As your company grows, you might watch your sales growth slowly plateau or sales results become lumpy and inconsistent. Unfortunately, weak sales results are typical among many businesses that do not implement sales enablement strategies in their plan to foster growth. All industries require a sales department or a program for growing sales. Hubspot sales enablement provides your sales team with the most effective resources to close deals using content, knowledge, and information gathered from experience with customers. Using this process will empower your sales team to sell faster with process automation and build a better relationship with your clients.
Keep reading to learn about creating and implementing the most effective sales enablement strategies into your business plan.
Since this is a comprehensive article, we’re providing an index here to make it easier to find what you need:
Growing sales in the 21st century can be complex if you don't understand how to communicate with your client and prospects. With the accessibility of the internet, consumers can quickly educate themselves on your products or services by doing a quick search. Businesses need to curate their sales plan specifically to keep up with competitors and to highlight to clients why they need you. Differentiation and clarity of the message are essential.
What does an effective sales enablement plan have?
Training happens after the onboarding process. Introduce opportunities to continue learning about best sales practices for even your veteran employees. Education will reduce the feeling of monotony among sales staff and keep everyone up-to-date on new sales tactics.
A successful salesperson is knowledgeable and passionate about their products, targeted demographic, and company. Put time into creating an accessible database for any information a representative might need for sales purposes.
What’s more, your top sales teams develop a repeatable process they can reuse for each target persona because they know their priorities and goals and which messages resonate with them. A modern CRM will have a capability called Playbooks and email templates which enables a business to take the sales approach of a sales leader and enable more junior sales reps to adopt it.
A trackable system and analytics are essential for keeping sales teams accountable and on the same page. Be sure that your sales strategies and analytics for performance are clear and consistent among all high-level and entry-level employees. Aligning sales metrics with your business strategy will help you win more clients. Sales leaders use analytics to know how well sales teams are performing and provide them with the details to understand which elements of the sales engagement model are where each sales rep is struggling. Data is a core capability all sales leaders need to grow their revenue and manage their teams for success.
Identifying sales goals will help your company track growth down to the last number. Simply setting a goal for more sales is too general to be helpful down the line. Businesses need metrics for their complete sales funnel to manage and improve performance. Many sales leaders use these granular analytics to create an attainable sales model and convince sales teams to achieve it. A business might track how many sales outreach attempts they make in a day, how many new companies and contacts they identified who are reasonable prospects for outreach, how many phone conversations occurred per week, the number of initial sales meetings they book, and finally, how many new qualified deals have been created by rep. In essence, having a granular analytical view into the complete sales acquisition funnel enables your business to improve it.
Customers want to learn from and trust a salesperson, not sold by them. Train your sales team to engage with contacts in a way that delivers value with each touch. Learn about their specific needs while offering ideas for how to solve them. Getting clients to talk about what they value in a solution will create a better connection between sales representatives and prospects. Not only can sales reps who take this approach gain new clients, but they will also retain current clients by building deeper relationships. Knowing how well sales reps engage with prospects is essential. Use analytics like the number of initial connections that turn into opportunities and the conversion rates from outreach to sales to measure performance.
Maybe the most important thing about using sales enablement is to begin with a documented model that identifies each step and content used. Keep your sales enablement strategy on file to train new users, and for times when an update is needed, the changes are easier to make and maintain. Documenting your approach and process will ensure a consistent application across established teams and new sales members. Some data may not be relevant to the whole company, but providing the complete picture to the company will help everyone understand the strategy and expected results.
CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management, a system that stores and categorizes all of the contacts your sales teams engage with from prospects to customers. Most businesses already have a CRM in place. If not, this is the first step to enable your sales team for better productivity, and accurate analytics about top line performance and the efficiency of your sales funnel. A CRM will help you understand how your customers find your business and what they want from your company. Modern CRMs will also enable your sales team to break through the fog of inactivity and the unknown during their outreach attempts.
Once a business identifies its weaknesses in sales productivity, it can use these tactics to address the issues. The best step to take when looking at the customer is utilizing CRM software and all it offers. HubSpot CRM will help businesses sort through their clients and create a streamlined process for directing sales and content. New CRMs make sales teams much more productive.
The key difference between sales enablement and content marketing isn't the content but their audience. The former creates content about the sales art of engaging with and distributing the content, whereas marketing teams' content focuses on making buyer consumption assets.
For sales, content is one of the essential parts of a sales enablement strategy; sales enablement and content marketing teams are responsible for different audiences. Sales enablement prioritizes salespeople engagement and distribution, while content marketers produce content for potential buyers.
Sales reps, on average, spend ⅓ of their time hunting for or creating content for their sales process. By focusing on this step, you can improve your sales productivity by more than 33%. Developing a content plan is essential to ensuring sales are productive. The content should directly support your sales motion and be the same content your sales leaders are using. Sales enablement tools have a vital role with content. Modern sales enablement not only gives the sales reps a repository that makes it easy to share the content with prospects and customers, but it provides analytics about how prospects are consuming the content.
Traditional marketing focuses on generating qualified prospects to nurture until they are ready to engage with your sales team. In contrast, sales enablement prioritizes everything needed to improve your sales team's productivity significantly. Blogs, social posts, videos, and case studies are examples of content used by marketers to gain the attention of potential customers. Once the marketing automation solution deems content to be a "sales-ready" lead, the sales representative is responsible for the process of taking qualified prospects and turning them into customers.
Remember – an essential aspect of sales enablement content is its target audience – how salespeople will engage with the content and distribute it. Much of your marketing content (if you have existing content already) can be repurposed into sales enablement content. You need to know what to look for in your audit.
