4 Sales Enablement Tactics You Shouldn’t Overlook

Sales enablement allows teams to gain insight and improve effectiveness. Equipped with the best tools and methodologies, teams can filter data and leverage metrics to ensure that their reps are empowered to sell—always and from anywhere. Sounds great, right? Well, enablement does demand some finesse. It requires teams to implement both the right techniques and the right technologies into their processes.

Fortunately, enablement is possible for teams of all sizes. To make the most of sales enablement, here are four tactics you should never overlook.

1. Empowering Sales Teams with the Right Content

Sales relies on your marketing team for content. And not just any content. They need relevant, up-to-date material that drives results. That’s why your content must be connected around the buyer’s journey and sales funnel. As you develop digital communications, ensure that content is usable for both your end users and reps.

While features and benefits are the bread and butter of your product, content and collateral should focus on your prospects. How so? They should directly address the pain points based around stages of the buyer’s journey along the path to purchase.

Sales enablement is about getting relevant content to your reps at the right time.

However, according to research, 65 percent of reps can’t find content to send to prospects. Enablement tools can align content with the buying cycle and help your reps be more effective with their communication efforts.

2. Providing Sales Teams with Recommended Next Steps and Alignment Methods

There’s an element of consistency that should be incorporated into your best practices of following up with customers. To better track the success of your sales efforts, it’s essential to define the following:

• The steps your reps should take
• The number of touches you require
• The methods of reaching out
• The collateral they should leverage

Sales enablement tools can track engagement through metrics such as email activity, page time, and demo requests. They also track content consumption around specific buying stages. Your content should empower your sales team to offer features and benefits to address these pain points. Team-based selling, supported by collaboration tools, enables both departments to gain a 360-degree view of your customers.

3. Enabling Reps to Repurpose Email and Marketing Campaigns

It’s possible for sales reps to serve as stand-in marketers. This may be a frightening notion in a regulated industry, but if done right it allows reps flexibility while remaining compliant. By leveraging sales enablement tools to provide marketing-approved templates, reps can easily send relevant content to prospects. Sales reps can repurpose simple, on-brand templates to follow up with prospects, and provide them with appropriate resources to educate them along the sales cycle.

It’s possible to integrate this methodology across all your marketing campaigns and distribution channels, including social, email, and web. Templates for events, demos, and webinars are especially useful because reps can invite and follow-up with contacts with very little effort. Automation not only improves the productivity of your reps—it ensures that your email and marketing materials are aligned with your brand.

4. Automating—and Personalizing—Communications

Sales reps send a lot of emails to prospects. And templates can save time. However, it’s still crucial to personalize these efforts to optimize open and conversion rates.

That’s where enablement steps in. Sales enablement tools automate the process with personalized messaging that caters to personas. For example, reps create lead nurturing workflows designed to improve follow-ups. Lead scoring and lifecycle stages qualify and prioritize high-value leads. This results in less manual work required by sales reps, which enables them to focus more on the day-to-day management of leads. Plus, this allows them to engage only with sales-ready prospects.

Enablement tools also integrate email communication and systems that store data and track prospect activity. This enables reps to provide quality one-on-one time with prospects and relevant dialogue based around interests. To reiterate, templates and personalization tokens allow reps to send emails with personalized information to relevant prospects.

Conclusion

Syncing your CRM to auto-populate data, including content consumption, allows teams to glean insights from detailed analytics—which, in turn, empowers sales teams to communicate effectively and efficiently.

Most sales teams use Salesforce to host data, closed-won cycles, and customer touch points. However, many systems are underutilized and outdated. Native, end-to-end tools make the most of your pre-existing Salesforce efforts. Enablement tools unlock the value in CRM by providing an end-to-end platform that increases your go-to-market sales processes.