Sales Enablement Best Practices

Simply put, sales enablement is the practice of providing sales teams with the tools, information, training, and content they need to sell more effectively. This is why it's important to know how to do sales enablement correctly. 

The lack of easily accessible relevant and optimized sales content, disjointed sales and marketing teams, slow onboarding of sellers, and full reliance on the seller's memory and skill to run a successful demo, are only some of the most significant obstacles to a successful sales enablement program. 

These obstacles are partly the reason that, according to Korn Ferry, 47% of sales people report that they don’t meet their goals. 

The following best practices can help businesses overcome the various sales enablement challenges.

1. Pin-point what works, replicate, then train

Every company has its star sellers - the highest performing salespeople - and you can leverage their skills to help your entire sales team perform better.

Here’s how:

• Identify what your top sellers do that makes them the highest performing sellers.
• Turn these practices into clear and structured best practices so that sales teams know exactly how to operate.
• Create clear and accessible playbooks based on these best practices.
• Implement the playbooks by training your sales team and allowing them to improve constantly.

This is one of the most important sales enablement best practices because it allows sellers of every skill level to use winning plays and ensure consistency. 

Consider using sales enablement software that allows you to easily turn your most successful demo scripts into demo playbooks everyone on your sales team can access and replicate. This way, you turn training into actions sellers can use in real-time as your sales reps share the best playbooks with the team, see how they are being used in real-time, and even log insights and info after each demo.

2. Optimize training efforts

Training new sales reps should be effective. That’s stating the obvious, right?

Well, according to Task Drive, only about 15% of sales managers believe their company provides a good amount of sales coaching. In addition, according to Uplead, as 46% of sales reps never intended to become salespeople, many new sales reps need a lot of training before they can even start, let alone be successful. 

A good sales enablement software can help make training much more effective by providing constant reminders and updates and turning training into clear action items.

And then, there’s also the forgetting curve. 

Data from SAVO Group shows that the average employee will have forgotten 65% of the information they learned within seven days of their training. This makes for a very poor ROI on sales training.

The best way to deal with this sharp forgetting curve is to use sales enablement tools that allow salespeople easy access to your sales enablement best practices in real time. In addition, software that helps you easily turn training into seller actions reduces training costs and eliminates the forgetting curve altogether. 

By using the right tools, you will not only empower your sales personnel but also allow them to instantly access knowledge, links and examples whenever they need it (rather than try to remember every single playbook and best practice), so they can follow your best practices and respond to prospects’ questions in real-time, even as they run live demos and sales discoveries. 

3. Provide access to relevant content

According to Kapost, 65% of salespeople say they have difficulty finding the content they can send to prospects. Plus, according to the American Marketing Association, 90% of the content isn't used by sales teams. 

When your sales team can’t access relevant and current content in real-time and quickly, they simply waste time looking for it. How much time? Forbes states that sales teams only utilize a third of their time actually selling.

To allow your sales reps to focus on selling and do it well, make sure all relevant and up-to-date content is easily available to your sales team when and where they need it. Out-of-date content means salespersons will not be able to be effective. 

To ensure alignment with the marketing activity and constantly provide salespeople with relevant content, use sales enablement software that seamlessly connects with other tools used by the different departments. This will also ensure that content is constantly updated and aligned. 

Finally, the content should be constantly performance-based and aligned with your marketing messaging. 

4. Constantly measure, constantly improve

Stagnation is every company’s greatest enemy, and that includes your sales teams. 

The most effective sales enablement programs are ones that make it easy for sales reps to constantly improve their skills, use new tools and learn new playbooks. 

There are a few things you can do to help your sales reps continuously upskill and make use of new information and up-to-date content, such as having regular team meetings, supplying your teams with continuous refreshers, and allowing easy access to real-time coaching.

5. Technology is sales enablement’s best friend

According to a CSO Insights study, 60% of companies that don’t use good sales enablement tools have longer sales cycles. 

In addition, in its ‘The Power of Enablement: Bridging the Sales Productivity Gap’ report, Forbes states that 59% of companies that exceeded their revenue targets - and 72% surpassed them by 25% or more - have implemented sales enablement functions. The report also found that the leading technology investment (55%) for boosting sales productivity is sales enablement solutions. 

A good sales enablement technology can help boost sales by positively affecting so many aspects and stages of the sales cycle. The right sales enablement tool can accelerate the onboarding process of new hires and help them start selling sooner, allow you to set and track goals, align the sales and marketing efforts and activities, track revenue and basically, implement every single best practice listed in this article. 

‍