What is sales enablement?

How do you ensure you stand out in an increasingly competitive market? You need the best product, sure. But you also need to offer the best customer experience. You need marketing that draws people in and helps them make the right decisions and an engaging, insights-driven sales process. Meanwhile, your customer support organization must exceed expectations, ensure guarantees are delivered and make your customers shout about your services to the rest of the world. If you perform well on all fronts, you distinguish yourself from the competition, increase market share, and boost revenue. But how do you achieve this gold-medal-winning performance? With a strong sales enablement program.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is an approach used to empower your commercial teams with effective processes, key insights, content, and technology to engage prospects and customers and, therefore, win more deals.

• Processes = your sales execution, informed by coaching and training
• Insights = data that tells you what’s working and what’s not
• Content = multimedia resources from blog posts to slide decks to video, designed to engage the buyer at different touchpoints in their journey
• Tech = the digital tools used to gather insights, curate and deliver content, and inform processes

Your company's enablement program needs all of these key elements, but you also need to accept the underlying principles of enablement: An engaged, empowered, and supported buyer makes great purchasing decisions. Great purchasing decisions make happy clients. Happy clients lead to increased revenue.

You could go so far as to say that enablement is more than just a strategy; it’s a state of mind. But that would be cheesy, so we won’t do that.

Why is sales enablement important?

Enablement is a necessary reaction to an increasingly digital landscape. Think about your purchasing habits for a moment. If you’re interested in buying new computers for your department, do you call your IT supplier and ask which one you should buy? Probably not. The chances are you begin your search online, Googling phrases like ‘best laptop for frequent traveler’ or ‘best hybrid for under $1000’. 

You skim articles and read blogs and product reviews to narrow your choices before running price comparisons to see where you can get the best deal. By the time you interact with a seller, you’re already a long way through the buyer journey. That means a sales rep has a lot less opportunity to influence your decision.

Compare this scenario with how your grandparents would have gone about buying, say, a used car (to choose a sales cliché). They might have visited a few used car lots with some idea of the size, model, or price they wanted. 

But it’s unlikely they would have gone armed with all the data you’d have these days about fuel consumption, safety features, or repair costs. Their choice ultimately would have been influenced by the different salespeople they met.

The difference, of course, is the internet. Whereas customers used to rely on sales reps to inform their purchasing, the easy availability of information online has made that role largely redundant. 

Customers and sales reps often begin their relationship from a position of mistrust — a fact for which the used car salesman cliché must take some responsibility. That means sales reps have to work harder to win buyers' trust and add value to have any influence over the customer’s journey.

Enter sales enablement, which aims to give sales reps that value. By empowering them with the tools and strategies they need to help buyers make the right choices, the industry hopes to gradually displace the old clichés. Instead, positioning sellers as allies and consultants.

Why do organizations need sales enablement?

A strong program will:

• Align commercial teams
• Enhance buyer-seller engagement
• Boost revenue
• Increase employee satisfaction
• Align commercial teams

At the heart of every successful enablement program is the recognition that sellers don’t operate alone. They are part of a larger sales team, but they are also one of several departments accountable to the same goal — revenue. All of the customer-facing teams within a company must work together to grow the business. How do they do that? By proving your product or service is what buyers need to overcome their challenges and meet their goals.
For your company to succeed, you need to eliminate sales, marketing, and customer success/account management silos.

Silos spring up when you treat the customer journey as a linear process with carefully delineated responsibilities. Something like this:

• Attract (Clearly marketing’s job, right?)
• Convert (Umm, is this marketing or sales?Depends on how it’s going…)
• Close (Absolutely the sales department’s responsibility, surely?)
• Delight (Customer success all the way.)

But the buyer’s journey is not always linear. And does it make sense to pass the customer along like a baton in a relay race? Aren’t repeat customers worth so much more than new customers? Let’s turn that funnel into a flywheel and see how that looks.

• Attract – Marketing draws customers in with input from sales reps who can also engage with customers directly, thanks to social media. Meanwhile, happy customers talking about their experiences also attract new customers.
• Convert – Marketing and sales use their combined skills and data-driven insights to convert leads.
• Close – Marketing provides backup (think insights and resources) as sales reps close deals. At both the convert and close stages, customer stories play an important role in convincing customers to purchase.
• Delight – Because marketing and sales have guided buyers towards the best solution to their problem, customer success teams aren’t left to deal with buyer’s remorse. With marketing’s support, they can continue providing valuable content, which helps customers get the most out of their product, making them more inclined to buy with you again — and to share their success with other prospects.

