What if you don’t have a team member focused on sales enablement and you don’t plan (or have the budget) to hire one? Maybe you’re trying to find a good sales enablement manager to add to your team, but they’re hard to find because the role is in high demand.
While sales managers have typically handled individual sales performance, sales enablement professionals are responsible for providing information, tools, and content to improve sales efficiency.
Dedicated sales enablement professionals ask questions like:
- How can sales reps engage more efficiently with prospects?
- What tools will help reps move buyers along the sales funnel faster?
- What resources would be helpful for sales to provide to leads?
Asking your sales manager, or other roles, to take on additional sales enablement responsibilities can be difficult to manage and prioritize. There are only so many hours in the day.
Here’s how you can help provide sales enablement without a dedicated person:
Automate Sales Training
Companies that want to implement sales enablement initiatives without hiring a dedicated professional need to leverage technology to do as much of the work as possible. Partially or fully automated processes are the best way to tackle these new projects efficiently.
Using a video coaching and sales training software, like Showpad Coach allows your team to build, customize, deploy, practice and track training in an easy, streamlined fashion.
With sales training technology, sales managers can:
- Easily deliver new content and messaging strategies
- Use video coaching software to give direct feedback on practice pitches from anywhere
- Quickly access sales performance insights through data and online reporting features
- Enable sales reps to create personalized demos and customer content with screen capture technology
Use Pre-Existing Training Content
Sales enablement professionals act as content creators and curators. Sales managers simply don’t have the time to create all of the content for their teams on top of everything they else do.
In order to still provide teams with all of the training & reinforcement content they need, leverage your top performers to quickly share their best practices and create content directly in your platform. Sales managers can also look into existing sales training material when possible. For example, LearnCore partnered with John Barrows so our users can build their training curriculum with his proven sales content.
This content helps sales get trained on topics like:
- Scheduling more high quality meetings
- Customizing messaging at different stages of the sales process
- Receiving coaching from managers and peers
They can even practice with written and video exercise. By leveraging pre-existing content from high quality professionals, sales managers can deliver sales enablement level content, without taking additional time out of their day.
Leverage Marketing
Sales enablement professionals provide sales reps with content and resources to help the sales process close smoother. Sound a little bit like marketing? There is a huge overlap between these two departments, but often little-to-no communication.
Even if you’re using some pre-existing content to cover your sales training needs, your reps will still need company specific customer-facing materials. Sales managers can take the majority of this work off their plate by collaborating with marketing and getting them involved in the process.
Instead of falling victim to the age old marketing vs. sales feud, help your two teams get along. Have leaders set the tone, work through any past miscommunications, and encourage collaboration. Get marketing involved in the content creation process at the beginning, instead of dumping unplanned projects on their plate at the end.
If you can get these two teams to work together, you can rely on marketing to create amazing sales-guided customer collateral that will enable your reps to work more efficiently, and close more deals.
It’s challenging to enable your sales reps when no one is dedicated to that responsibility but it’s not impossible. Avoid overwhelming your team a greater workload by bringing in external partners to automate processes, and by leveraging internal resources to work smarter.
