Sales enablement is a discipline that helps you increase sales by bridging the gap between marketing and sales. When you work with sales enablement, you optimize processes to make the sales process more efficient and increase interaction with marketing. In this article, we look at how you can get started with sales enablement:
- What is sales enablement
- Benefits of sales enablement
- What is a sales enablement strategy
- Tips for your sales enablement
- How to get started with sales enablement
- Get sales enablement through Radiant
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is about refining and improving the sales process to boost sales effectiveness. It’s a branch that spans a wide range and includes people, processes and technology to succeed.
At the center of sales enablement is the goal of equipping the sales team with everything they need to do their job better. This includes sales training, synergy with marketing, an optimized CRM system for their needs and all this should support your sales strategy. A salesperson who is well prepared and has the necessary resources at hand is more efficient and achieves better results – and that’s what sales enablement is all about.
An effective sales enablement strategy requires insight into the customer journey and where the sales team can add value. An analytical view of customer data and sales performance is essential in order to tailor sales messages and materials to the ever-changing market. A concrete example of this could be that several accountants have had to integrate KYC into their sales processes due to increasing demands for this.
Strategically, sales enablement is an ongoing process that ensures sales efforts are aligned with the company’s larger goals and ambitions for growth. It involves a dedicated effort to link sales and marketing efforts, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development, and using technology tools effectively to support the overall sales process and customer relationships. Sales enablement should be an integral part of your growth plan or go to market strategy.
What does sales enablement consist of?
Sales enablement is all about making it easier for sales to do their job to perfection. There are several ways you can optimize this. Among other things, you can:
- Create sales training that can help you practice objections, gain better product knowledge and insight into new sales pitches.
- Optimize your CRM system so that it is more efficient for the sales department to use in their sales work. You can read about CRM systems for Sales enablement here
- Synergy between marketing – if you can get marketing and sales to work more closely together in terms of handover of leads and content, it will help sales greatly.
- Ensure that sales has the necessary data to do its job. For example, if you work with ESG, it’s essential for sales to have the annual report so they can quickly assess whether the company meets the CSRD requirements.
These are four of the things sales enablement consists of. However, it’s important to keep in mind that every company is different, so it will also be different which actions you should use in your sales enablement strategy.
Overall, sales enablement is about removing time spent on non-value-adding tasks and ensuring more time is spent on value-adding tasks.
Benefits of working with sales enablement
The purpose of sales enablement is to make sales more effective. The benefits of having a department or partner working with sales enablement for you are therefore closely related to sales. The benefits include:
- Implementing sales enablement strategies can improve your sales team’s efficiency and win-rate.
- By ensuring a stronger connection between sales and marketing, sales efforts become more focused and targeted.
- Better lead management, especially in qualification, can speed up the sales process.
- Analyzing the market and dedicating more time to preparatory work can result in a better sales pitch and/or additional sales.
- One of the areas to work on in sales enablement is sales automation to free up more time for your salespeople to be on the phone and communicate more with your target audience.
- Shorter sales cycles are a natural consequence of better preparation and more precise sales strategies.
- A well-executed sales enablement effort is directly reflected in the company’s finances with increased sales volume and improved closing rates.
Keep in mind that the above benefits are general and you can easily experience other benefits from having a sales enablement department or partner. However, we have helped more than 100 companies with sales enablement and see 9/10 experience the above benefits – which is why we have chosen them.
To get in touch with a sales enablement expert, contact us.
How to get started with sales enablement
Planning plays a key role in ensuring that a sales enablement strategy is implemented well. Here are some key points to kick-start an effective strategy:
- Understand sales processes and the customer buying journey
- Define necessary sales tools
- Choose the right platforms and systems
- Implement targeted and continuous training
- Measure efficiency and improve
By following these steps, companies can ensure successful implementation of their sales enablement strategy, which will help improve sales performance and strengthen their market position in 2024 and beyond.
Contact our sales enablement expert Malthe.
What is a sales enablement strategy?
A sales enablement strategy is your toolbox to optimize processes with the aim of strengthening the sales team’s effectiveness towards its goals.
In any sales enablement strategy, providing salespeople with the necessary tools is fundamental. This ranges from sales materials to sales coaching, ensuring they are well equipped for the task. Some of the most important tools in a sales enablement strategy are:
- Revenue operations (RevOps)– can be done in a CRM system
- b2b lead generation – with inbound marketing
- Segmenting your target audience
- Effective B2B sales to manage leads
There is no such thing as a sales enablement strategy in generic terms, just as there is a marketing strategy that focuses on inbound or outbound, for example. On the contrary, sales enablement is more complex and the strategy requires deep insight into your processes, target audience and internal resources to define what needs to be optimized. However, it can be said that a good sales enablement strategy aims to make sales more efficient.