Enhance Buyer Engagement

We’ve already established that sellers have limited time to interact with buyers. And to win, that time needs to count. “I’ll get back to you with more information” can’t be part of the conversation.

Revenue teams need to engage buyers with the right personalized content at the right time along the journey. And that content needs to be relevant and compelling enough to help move the deal forward.

Sales Enablement empowers marketers to push the latest content to the entire revenue team in real time. With all content at their fingertips, sellers and success managers can pivot conversations to address whatever topic the buyer or customer cares about most.

Sellers who present directly from a sales application create a streamlined experience for buyers. They can easily package the content presented and share it as a follow-up before the meeting even ends.

They can track content usage (sellers) and consumption (buyers) to establish sales best practices, make content recommendations, and personalize follow-up communications.

Revenue leaders can also identify accounts at risk and help the team prioritize deals based on who is most engaged and, therefore, likely to purchase.

Boost revenue

We’ve already established that sellers have limited time to interact with buyers. And to win, that time needs to count. “I’ll get back to you with more information” can’t be part of the conversation.

Revenue teams need to engage buyers with the right personalized content at the right time along the journey. And that content needs to be relevant and compelling enough to help move the deal forward.

Sales Enablement empowers marketers to push the latest content to the entire revenue team in real time. With all content at their fingertips, sellers and success managers can pivot conversations to address whatever topic the buyer or customer cares about most.

Sellers who present directly from a sales application create a streamlined experience for buyers. They can easily package the content presented and share it as a follow-up before the meeting even ends.

They can track content usage (sellers) and consumption (buyers) to establish sales best practices, make content recommendations, and personalize follow-up communications.

Sellers can also identify accounts at risk and prioritize deals based on who is most engaged and, therefore, likely to purchase.

Increase employee satisfaction

Happy customers serve you well – but they’re much easier to come by when you have happy employees. You know how it is when you walk into a store, and it’s immediately clear whether or not the staff wants to be there. It can have a massive impact on your shopping experience.

If the employees are unhappy, they can’t provide the warm welcome you’re looking for. If they’re happy, you’re more likely to hang around, browse, and even buy things you don’t need – almost as if you’re rewarding their happiness.

B2B sales experiences are not the same, but the impact of being assisted by unhappy staff can be just as damaging. If you, as a buyer, have a problem, you need to talk to someone positive, and proactive — someone who makes you feel heard.

Meanwhile, from a business perspective, the cost of losing employees is high. The task of onboarding new team members is also expensive and time-consuming, not to mention disruptive.

So, how can sales enablement help keep your team members happy? Well, the removal of those siloes can work wonders. When everyone feels supported, there is a greater sense of community. Having tools, data, and resources to get your job done makes day-to-day operations more manageable. Not to mention the satisfaction of helping others — both colleagues and customers — and meeting your goals.

How sales enablement improves processes

How do your salespeople express your brand identity? How do they present your content and prepare for customer meetings? How do they stand up in front of people and tell your brand story?

Can you answer these questions? More importantly, would your sales reps all give you the same answers?

Enablement allows your reps to improve their skills. It also allows businesses to create uniformity across all customer-facing teams in terms of messaging, delivery, and best practice.

Take content, for example. All of your best practices for developing new content, including product messaging, brand tone of voice, etc., should also be passed on to your sales team.

If their presentation style, or worse, the things they communicate are at odds with the content they’re presenting, you’ve got a major problem. The customer won’t know what to believe and is less likely to partner with a business that sends mixed messages.

Training should focus on empowering your sales team with the knowledge, insights, and confidence to sell more. If that means providing them with training on a particular industry they’re selling into, do that. If it means teaching them how to make better use of the CRM, do that. If it’s a course that helps them overcome confidence issues in high-pressure situations, why not? All of these will equip your salespeople to add value for their customers.

How to use insights

Enablement isn’t just about sharing the right content with the right people at the right time. But knowing which is the right content, who are the right people, and when is the right time are questions best answered by data.

