You want to fire up your marketing team, empower your sales team and maximize revenue growth for your business. How? Through sales enablement. With these best practices, you can implement sales enablement and help your sales team close more of those leads that your marketing team is bringing in.
For a quick recap on what sales enablement is, check out our blog here.
Sales Enablement Best Practices
1. First, get a sales enablement team.
Sales enablement is a team effort; there’s no way around that fact. To effectively implement sales enablement, you need to make sure you have the proper support.
Get buy-in from both sales, marketing, and your sales enablement project leader to bring them all together. Designate an authoritative sales enablement champion who understands the cause and is dedicated to sales and marketing alignment. This will go a long way - especially towards our next best practice.
2. Set sales enablement goals.
If your sales enablement team has leadership and buy-in, set measurable and attainable goals for them to work towards. You’re measuring successes, failures and efficiencies in other aspects of your business, so why not sales?
Set goals for key performance indicators (KPIs) like:
- Lead conversion rates
- New opportunities
- Deals closed
- Revenue
- Up-sell dollars closed from current clients
Basically, everyone working on your sales enablement initiative should know how they are being held accountable and what they are responsible for. These may change over time, but give you a great foundation for accountability.
PRO TIP: Use sales enablement tools like HubSpot or Engagio to track these metrics and more.
3. Allocate resources to help achieve your goals.
You will also want to make sure that you are clear about how you want your team to achieve these KPIs. Setting goals will help make sure that everyone’s time and energy is allocated to the right tasks and everyone is working towards the same goals. You want to clearly define tasks and objectives like:
- Team roles and responsibilities: Make sure your sales team is spending the majority of its time on selling-related activities.
- Regular sales enablement review meetings: Sales and marketing should be involved in these meetings for transparent communication.
- Training and sales process implementation: Are your sales reps well-trained in content marketing, the product they are selling and effective sales strategies?
- Content creation and optimization: Marketing should be continuously creating and changing content based on feedback from sales.
You should consider looking into creating an incentives program for sales and marketing to help motivate your teams by better defining and implementing your sales enablement initiatives.
4. Analyze your sales enablement results
For your sales team to succeed, they need feedback on what is and isn’t working from prospecting, to close and retention. Where in the sales funnel are leads dropping off? What content is working best? What forms of communication are most effective?
PRO TIP: Reach out to the clients your sales team didn’t close and ask them why they did not decide to do business with you.
For your marketing team to succeed, they also need feedback. The sales team spends the most time face-to-face with your prospects and can give great insight into your personas' pains and challenges, what motivates them and key messaging that may resonate with them.
Questions about other sales enablement best practices?
We know that setting up sales enablement can be time-consuming and foreign, but trust us, it's worth it. Once you start pulling in leads you will get a streamlined process for closing them, which feeds directly to your revenue generation. These are sales enablement best practices for kickstarting your initiative and we hope you found them helpful. If you have questions about getting your sales enablement program started or about what you can be doing better, let us know! We're always happy to help.
