Although it is a well-known concept in other countries, in Europe it has landed relatively recently and has started to gain momentum. Are you also one of those who do not know what sale enablement is or how it works? We'll tell you about it!
Definition: sales enablement
Directly translated from English, sales enablement could be translated as sales enablement. However, what is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of creating a sales system that develops processes, content and technology to enable sales teams to perform their functions efficiently and at a higher speed.
In reality, the aim of this process is to align the strategies of the marketing department and the sales department, thus exploring all that the product or service has to offer and optimising the commercial approach.
Therefore, the responsibility of the Sales Enablement professional involves everything from implementing new tools, creating and improving processes to training teams. Some of the tasks that are developed during this process may be:
- Create the most relevant content for each lead: The sales team will have personalised and individual content for each user who intends to become a future customer.
- Train the sales team: Having a good sales team, with the roles well distributed, will help the enablement strategy.
- Teach the sales team to become good coaches: In other words, they must be able to capture contacts through a process that is not intrusive but that attracts them to the brand.
- Performance analysis: In this way we will check if the strategies we are applying are well developed and working.
- Creation of materials and new channels: To develop our commercial strategy we must create the appropriate materials and expose them in the relevant channels for greater reach and success.
In summary, a sales enablement strategy will develop different activities, related to each other and whose purpose (of all of them) is to enable the sales process, capture leads and convert them into future customers who want, after completing their purchase process, to become loyal to our brand.
Sales enablement phases
In order to develop a good and successful sales enablement strategy in our company, we must follow a series of steps that will make it more effective:
- Alienation
Firstly, there is the alienation stage. As we have already mentioned, sales enablement is about unifying the marketing and salesdepartments so that they work together to make our company's sales more successful. 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 business objectives mentioned above.
Secondly, the buyer persona, i.e. the target audience to which we are going to direct our entire sales enablement strategy, must be very well defined. This will allow us to focus marketing actions correctly and will enable the members of the sales department to know which users to target: not all users will be potential customers of our brand.
The third element to work on is a lead qualification context: the two teams must know how to identify whether a lead is of quality or not, for example, if we are targeting large accounts, it is unlikely that a local company with less than 10 people will buy from us, or if we cover a very limited territory, we should not prioritise people who are outside it.
As we already know, having a well-defined and established sales process will help us to acquire customers much more effectively. It does not only depend on the intention of the sales department, but also on establishing a good roadmap to follow.
Therefore, it is important that we are able to define some steps and set some objectives: which channels we are going to use to define our strategy, where we are going to display our products or services, etc.
Once we have made our marketing plan, it is important that we periodically review if the processes are being fulfilled and if they are optimised, this way we will know if our strategy is working or if we need to make any changes.
3. Establish
In this third stage of the sales enablement process, we must establish the action strategies through which we are going to carry out our sales acquisition or sales enablement.
In order to achieve this, it is advisable to have a person responsible for the management and creation of content. In order to identify the most relevant content, we will have to involve the sales area. It is a priority to be aware of those doubts and questions that frequently arise in the sales process and to create content that responds to them.
All this content can be used to sell better, although it can also be used by the marketing department to attract our leads so that they are better prepared for sales. This type of strategic development allows sales processes to be more agile and efficient.
4. MechaniseMechanising 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.
Therefore, in this last stage of the process we must establish the mechanisms we will use to develop the strategies. For example, emailing campaigns, process analytics... These are tasks that we can mechanise and automate and will save us a lot of time.
If you are interested in optimising your company's sales acquisition, we recommend establishing a sales enablement strategy. When the marketing and sales departments work together, they will manage to optimise many processes and achieve greater success for the company in terms of the sales process.