Many sales tools capture insights into what content propels buyers through their journey or is most likely to result in conversion from lead to prospect.

Some allow you to capture data and insights on content ROI, customer engagement, and more to support your sales reps and help accelerate sales cycles.

Machine learning enables us to see patterns we wouldn’t typically see and model scenarios previously not modeled. This analysis allows you to be more strategic with all your sales and marketing activities, basing decisions on actual trends and not perceived demand.

Content that empowers everyone

Salespeople have always used content to inform their customers.

Content (e.g., printed product brochures and PowerPoint presentations) has formed the basis of every sales pitch and presentation for every B2B sales meeting ever.

However, that content was not without its downsides. Consider, for example, the number of times a salesperson:

• Handed customers out-of-date brochures;
  Lost flyers in transit;
• Presented off-brand slide decks;
• Went off-message;
• Couldn’t answer a customer’s questions.

Part of this relates to the silo behavior of lone wolf reps. Partly, it’s outdated technology (or lack thereof in the case of printed materials). But it’s also a failing of company cohesion and brand identity. It is an inability to foresee what the customer might want to know. And the responsibility for that failure is on everyone, not just the individual in the meeting.

What should content look like?

Content serves to empower both your salespeople and your customers. Sales reps approach every sales conversation armed with resources and insights to provide value to the customer. The customer gets their questions answered and is able to make a more informed decision about their purchase.

Your buyer has already had the opportunity to peruse all your online content in the research stage of their journey. Now, it’s critical to add to their existing knowledge with insights into how your product or service can solve their challenges. Therefore, content needs to be specific — targeted to the customer, their industry, their concerns, etc. — and engaging.

You’re unlikely to be the only sales rep this customer will see. You’ve got competition and need to stand out from the crowd. In this respect, content plays a huge role in separating you from your competitors and helping you establish a relationship with your customer.

How can sales and marketing collateral help build customer relationships?

Creating valuable content is one way of building customer trust. When you prove that you are there to help customers achieve their goals, customers are more likely to believe in you.

Because we’re all akin to magpies attracted to shiny things, it’s also important to put this content in a format that is:

• Fun to look at
• Easy to read and understand
• Fully on-brand

Trust is an enormously important part of the customer relationship, but a good rapport also needs engagement. If you can find a way to present valuable information in a delightful way, you’re on to a winner. That means no pages full of boring bullet points. Go easy on the graphs. Stick to the pertinent points, lean on visuals and equivalencies where you can, and try not to cram too much in one slide deck.

In terms of branding, your company must have a distinct brand identity to set it apart from its competitors. A strong and consistent brand visible across all your collateral is – even subconsciously – reassuring. Unity across materials, messaging, and company representatives shows your customer that you are a reliable company that will deliver on your promises.

Sales enablement software

Finally, we’re ready to discuss the tech tying all these elements together. Sales enablement tools and software allow you to execute your strategy. Different companies may offer a combination of these tools. But the following is a complete list of the tool types you need for a successful program.

Content management and delivery tools

These tools enable easy management, sharing, and distribution of content. They give marketers control over messaging and sellers the flexibility to curate and customize resources according to their needs.

When content is all in one place and available online or offline, it’s easy to find and use. Marketers no longer have to worry about sales reps using out-of-date assets. These tools also enable marketers to track what content buyers and sellers use and what works and doesn’t so they can optimize accordingly.

Value-based Selling Tools

Buyers need to understand the value your product will bring to their business. Value-based selling tools such as ROI and TCO calculators can help you deliver easily digestible, credible figures that enable customers to visualize that value. These can be used as self-service tools on your website, during meetings, and even to prove realized value to existing customers come renewal time.

Sales Coaching & Training

Scrap ineffective, one-size-fits-all training. It’s the reason less than half of all reps achieve quota. Instead, teach your sales reps what to sell and how to sell it with sales coaching practices that drive long-term behavior change. Record and analyze every conversation to identify trends, coaching opportunities, and insights to close more deals. Use data to understand what behaviors drive quota. Use the insights to uncover your employees' strengths and gaps and coach them to peak sales performance.