Sales enablement is a dynamic process that requires continuous learning and adaptation. It’s about adjusting the strategy in line with changes in the market and the development of the sales team. Using data analytics and feedback ensures that sales enablement initiatives remain current and effective, which supports the building of lasting customer relationships.
Tips for working with sales enablement
Sales enablement isn’t easy, so we’ve put together some tips on how to get started with it:
- Map the customer journey and understand what your customers’ needs are and when – this way you can ensure sales has the right information throughout the customer journey and increase your relevance Read more about customer journey mapping.
- Create synergy between marketing and sales – this is something everyone in sales enablement preaches because the returns are so high.
- Streamline and collect all your data and activity in one CRM system
- Break down the sales process and optimize each part
- Ensure you educate and train your sales team
These are tips for your sales enablement and should not be seen as a one-off task, on the contrary, sales enablement is a longer process that requires time to succeed.
Involve sales and marketing
To strengthen promotional initiatives, it’s crucial that sales and marketing work closely together. This interaction ensures that materials and messages are aligned with the customer’s needs throughout the buying journey, improving the customer experience and strengthening your brand. Collaboration facilitates the exchange of important information needed to adapt strategies according to the market and customer behavior. Setting common goals and KPIs, as well as maintaining open dialog and feedback, ensures that sales efforts are targeted and effective, which is crucial for success.
Invest in a CRM to get started with sales enablement
To maximize sales department output, it makes sense to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that can manage and improve customer relationships.
- Choose the right CRM solution: Read about the 10 best CRM systems
- Thorough training of employees
- Integration with existing IT infrastructure
- Leveraging CRM data
- Automation and data analytics
By following these steps, companies can ensure they get the most out of their CRM investment, which can ultimately lead to improved sales results and a stronger bottom line.
Sales enablement tasks you can start now
Below we have gathered some of the most essential tasks in sales enablement – which you can start right away. It’s always not just a good idea, but essential, to talk to sales when prioritizing and starting the tasks below. Put yourself in their shoes, understand their everyday life (maybe sit next to them for a few days) and find out what they are missing in their everyday life.
Map the sales process
Map your sales process to identify which stages it consists of and where your sales team spends their time. That way you can see which parts can be automated, cut out and made smarter. Sit next to sales, talk to them and discuss their process with them – and you’re good to go.
Read more about the sales process.
Use of data
One of the most important tasks in sales enablement is to ensure sales has the necessary data and doesn’t have to go out and find it elsewhere. Therefore, make sure they have the data directly in your CRM system so they can focus on sales work. To get started with this, talk to sales about what data they currently use and what data could be valuable to have in the future.
If you use HubSpot, you can quickly enrich your CRM with, for example, LassoX or Vainu.
Ensure an efficient sales pipeline
A sales pipeline is the stages a warm lead (a potential customer) goes through before becoming a customer. A typical sales pipeline can be
- Meeting
- Follow-up meeting
- Formalization of offers
- Presentation of offers
- Contract sent
- Won / lost
By ensuring you don’t have unnecessary steps in your sales pipeline, you save the customer time and reduce the ‘burden’ they face to get started. In other words, you reduce the chance of losing the customer.
Read more about sales pipeline
Get sales enablement – with Radiant
At Radiant, we specialize in B2B sales. We work with Sales Enablement on a daily basis for a wide range of companies in Denmark. We typically help companies to:
- Creating Synergy: between marketing, sales and service
- Create playbooks: pitches, USPs, VPs, templates adapted to your target audience and product
- Setting up gamification: purpose in trivial tasks
- Dashboards: performance culture and insights
- Defining ICP: match customer needs and messages
- Create segmentation: target lists with contact info
- Sales training: in prospecting, objections, sales process and using HubSpot
- AI: using ChatGPT4 & HubSpot for sales & CS
All with the aim of making your sales more effective. We have gathered all this under Sales Excellence in one of the packages.
Meet three of our sales enablement experts
Malthe
Malthe has concrete experience with sales enablement through his work with CRM setup with focus on data and revenue operations – marketing, sales & customer success. The deep understanding of a best practice commercial strategy and setup has been cemented in over 50 CRM implementation and transformation projects within NGO, FinTech, GovTech, SaaS, Professional Services, etc.
Christoffer
Christoffer has many tasks within Sales Enablement and B2B sales in his work as Partner and Finance lead. Here he is responsible for creating the foundation for effective growth for our finance customers in Radiant. Furthermore, Christoffer works daily with:
- Ensuring a streamlined sales process
- Create an overview of activities to assess strategic initiatives
- Create the foundation for sales work to have the best conditions
Simone
Simone has a more technical approach to Sales Enablement, working with processes and CRM
Among other things, she has experience with how HubSpot can be adapted and used to optimize customer journeys across industries. She is dedicated to the three primary areas of HubSpot – marketing, sales and service – both individually and in interaction with each other.
