Looking for a crash course in sales enablement?
We’ve got the quick and easy sales enablement guide you need. In this blog, we’ll run through a definition of sales enablement, some practical tips to developing a strategy and how to build a winning program
What is sales enablement?
Broadly speaking, sales enablement is the practice of ensuring your reps have everything they need to efficiently and effectively sell.
Those words “efficiently” and “effectively” are fundamental to sales enablement. For example, while a rep may have all the marketing collateral in the world, he or she might not have personalized content, metrics on top-performing assets or even simplified access to your content library. This all hinders the sales process.
A sales enablement strategy will solve these issues and bottlenecks ahead of time by ensuring that sales teams have all the resources, data, intelligence, training, coaching and content that they need ahead of time.
The goal of enablement is to meet the salesforce’s needs before they are expressed — and more importantly, to address those needs that go unseen and unspoken. For example, a particular rep may be lagging behind peers in terms of pitch presentations, but still generates enough dollar volume to make up for it. With a sales enablement program and software solution, you can identify that underperformance, address it with personalized coaching and then reap the benefits of a supercharged rep.
What are the benefits of sales enablement?
In reality, sales enablement can deliver benefits across the sales cycle, as well as across your internal sales operations.
With a sales enablement program, you can strive to:
- Develop reps’ skills and knowledge on an ongoing basis
- Increase sales efficiency and preparedness
- Foster deeper, long-term relationships with clients
- Deliver targeted guidance to reps to address skill gaps
- Align sales and marketing teams more closely
- Ramp up new hires quicker while simultaneously increasing onboarding program quality
More importantly, the question is “Where can’t sales enablement have advantages?” Showpad client data has shown significant results in sales, content usage and ramp time.
What constitutes effective sales enablement?
So far, we’ve used this sales enablement guide to talk about what it is and what it can do for you. Now, let’s pivot to look at the practical elements of sales enablement in real life and what the pillars of a successful program are.
At a high level, there are three domains to sales enablement:
- Content: Content is king, and you need extensive tools for creating, sharing and updating assets.
- Coaching: Coaching is most effective when tailored to individual rep needs and occurs through interactive activities and modules.
- Training: Onboarding is crucial to rep efficiency and effectiveness, so lay the groundwork here for a sales enablement cadence.
While there are more functions to effective selling, these three are the trifecta of enablement and require attention and resources (particularly a technology solution).
What’s the role of technology in sales enablement?
Speaking of technology, modern sales enablement requires a modern platform that can deliver robust tools, capabilities, data reporting and insights that help guide and enhance your sales enablement program.
However, because of all the different functions of sales enablement, some organizations end up cobbling together disparate solutions. This setup can create headaches for data sharing and may even actively inhibit your sales enablement efforts.
The answer is a one-in-all solution that can give you everything you need to facilitate sales enablement from a unified platform. That’s what Showpad is built to be: A comprehensive sales enablement solution that can integrate with other critical tech, like CRM or social media management suites.
With Showpad, you can leverage:
- Customized content for various sales interactions
- User-friendly search capabilities
- Sales and marketing workflows
- Performance metrics on sales collateral
A single solution for content, coaching and training will streamline and support successful sales enablement exponentially more than a collection of separate tools.
What you need to get started with sales enablement
Let’s talk about sales enablement in practice and what concrete steps you must take to create a winning program.
Fortunately, we’ve already created a seven-step sales enablement guide for developing and implementing a strategy. Roughly, the steps break down to:
- Have a formalized, written plan documenting your program specs and objectives.
- Create a cadence of enablement activities like individualized coaching, classroom learning and self-directed modules.
- Get insight into the skills level of your sales team, looking for any gaps.
- Maintain robust, continuous communication with the sales force and all other stakeholders.
- Simplify content access, personalization and sharing as much as possible.
- Consider technology investments that streamline or upgrade your stack — like moving from a cluster of tools to a one-stop platform.
- Consult the data and fine-tune your program to keep reps current with top practices.
Leverage Showpad throughout the enablement process
As a one-stop platform for everything sales enablement, Showpad can support successful efforts across all domains of enablement.
Showpad offers robust tools for content, coaching, training and onboarding, like:
- Content recommendation powered by data analytics
- Tools for content personalization, as well as template buying experiences
- Features like 3D models, Conversation Intelligence™ and augmented reality
- Scalable and individualized sales coaching
- Integration with Marketo, Salesforce, email, social media and more
Best of all, perhaps, Showpad can get your sales and marketing departments to work in sync. Too often, these collaborators are working from different playbooks, but Showpad can ensure everyone is on the same page.
Want to see Showpad in action? Request a demo today, or contact us to learn more about the platform.