Revenue Intelligence

Revenue intelligence solutions gather a variety of data to help revenue leaders manage sales pipeline, forecast, and guide sales execution. Many of these solutions gather a subset of data. But Mediafly's Revenue360 platform captures activity and engagement insights from across the customer journey to give you a holistic view of your sales pipeline. That data includes:

• Sales engagement & activity data
• Content engagement data
• Buyer intent data
• Conversation intelligence data
• Value report data
• Talent intelligence data

Sales enablement best practices

Whether you’re thinking about implementing a sales enablement strategy or already have one underway, it can be challenging to turn theory into action. Sure, you’ve done your reading. You understand what sales enablement is. You can picture how it will help you win more customers and close more deals. But how exactly will it fit within the framework of your organization, and what is the daily work of sales enablement that brings you all that success? 

In this article, we’re going to look at sales enablement best practices, ownership, and how to make a success of your strategy.

I like to think about sales enablement in terms of best practices because it’s a phrase that suggests continual effort. It’s not a one-and-done kind of thing — like migrating from one technology to another. It’s more like exercise. The more you practice, the better you get — and the more you feel the benefit. ‘Practice’ also indicates an expectation of growth and adjustment; you won’t do the same things in the same way forever. You will learn and adapt according to your successes and failures. And every day, you will grow stronger.

Sales enablement best practices revolve around four key principles: content, tools, people, and training. Let’s look at these individually and see what best practice looks like.

Content

Content is the most valuable thing you produce after your product. Actually, it may be even more valuable than your product — because nobody would know about your product without content. 

From webpages to brochures to slide decks and everything in between, content is how you create awareness and build familiarity with your product. In a world where buyers do most of their decision-making before engaging with a sales rep, content helps establish the need your product fulfills, how it works, how it is different than similar products in the market, and why they should buy from you. 

Best practice dictates that you should have content for every stage of the customer journey, from initial discovery to the final decision and beyond. And when you think about the buyer, remember that it is rarely just one individual; it’s a growing group of decision-makers that includes high-level C-Suite perspectives and end-user input. To paraphrase Oprah, You get content! You get content! Everybody gets content!

So, we know content should be tailored to the buyer persona and stage – but what should you write about? We fully subscribe to Marcus Sheridan’s content creation strategy, summed up in the title of his book: They Ask, You Answer.  

Every question your buyers ask can be the basis for content. If you run a print shop, for example, you should be able to answer questions like: 

• Can a brochure have three pages? 
• Are brochures good for advertising?
• Where to find brochure templates in Word?
• Why is a brochure effective?

(And, in case you’re wondering where I got those questions from, I put ‘brochure’ into Answer the Public – you can do the same with your keywords.) Every question deserves a written answer, and the more answers you provide, the better equipped your buyer is to make a decision. What’s more, having established your organization as a reliable source of information, you are far more likely to win the buyer’s trust and become their preferred seller.

Tools

Having the content is one thing. Making it accessible to your buyers and sales reps is something else. That’s one of the ways sales enablement tools can help you.

If you have ever used a content repository like SharePoint or Box to share documents, you’ll know how easily your files can fall into disarray. Before long, everyone is working with different versions — simply creating new copies to suit their needs. The result is a mish-mash of styles and tones, out-of-date information, and the potential for miscommunication. By contrast, specially designed content management and presentation tools help you organize content more intuitively, making it easy for sellers to find what they're looking for in every scenario and share or present it to buyers. 

Marketers control the source documents, while sellers can flexibly create personalized content collections or customize presentations to suit specific buyers. Moreover, content engagement analytics, including what content is shared, when, and with whom, are captured so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. The insights feed a data-driven approach to content creation that ensures marketers aren't wasting time creating content sellers won't use. Instead, you can invest more in what you know drives sales.

Meanwhile, value selling tools such as ROI calculators, TCO comparisons, and business value assessments ensure you’re not just talking to buyers about what your product can do but actively demonstrating the value it will bring to their business. This perspective is at the core of sales enablement best practice: finding ways to show you understand and can meet buyers’ needs rather than just talking about yourself. 

And remember, the biggest obstacle to sales enablement tool success is a lack of synchronicity between tools. You don’t want to waste time inputting the same data in various applications or executing based on inaccurate or incomplete data. If this is an issue in your organization, resolve it before you lose buy-in to the entire sales enablement strategy.

