. The process involves both technical and sales-related elements.”
Although channel partners are effectively an extension of your sales teams, they can often be overlooked when it comes to sales enablement. Effective partner enablement is the key to successful and mutually beneficial relationships.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Sales Enablement
Technology is playing an increasingly important role in sales, and the reality is that it’s not going to change anytime soon. A sales process that used to start with someone knocking at your door, or cold calling you by plucking your name out of a phonebook, is now rooted in strategy and driven by data.
Automation and AI are progressively informing our sales processes, driving real, measurable results for your business. Salesforce found that high-performing teams are 2.8 times more likely to be using AI than underperforming ones — a 76% increase since 2018.
How can you leverage AI to inform key B2B sales enablement processes? Here are a couple of examples:
Lead Generation
Using AI-powered tools, like chatbots and virtual assistants, can help you generate and prospect new leads at scale by finding patterns and extracting insights from your customer data.
Lead Scoring and Qualification
Learning from lead conversion data, AI can help you build smarter lead scoring systems, making it easier to generate best-fit leads and convert them at higher rates.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Diagnostic analytical models of AI and machine learning cluster data in a way that builds a refined vision of your ideal customer — one that becomes increasingly refined as the technology learns over time.
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Artificial intelligence and sales enablement are a match made in heaven.
Metrics, Analysis, and Reporting
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to measuring sales enablement success. What constitutes success differs from one organization to the next. Because of this, it’s important to be specific about what information you want and how you’ll use it to inform your B2B sales enablement strategy.
Positioning your goals around metrics is essential for sales enablement assessments. These goals will help you narrow down the metrics that matter to your organization. When it comes to sales enablement goals, there are many places to start. Anywhere from increasing traffic to your blog and building brand awareness to developing search engine authority.
Once you’ve gathered some data, it’s time to peer into it and draw some conclusions.
- Do sales reps have the content they need when they need it?
- Is it up to date?
- What gets pitched?
- Does it generate revenue?
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Customer Enablement, Retention, and Experience
So we’re here at the so-called end of the road. You’ve landed the sale — the deal is signed, sealed, delivered, and you’re celebrating over a single malt Scotch whisky. But…is this really it? What happens next?
If you want to retain them as your customer, this isn’t “it.” The sale is merely a milestone in the buyer’s journey. This is especially true in B2B sales and subscription-based business models which rely on renewals and product releases to sustain growth.
Customer enablement is an umbrella term that captures the customer experience, ensuring your customers have everything they need to feel satisfied with their purchase. It exists as programs and will look different depending on the maturity level of the organization. Customer enablement can be as simple as a post-sales marketing plan to a full-blown cross-functional customer success team.
How does customer enablement fit with B2B sales enablement? Well, sales enablement is a strategic, collaborative discipline designed to accelerate revenue growth — from both new and existing customers. Customer enablement is a process that supports this discipline.
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What Should You Do Next?
The strategy you build using our B2B sales enablement framework should be treasured. It’s singlehandedly one of the most important documents for your organization’s success.
Once you have the framework in hand, what’s next?
Well, that will depend on your organization’s immediate needs and business goals. Here are a couple of suggestions.
Work towards team alignment
Start a regular meeting with team leads, with the sole purpose of opening the lines of communication. Sales and marketing alignment is a non-negotiable part of sales enablement.
Take an inventory of your sales enablement content
Do you have content for every stage of the buyer’s journey? How is it performing? Can sales teams easily find what they need when they need it?
Consider assigning someone to own sales enablement activities
A third-party agency or another stakeholder that sits between sales, marketing, human resources, and customer success can act as a neutral party.
Adopt a sales enablement tool
Adopt a sales enablement tool Once your teams are in lockstep and have firmly grasped key sales enablement processes, it might be time to start using a sales enablement tool to automate and streamline the process.
And so much more. But remember that B2B sales enablement isn’t a one-off strategy — it’s a discipline that needs constant adjustment as target markets evolve, products change, and businesses pivot.
Get the Complete Guide to B2B Sales Enablement
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