What is sales enablement? How does it really affect your business? As CRM specialists, StormSpace can advise you on a bespoke sales enablement programme that will help you grow your business, but first, let’s unpack what this all means. 

Sales enablement is a business strategy that incorporates relevant tools, information, and training aimed at equipping your sales team with the resources needed to be more effective. There’s really no limit to what you can include in your sales enablement approach, so long as it provides your team with what they need to convert leads into sales.

When correctly employed, particularly through the support of a CRM specialist who can take this concept from buzzword to business growth, the results of sales enablement are remarkable. 

Let’s explore what an effective enablement programme looks like and why this is a vital part of any business’ growth strategy.

Why Sales Enablement is More Important Than Ever

Before sales enablement hit the boardroom, increasing sales productivity traditionally boiled down to hiring the right talent, training them up, setting targets, monitoring performance, and then sitting back to enjoy the increased revenue. That was the simple, straightforward sales empowerment strategy of old that many still implement today. The trouble is that this method resulted in consistently missed targets, fewer sales, low morale, and an increasing sales employee turnover. It was and is inadequate.

It has become apparent that every part of the sales funnel, including lead generation, content, pitch and closing should be intentionally primed for success, a feat made achievable through the implementation of an effective sales enablement strategy. An approach that provides your business as a whole and your sales people in particular with the knowledge, autonomy, and data needed to successfully meet their targets and drive sales revenue – and do so in way that is scalable and repeatable. 

Key Reasons to Implement Sales Enablement

The obvious answer is to use sales enablement to make more sales, and while this is certainly the case, the benefits are more than just an increase in customers. There are many more ways that this strategy can grow your customer base, and in turn, grow your business. 

1. Intelligent Buyer Interactions

One of StormSpace’s strengths lies in helping our customers unlock invaluable data, including buyer insights, interests, personas, behaviours, pain points, and more. This is the kind of information that equips your sales team to strategise the best way to reach out to their leads, communicate with them when it’s the best time to do so, and customise their messaging to their unique needs and interests.

2. Long-Standing, Lasting Customer Engagement

The random approach to following up with leads is invariably ineffective and a waste of your team’s time. After all, contact with someone who knows your name and is familiar with your needs, motivations, and concerns is undoubtedly going to have a better chance at selling you something than if you were to be put through the excruciating experience of a generic pitch.

Through relevant data and analytics steered through the lens of sales enablement, your team can continually nurture qualified leads by providing them with relevant information, insights, and value based on their unique needs. Essentially, developing lasting and meaningful relationships over time that will consistently bear fruit.

3. Increased Collaboration Between Departments

It’s a truth universally acknowledged by anyone dealing with sales enablement that even those who are not directly in sales must be considered as a vital part of sales support. Sales enablement greatly reduces the gap between departments, allowing them to function more easily as a team operating on the same page – especially sales and marketing. When these two departments in particular work together to share knowledge and use CRM data to brainstorm the best possible information that will resonate with a lead’s needs, they become an unstoppable force. 

With top level support and our expert guidance on how to combine these true data sets, you’ll be able to eliminate inconsistencies across the business, and function as a unit to engage more leads and increase conversion rates.

4. Shorter Sales Cycles

Inevitably, the sales cycle becomes shorter when your sales team spends less time looking for information. With the latest data at their fingertips and real-time access to resources, sales people are able to reduce the length of the sales cycle and increase sales efficiency. This drives increased revenue for the company and supports the big-picture goals in your business.

5. Guaranteed Consistent Brand Messaging

Every single person in your sales team and indeed your business, must work from the same playbook, because while it’s generally the sales people who close the deals, anyone can land the blow that loses a customer. 

Regardless of whether your operations are spread over one office or multiple locations, sales enablement provides everyone with clarity on the most up-to-date information on your target market, product, and sales processes. This eliminates inconsistencies in your brand’s messaging across the company, enables team members to build expertise and engage more leads, win more sales, and drive more revenue. 

What goes into an effective sales enablement strategy? // Tools, Processes, and Technologies To Empower Sales Teams

Without sales enablement, your team is likely to be less effective and will struggle to reach their targets, thus compromising business growth. But when everything that could help counts as sales enablement, how do you deliberately create an intuitive strategy that helps your sales team do their job more effectively?

When we help customers to develop their customised sales enablement strategy, our approach looks at strategy, tools, training, and testing, among other key features.

1. Sales Enablement Strategy

It all starts with strategy – one that is intentionally designed to bring everyone in the company on board to create an internal culture of closing, and to increase predictable sales results through the implementation of intuitive enablement services. We ensure that these specific services are selected according to their business type, growth objectives, and importantly, their customers’ ideal journey through the sales funnel.

2. Sales Enablement Tools

An invaluable part of this strategy are the tools that you choose. Any tools that are included in your sales enablement programme must serve both your internal and external customers. Namely, your internal customers are your employees who must be able to understand and use the tools at their disposal to win more business. Simultaneously, these tools must also focus on the customer, supporting their needs regardless of where they are in your sales funnel. 

This necessitates using true and accurate CRM data as a cornerstone to provide your team with a laser focus on who your customers are, what they need, when they need it, and how they best consume information so that they can act effectively and successfully. 

3. Sales Enablement Training

Too often we see wasted capital on software and marketing collateral that employees don’t understand, don’t use, and don’t believe in. Even the best CRM tools are useless, for all the good they are capable of, if your teams won’t take advantage of them. That’s why training and readily available, supportive content is of the utmost importance. The use of tools, software, and the very approach itself must be explained through ongoing training to make sure that your team knows what resources are available, what their purpose is, and importantly, how to use them to their full advantage.

4. Sales Enablement Testing

It’s essential to track the use of the tools and content made available to the team through regular reporting, not just to verify the usage and buy-in by employees but to make sure that what you’ve implemented is working. This enables you to explore the need for further training, tweaks to the systems, and even adding assets as your team adapts and improves.

Talk to Us About Your Sales Enablement Needs 

It’s certainly a rewarding feeling to win new business, but the defeat experienced when those long hours are wasted and the deal is lost can be worse. Our goal at StormSpace is to help you implement a successful sales enablement strategy so that your sales team can be more effective. We are well versed in providing sales teams with customised CRM software tools that can help align your departments, provide your teams with a collateral library of accurate, relevant data to keep your departments on the same page, and advise you on how to drive lead generation and grow your business.

Chat with us and let us detail the dedicated sales enablement support that you can expect with a real CRM specialist like StormSpace.