Avoiding point tools and standardizing all of your commercial teams (e.g., sales, marketing, customer success, presales, RevOps, etc.) on one fully integrated tech stack can drastically improve your revenue team’s ability to manage and forecast your pipeline, identify risk in time to save a deal, determine the next best sales action, develop effective sales coaching and sales best practices, and improve win rates.  

With so much happening outside the meeting in our digital world, 360-degree visibility into sales activities and content engagement across the customer journey supports the insights-driven sales process required to drive sales performance.

People

Your tools and content are only as effective as the people using them. And while training and coaching play a huge role in the success of your revenue team (we’ll get to that next) — behavior is often the biggest determinant of success. 

According to the annual Field Sales Benchmark Report 2022, sales leaders report that only 62% of their sales team reliably hits quota — down from 64% in 2021. Why? Even the most sophisticated sales intelligence software and the best content cannot overcome the challenge of meeting revenue targets. Even with all the data available, a critical component is missing: people data.

The lifeblood of any revenue organization is the people that make up the team. While technology and other performance drivers will help move the needle, the key to achieving peak performance is identifying the underlying seller behaviors that drive positive sales outcomes. The best competitive advantage sales leaders and company executives can give their businesses is an unraveling of the behavior that drives their salespeople’s performance. 

The question is simple; how is my team performing, and how does it relate to their behavior? If Jennifer and Jane are both hard workers, why is Jane so much better at selling? What are the underlying behaviors ultimately driving Jane’s and Jennifer’s performance?

Incorporating talent intelligence software into your sales enablement tool stack can help you understand how rep behavior will impact performance — before you make a hiring decision. Behavioral surveys ensure you have the right people in the right roles and have the data you need to coach them to peak performance.

Sales training & coaching

Even with the right tools, people, and content, your sales enablement program can still fail without effective sales training and coaching. Yet, recent research we conducted in partnership with RevOps Squared showed little consistency in sales training and coaching across respondents’ sales enablement strategies. 

And few companies perform call recording coaching (14%) and call recording review (19%) as part of sales onboarding and education, despite their organizations having invested in the technology to do so.

When it comes to training, little and often is a better methodology than annual chunks. Workshops that can be revisited through weekly discussions, 1:1 call coaching between reps and managers, or daily reminders are far more potent than a two-day conference that isn’t ever referred to again.

 Just as with content, you should aim to have training available for every stage of the buyer’s journey, from prospecting to identifying customer needs and account management, right through to negotiating and closing. 

Most importantly, training should be strategic. Start by defining the need and work from there. Figure out how you will measure success; otherwise, you won’t know what’s worth investing in and what’s not. Again, it’s like exercise. To see real benefits, you have to do it regularly.

Who should own sales enablement?

Historically, the sales, marketing, and post-sale departments were siloed entities engaging in different activities with distinct targets. The practice of sales enablement encourages you to dismantle those silos and work collaboratively to facilitate the customer journey. So, who should take ownership of your sales enablement program?

It's up for debate. 

Perhaps because of the critical role that content plays in a successful sales enablement program, research by Forrester suggests that companies who let marketing lead their sales enablement initiatives exceed their sales goals more often than companies who let sales or even the CEO own their sales enablement strategy. 

But our research shows about half (49%) of companies situate sales enablement firmly in the sales organization, 29% of sales enablement teams report to operations, and only 13% report to the marketing team. 

Interestingly, as more companies have adopted RevOps models in recent years, a quarter of companies now have sales enablement report to the Chief Revenue Officer. That makes sense. What better way to break down silos than have one person responsible for ensuring all revenue-accountable teams are enabled?

Getting started with sales enablement

Sales enablement allows you to drive revenue and become a better sales organization. Often distilled into a pithy soundbite – ‘the right content to the right people at the right time’ – sales enablement could also be described as the process of becoming a more customer-centric organization that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey.

For your sales enablement practice to be successful, you must also support sellers, marketers, and post-sale teams with the tools, insights, and resources they need to help decision-makers find the right product or service to meet their needs. But how do you get started?

This is a rough step-by-step guide, with the caveat that some of these steps ought to be taken simultaneously. Ready? Let’s go.

Step 1 – Build a sales enablement strategy

First thing’s first – what do you want to achieve? In order to build a solid sales enablement strategy, you could start with a baseline audit, wherein you evaluate your actual performance and set it against your targeted performance. 

