How to Create A Sales Enablement Strategy

Having a good sales enablement strategy is essential to a company’s success, and whether you’re building it from scratch or rethinking your existing strategy, it’s no small feat. 

To help you get it just right, here is a step-by-step guide to building and implementing an effective sales enablement strategy.

Step #1 - Formalize an Enablement Charter

In its 5th annual sales enablement study (2019), CSO Insights found that organizations that followed a formal and charter-based approach saw significantly better results than those that had a random or informal approach, and their win rates were 8.7 percent points higher than the report’s average. 

Here’s what’s important to know when formalizing your enablement charter. 

1. Set Your Goals And Write A Clear Mission Statement

No, we don’t mean a goal stating that your objective is to allow your sales team to sell more or that you want to increase revenues. That’s a given. 

Efficient enablement goals could be:

• Streamlining the sales activity.
• Alining all associated departments and messages.
• Identifying and eliminating obstacles to allow the sales enablement team to sell better.
• Defining who will be affected by the sales enablement strategy, what the specific expectations of each team are affected by this strategy, and what changes the C-Suite can expect once the strategy is implemented. 

Once your goals are laid out, specify the key stakeholders involved in this strategy and their respective responsibilities. This will help keep the relevant stakeholders in the loop throughout the process and establish an effective internal communication system. 

While increasing revenues is the overall objective of the entire company, actionable and tangible sales enablement goals and mission statements will allow your sales team to help your company reach these objectives.

2. Establish KPIs And Benchmarks

Now that your goals and mission are clear, it’s time to define specific KPIs (key performance indicators).

Try to answer questions like:

• What is the timeline for rolling out the strategy to the sales enablement team? 
• How often will the sales enablement content be reviewed? 
• What specific, measurable, and scalable actions are expected of your enablement team?

This will set clear expectations and describe what outcomes you want to achieve and when.

Step #2 - Create a Customer-Centric Strategy

It’s important that you understand your customer. This is obvious, right? Well, just in case it’s not: to create an effective enablement strategy, you must know who your customer is and their buyer journey. 

This is more than understanding your buyer’s pain points and needs and goes deeper than simple demographic data. To truly understand your customer, you need to map out their path so that your sales team can craft massaging that’s relevant to where your prospects are in their customer journey. 

Usually, this is when you will identify where your current messaging and content are lacking. 

In addition, as most customers research independently before interacting with any sales reps, you need to understand what your prospects want to hear and exactly when they want to listen to it.

Consider the following data:

• According to Forrester, 67% of B2B decision makers prefer not to have a sales rep as their main research source. 
• According to a Hubspot report:
  - 19% of buyers want to connect with a business's sales rep during the awareness stage when they first learn about a product or service.
  - 60% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the consideration stage after researching and having a shortlist. 
  - 20% of buyers want to connect with a sales rep during the decision stage, after they’ve reviewed their shortlist and are ready to buy. 

By mapping out each stage and its corresponding content, you will be able to create a consistent process. 

Step #3 - Build Your Playbook

Now it’s time to create your sales playbook, which is one of your reps’ most important assets when interacting with your prospects at any point in their journey. 

A truly effective playbook is one that is based on your top performers because it leverages playbooks and sales enablement best practices that have already been tested and proven effective. 

To create a playbook, first identify what your top sellers do that makes them the highest performing reps, then turn that into clear playbooks and train your sales team. 

This way, sellers of every skill level will have instant access to winning plays, and your entire team will be able to maintain consistency. 

To make this process easier, you can use sales enablement tech that gives everyone on your sales team direct access to a library of your most successful demo scripts they can replicate. A good enablement software also acts as an enablement helper, by allowing your sales reps to share the best playbooks with the team, see how they are being used in real-time, and log insights and info after each demo or discovery call.

Step #4 - Implement, Then Analyze

Keep in mind that your strategy will constantly evolve over time. Sales enablement is a dynamic discipline, and there’s always something new you can try, test, adopt or invent - tools, content, processes, or technologies. 

So always track and analyze the outcomes of your strategy, and improve it where needed. 

Step #5 - Give Them The Tools They Need

There’s nothing worse than sales reps using outdated content. To avoid that, provide your enablement team with the technology that will allow them to easily access the most relevant and current content. 

But, an enablement software can not only equip your salespeople with the content they need to interact with prospects at every stage, but can also allow sellers to take notes from discovery and demo calls and instantly synch them with your CRM, so that your reps will never forget important details about specific prospects and will be able to easily see what was shown on each demo and when. 

Good tech software can also help you constantly improve and tweak your content in real-time, based on performance and winning playbooks.

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