Why Your Business Needs Sales Enablement

There’s no question about it: digital is the new normal and this fact is fast impacting the buying and selling process in today’s rapidly-shifting digital marketplace. Once upon a time, only the biggest, most established companies had prominent visibility, but today’s buyer has unlimited access to the latest market trends and intelligence available in the palm of their hand (literally). And with everything moving at a rapid pace, companies are more compelled than ever to improve their sales process in order to stay relevant and competitive. 

But shifting to an agile and engaged sales process isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires organizations to equip their reps with the right tools, content, and processes in order to drive success. That’s why so many companies are turning to sales enablement to increase rep knowledge, improve prospect relationships, and grow their bottom line.

According to the 2018 “Sales Enablement Report” by CSO Insights, the percentage of salespeople achieving quota improved by 10.6%, which is an improvement of 22.7%. In these extraordinary times, companies can’t afford to miss out on a strategy that yields those kinds of results. 

But the benefits of proper sales enablement go beyond just growing your revenue. It also facilitates a multitude of business benefits across your organization, like:

Keeping Your Sales Team Informed

With a constantly shifting marketplace and selling landscape, it’s vital that your reps are armed with the latest knowledge and information about your industry and the issues affecting companies in the space. A successful program empowers your team to absorb essential information and content so they are adequately prepared to deal with a prospect and offer value. Proper sales enablement allows you to ensure all reps are getting consistent messaging about your company’s products, services, messaging, and overall positioning, so they can more effectively engage prospects across multiple channels at different stages in the sales life cycle. 

Synthsizing External Teams

Thre’s no doubt that, for a sales program to be effective, there needs to be efficient cross-collaboration between sales and marketing. In fact, a survey revealed that, on average, about a third of the assets reps need to service the customer journey come from marketing. 

But the truth is, it’s very rare they are working with marketing alone–oftentimes sales is connected with teams across the entire company. That’s why it’s so critical to include “implementing a proper sales enablement portal” on your strategy’s priority list. By setting up a hub where teams across the company can store and share trusted information, you reduce the overall chaos and disorganization that can accompany a high volume of assets coming in from multiple places, ensuring that the best information consistently flows to the sales team. This allows your reps to spend less time looking for the right content, reduces redundant communication threads, and allows marketing and sales enablement to control the accuracy, quality, and consistency of the information being shared with reps.

Getting More from New Talent

No matter what area of an organization you’re in, finding, retaining, and properly onboarding new talent can be difficult. But sales teams also have to contend with a few unique roadblocks, namely:

• It takes and average of 10 months or more for a new sales rep to be fully productive and;
• “The average sales turnover rate is 35%, compared to an average turnover rate for all industries of 13%. In other words, sales turnover rate is nearly triple the average employee turnover rate,” according to HubSpot.

With increasing competition and control shifting to buyers, it’s more important than ever to build a sales team that is engaged and committed to representing your company and products. A proper sales enablement platform not only gives your reps the information they need to be successful but can also play a critical role in rep success from the moment you hire them. 

65% of employees believe the quality of training and learning opportunities positively influences their engagement so it’s easy to understand why the most forward-thinking organizations are using sales enablement solutions to build full-scale onboarding and training programs that set new talent up for success. The most versatile and robust platforms allow you to easily establish training tracks, integrate them with tests and quizzes, and end up becoming a resource reps can easily refer back to later. 

Data-Driven Decision-Making

It’s a well-known truth: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And while every leader will tout the advantages of enabling sales with the right tools, knowledge, and guidance, many organizations are still absent any properly-defined sales process or way to effectively measure it. 

In today’s data-driven world, it’s not enough to just have a strategy and infrastructure in place, you also need informative analytics that can empower you to make smarter decisions for your team and your business. A formal sales enablement structure should include a tool that not only tells stakeholders what is working (and what is not), helps quantify success in real dollars, and gives insight into key metrics like:

• Who is accessing the content
• What they are accessing
• How long they engaged with it
• How effective the content was 
• If the content translated to a sale

Data doesn’t lie: when sales teams create and distribute content that is meaningful to their audience, they are radically more effective. Sadly, many platforms say they offer this type of in-depth reporting but, oftentimes, the capabilities come up short. You’ll want to find a solution that not only allows you to generate custom reports but also integrates effectively with existing programs in your tech stack like Salesforce so you get the most holistic picture of the impact your content is having as possible. 

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Would you like to learn more about how CircleHD’s sales enablement software can help your team deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time? We’d love to speak with you. Let’s talk.