4 Top Sales Enablement Solutions for Successful Organizations
- Dean Ara
- January 31, 2022
We’ve all seen it. Sales reps pushing leads to the brink just to close the deal; marketing oblivious to prospect concerns; teams refusing to agree on lead qualification — all the while scaring away customers and being pushed out the door.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. You get insights into where your strategy went wrong and reflect on how it could have been done differently. Failure is often seen as a bad thing, especially when it affects customer retention and the bottom line. But the way we view failure needs to change.
Failure makes better teams. We learn far more when things go wrong. Adam Grant — author, Wharton’s top professor, and Harvard graduate — says, “We don’t need to celebrate failure. We just need to normalize it.”
Implementing a complex function like sales enablement will take multiple tries to get right, but don’t be discouraged. We’ve put together a list of the top 4 sales problems and solutions organizations face when executing their enablement strategies to get that clear 20/20 vision.
4 Top Sales Enablement Solutions for Successful Organizations
1. Align Sales Content to Buyer Journey
Sales content should be aligned for every part of the B2B buyer journey. Your buyer’s definition of value changes depending on where they are in the journey, so you need to adjust your content accordingly. If there are any gaps in your assets, it could cost you the sale.
Sales enablement content covers assets for the decision stage of the buyer journey (aka the bottom of the funnel). These are leads who are ready to buy; they know they want your solution but last-minute concerns bubble to the surface before they make a final decision. Sales must ask informative, insightful, and provocative questions to get customers to reexamine their challenges and priorities.
Leads in the decision stage need different content that enables them to say yes and make the purchase:
- Competitive positioning documents
- Free trials and assessments
- Demos
- Reference architectures
- Proposals
Signs to look for
- Your content does not answer prospect questions and concerns
- Your content engagement and lead generation metrics are low (e.g., time spent on page, conversions, website traffic, etc.)
Top sales enablement solutions
- Create content that helps people solve problems that are related to the products you sell
- Get sales involved in content creation – interview them about what questions they get during the sales process and create content that directly addresses those questions
2. Provide Sales with Support to Successfully Engage with Leads
Do your sales reps know how to take enablement data and translate it into a conversation a lead would care about? Are your sales reps too busy with day-to-day operations to have meaningful conversations with prospects? These are common B2B sales problems.
Sales reps are often inadequately trained to use sales enablement content. Gartner research finds that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month. Turn that statistic around and create opportunities for consistent team development.
Make sure your sales training is centered around building skills for customer-facing situations in real time. Evaluate your training efforts through real-world applications, time-spaced repetition, and coaching. Performance reviews and pipeline analysis are not an effective way to coach your reps. Focus on building skills and confidence and you will see greater and more sustainable results.
Signs to look for
- Sales reps don’t understand the new buyer journey — they do not know which questions buyers have and how to answer them to keep leads moving down the funnel
- Sales reps feel disconnected from the sales process
- Sales cannot find content quickly enough when they are speaking with leads in real time
Top sales enablement solutions
- Create opportunities to build your sales reps’ confidence by teaching them to sell based on value
- Implement regular training to fill the knowledge gaps around customer pain points
- Ask what is holding them back from being successful – then do your best to fix it
3. Know When and Which Processes to Automate
Automation works well when sales enablement processes are well established and understood, but initially sales enablement brings up a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. Sometimes what you automate is correct…at the time. But things change. So you have to have a fluid ability to adjust.
Don’t be discouraged though — it takes time to develop a strategy. Maybe you are actively doing research to clarify your buyer persona. Maybe you are collecting customer feedback. Maybe you are figuring out the perfect cadence of communication between your sales and marketing teams. Eventually the bumps and kinks get smoothed out, your team develops experience, and you can start applying good judgment.
Keep your manual processes on track by maintaining a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and your customer. For every problem you encounter, approach it like an experiment and apply the scientific method:
- Have a theory
- Take action
- Evaluate the result, either good or bad
- Identify what you learned
- Apply it to the next problem
It will take some experimentation to figure out the best sales enablement solutions that work for your teams, but it is the most tactical approach. Lacking a strategy behind your sales processes and relying on technology might harm salespeople more than it helps.
Signs to look for
- You’ve invested capital into special tools but you have no idea how to use them
- Your data is a mess and doesn’t give any insights
- Your sales team is trained in your tech solution, but isn’t using it
Top sales enablement solutions
- Set up your sales enablement process without specific tools, then explore tech solutions later to accelerate it
- Maintain a feedback loop between marketing, sales, and your customers
- Get data-driven results by applying the scientific method to every problem
4. Sync Up Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing teams are keystones to sales enablement solutions and the buyer journey as a whole. If they are out of sync, your sales enablement efforts will be lost.
Sales and marketing misalignment is a common problem. Traditionally working from opposite ends of the marketing funnel, they have a reputation of butting heads over messaging and delivery. But with today’s digital buyer journey, marketing plays a bigger role in supporting sales — the majority of B2B buyers’ time is spent researching independently online, with the least amount of time speaking to potential suppliers.
Sales and marketing alignment is more important now than ever before. It helps create impactful assets, closes more deals, and nurtures company growth.
To support sales, marketing must:
- Consistently engage leads
- Educate buyers with content at key moments in their journey
- Nurture and qualify leads
- Be up to date on competition and trends
To support marketing, sales must:
- Disclose content validity
- Share buyer feedback
- Be aware of market dynamics
- Have intel on product capabilities
Signs to look for
- Lead handoff is clumsy and creates tension
- Marketing content is being generated but goes unused by sales
- Your customer and lead data are in different places and don’t give any insights
Top sales enablement solutions
- Agree on lead qualification
- Align teams around a unified goal and set of deliverables
- Look into how both teams are using your tech stack and unify the process
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