Identifying the performance gap will help you establish what sales enablement can do for you. For example, if your website gets a lot of traffic that’s not converting to leads, you have a content gap. If your sales reps get a lot of meetings but can’t convert those opportunities, you might have a training gap. If you can’t see where you’re losing buyers, you have a data or tools gap. You will need this information for step two.

Side note: These metrics and KPIs are critical.

All sales organizations track some KPIs – but do you track enough? And how granular is the data you’re collecting? Knowing, for example, that one sales team is achieving sales cycle times that are 50% faster than other sales teams is valuable information. Likewise, identifying poor performers could help pinpoint training needs. 

Common metrics

• Quota attainment – Is the company hitting quota, and how is attainment distributed through the sales organization?
• Win/loss rates – As a company, within teams, individually, and who are you losing to?
• Sales cycle length – How long does it take to close deals?
• Deal size – How successful has your sales process been?

Less common (but still important) metrics

Other metrics that you can use to judge the success of your sales enablement program include:

• Content effectiveness – What content is driving sales, and what is a waste of resources?
• Employee attrition – When and why are you losing sales reps?
• Onboarding time – How long does it take to bring new sellers up to speed?
• Sales activities – How are salespeople connecting with customers? What works and when?

Start tracking and analyzing these metrics as soon as you are able. As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Step 2 – Get company buy-in

I've heard that you need C-suite buy-in to make sales enablement work for your business. My response is the good ol’ improv special: Yes and-. 

C-suite sponsorship of a sales enablement strategy is hugely important, but for your sales enablement program to succeed, you also need end-user buy-in. Specifically, sellers, marketers, and even customer success need to see value in the program before they will be willing to put in the work. The data you gathered in step one will be key here, as will developing cross-departmental targets to keep everyone working in alignment.

Step 3 – Evaluate your existing content

How does your existing content serve your new strategy? If it’s ‘inside-out’ – as in, it’s all about your product and not your buyer’s pain points – then the answer is probably not very well. Never fear, though. In all the content I rewrite for clients, I usually find the important parts are still in there; they just need teasing out. Don’t discard what you can repurpose. And look for content inspiration in every customer interaction you have.

Step 4 – Align your sales and marketing teams

Marketers are expert content creators but don’t always know what customers want. Sellers engage with customers all the time but don’t generally turn those conversations into content — or report them back to marketing. Imagine if you could combine those powers.

Of course, you can. Talking to sales reps to find out what tools and content they are using, what works, what doesn’t work, and what their customers most want to know about is a critical first step when you’re getting started with sales enablement. And once sellers understand how their unique insights can be leveraged to help generate more revenue, they will hop on board the sales enablement train.

Step 5 – Get your tools in place (aka How a sales enablement platform can help)

Your technology stack is the fuel and framework that supports your sales enablement strategy. Without the right tools, you can’t capture the data you need to optimize your sales process. Nor can you organize, distribute and present the content you have so carefully curated.

While there are many helpful software applications on the market, it’s important to select data-driven sales enablement tools that work together and with your CRM. A sales enablement platform that offers content management and delivery tools plus deep content analytics and insights, value selling tools, and sales coaching capabilities will enable you to take your sales enablement strategy and make it fly.

Step 6 – Testing, testing, one, two, three

Once you have the tools in place, the content underway, and the support of your teams, it’s time to put your strategy to the test. Starting small – perhaps with just one team or region – enables you to work through any kinks in your program, repeat step one, and identify training needs.

Leading a sales enablement program is a bit like parenting — the early stages are the hardest, but gradually the program will require less input from you (although you never stop parenting). Once you have pinpointed performance gaps and got an impression of the impact your sales enablement program will have, revisit that strategy and revise it.

A continuous adjustment will ensure you’re always optimizing your sales process, creating greater efficiencies and more opportunities along the way.

Good luck!

Thanks for sticking with us through this long yet brief introduction to Sales Enablement. There’s a lot of ground to cover and lots more to say, but this is probably more than enough for now.

When you’re ready to look at Sales Enablement tools, we would be delighted to give you a tour of all that Mediafly can offer to help kickstart your sales enablement project. In the meantime, why not see how some of our customers are making use of Mediafly solutions to increase revenues and reduce sales cycles? View our customer case studies here.