One of the essential factors for the proper functioning of a company is to ensure that the marketing and sales departments join forces and work together to pursue a common goal: to improve the company's commercial strategy.
what is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a concept that is often translated as "sales enablement", but this translation can be misleading as it is not limited to a training process, nor should it only concern the sales department.
Sales enablement is the process of providing your company's sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources can include content, tools, knowledge and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. These resources enable sales teams to perform their roles efficiently and at a faster rate.
What is sales enablement?
A sales enablement strategy is your company's approach to providing sales with the resources they need to sell effectively. This strategy is tailored to the specific needs of your sales team so they can target your audience and close more deals. These strategies should include:
- Make the most relevant content available to the sales team for each lead, at whatever point in the buying process they are in, and help present it in the best way for each situation.
- Train the sales team and measure the effectiveness of this training based on their results.
- Effectively communicate news and updates to the sales team, for example, in terms of product news or new content.
- Teach managers and leadership how to coach salespeople to reinforce training and promote best practices.
- Apply analytics to content and sales pitches to optimise them.
Key elements of a sales enablement strategy
We develop the elements to work on and define if we want to enable sales enablement in our company.
- Strategic alignment of marketing and sales teams.
In order to properly apply this type of discipline, it is essential to stop seeing marketing and sales as different teams with different objectives and understand them as professionals working towards a common goal, albeit at different stages of the process.
Therefore, first of all, it will be necessary to define common objectives between the two teams, which will be aligned with the company's objectives. Motivating both teams to work in the same direction should be a priority objective for the company.
In order to achieve this unification, it is first necessary to create a buyer persona, which will allow marketing actions to be correctly focused and will make it possible for the members of the sales department to know how to distinguish a good lead from a bad one.
The union between both departments is called SMarketing. SMarketing is a word that makes up "sales + marketing". It is a method in which the sales team and the marketing team must join forces to configure the lead generation strategy. In this way, both departments will work together and will become the same instrument to achieve the same objectives.
The main advantage that this strategy offers us is with regard to the optimisation of resources within the company, as it seeks to minimise possible conflicts of interest between the two departments and multiply the efforts on what is really important: achieving the company's objectives.
- Definition of the sales process.
The sales process is made up of a set of steps that a company must carry out from the moment it tries to capture the attention of a potential customer until an effective sale of the company's product or service is achieved because the customer has been accompanied throughout the process and has completed his or her purchase.
When we launch a product or service on the market, we must have previously analysed our customers in order to know their needs and anticipate them, but for this we must understand the stages of the sales process.
- Content strategy: to train the sales team and to educate our leads.
Content marketing is one of the most important elements to take into account for your strategy because it provides a unique value that is difficult to leave aside, as well as positioning you on the web. It is about offering useful and valuable content to attract visitors and get customers to become promoters, improving your reputation as a company and as a brand.
Of course, for this content to be used and to do its job, we must have it perfectly organised, updated and easily accessible.
Marketing departments usually have more resources and capacity to create content than sales departments, but we must not forget that the content created by the marketing team must be related to the sales team's proposals in order to get the most out of it.
- Technology.
Mechanising processes and avoiding having to do them manually allows sales teams to sell better and faster, while at the same time allowing sales managers to have much more information on their team's performance and providing them with data to make improvement decisions.
Using applications like HubSpot, where CRM, sales and sales enablement tools are fully integrated, makes every process easier. HubSpot's CRM is able to automate all your marketing actions in a meaningful and consistent way. Real-time updates, tracking and organisation is just the beginning of a fruitful relationship between CRM systems and customer management in companies.
Aligning marketing processes and objectives with sales, and equipping sales teams with the tools to improve their execution and drive more revenue for the company will be the best solution.
When you equip your sales team with the right resources, materials and tools, you will be able to sell more effectively and efficiently. This means your company will experience an increase in revenue and therefore an increase in the number of customers and brand advocates. So make sure your sales and marketing teams maintain open lines of communication to access and share the content, materials, technology and software they need to reach and convert more prospects into loyal customers.