1. Develop a Buyer’s Journey Map - Consumers' path when they decide to make a new purchase.
Prospects will go through three stages:
2. Learning about the sales funnel from clients' perspectives will help sales staff better understand their role in the process – how they can help move customers along this path from awareness to consideration to decision-making. The journey doesn't end there, because they can come back and decide to buy again and again and again, which is what you'd want. Your sales enablement content can keep customers interested in your services and products. Providing content to a customer at specific milestones in their buyer's journey will do just that. If your salespeople understand how your company's buyer's journey works and can identify where a customer is on that journey, they'll be able to move them along that journey time and time again.
3. Improve Sales Content Over Time - Content should never be published and left alone forever, and you should continuously be checking back in with content to shape assets for specific buyers. As you add new clients and expand into new markets, you will need to upgrade your content accordingly.
4. Identify the Best Visual Aids - One of the most effective content types for sales reps to use in their outreach process is one-to-one videos embedded into their outbound emails. This approach helps in several ways:
5. Pick the Best Content For Your Sales Team - The more specific content is, the more it will resonate with the prospects. Create content for each buyer persona to whom your sales team is selling. In some cases, the same piece of content may be applicable for each persona but make a choice based on the needs and goals. Factor into consideration accounts, clients, and industries when you create and organize sales enablement content.
6. Track Content Usage - How many times is your content viewed? How has the content interacted? What content drives the most traffic to your website or causes your prospects to do additional research? These are essential questions to understand when creating or evaluating the performance of new content.
7. Give Power to Sales Reps - Your salespeople are the closest contact to clients. Ask them for help when choosing topics for new content. They will know what content they wish they had to promote. Empower your sales representatives to speak up during sales enablement planning to define the topics for the best new content.
Auditing a business' content for a sales team completes a strategic run-down of all sales content with a goal in mind. Content will be aligned with a sales funnel to understand what content investment will have the most significant impact. Start this process after identifying goals for the sales team; then, you can focus on achieving them. Think about how content incorporation will help hit revenue goals at a marked rate.
Rating your content after its proven productivity boost promotes accountability for continuous growth. Create a scoring guide to drive the upcoming sales goals. A business may ask:
Make the audit goal-focused in the same way content is. For example, if a business is looking to decrease the time spent on a lead, eliminate content growth over its lifetime from this audit. Keep and track all data, but know how to identify what information will promote sales productivity.
These tools provide visibility to let you know how each piece of content is viewed across all of the outreach by your sales teams. Content that is not considered or read can be removed or replaced with more valuable content. Lastly, if your company is implementing Inbound Marketing, they have digital funnels on their website, and much of that content can be repurposed for the sales team to use.
These strategies are the best way to use sales enablement content creation. The HubSpot Sales Hub solution offers resources for each element to fuel your sales. Much of your company’s success will rely on the optimization of sales enablement and the support of your marketing team to leverage the work they are already doing.
Once you have created and implemented your sales enablement strategy combined with a modern CRM, you might be wondering when you will see results. The timeframe to results will vary from business to business. Still, you can be guaranteed that even just addressing sales enablement will create significant growth in your sales and company culture. What's more, the analytics provided will tell you exactly how you are doing and the progress you are making right from the start.
You will have buyer insights and interests to store for years to come from content engagement numbers and event attendance records. Your sales representatives will feel more comfortable selling because they understand the motivations and behaviors of your clients and what they can do to be best sellers. Giving sales reps other data like the percentage of their time spent on ramping up a client allows them to find ways to be more productive. Being faced with their numbers will motivate sales reps to raise their standards.
Revenue growth and understanding the levers that influence top-line revenue is the benefit of using sales enablement. All the data collected in this process allows your sales staff to have more successful sales and a higher rate of potential customer conversions. Maintaining relationships with your clients, following up with emails, finding cross-selling opportunities, analyzing performance, and developing sales strategies will all help improve your profit. The more significant profit helps your business grow, and you should identify your ROI by recording everything before your sales enablement plan is in place.
Talk to sales managers about tracking revenue gained from using their platform or systems. It is not just total revenue but each action, piece of content, or event that contributes to sales success. They will point you in the right direction to invest in more of the types of activity that contribute the most to new sales.
Any company with a sales team will benefit from using sales enablement. These strategies are suitable for targeting individuals to large enterprise companies. Be sure to find the company that best fits your needs.
The HubSpot sales enablement platform, called Sales Hub, is one of the top software programs in the business, according to user ratings reported by G2. The reason for such a high rating is that SalesHub was designed from the ground up based on how salespeople want to work and builds off of that.
The sales enablement strategies above are streamlined in their platform, and they can help you implement a custom sales enablement plan for your business. The HubSpot sales solution makes salespeople more effective through sales engagement tools, configure-price-quote (CPQ) functionality, sales analytics, and many tools for your growing team to engage with prospects at scale. Their product is not just a CRM in the typical sense. It provides industry leading capabilities. See the ratings for sales assistant, sales engagement, sales platform, sales enablement and sales analytics. Other CRMs are really databases that are storing sales information and really not enabling sales people. That why most sales people hate CRMs and it is why we are such a fan of the HubSpot solution.
These tools help facilitate and accelerate prospect outreach and tracking with seamless sales automation that works the way salespeople want to, and HubSpot Sales Hub provides all of these sales tools in one solution. Using a new and streamlined CRM solution will help your sales staff improve or maintain the speed and quality of their work.
Growing your business with sales enablement is a critical step to take when improving your revenue. Once you have a strong plan with your sales plan aligned, keep researching with your sales enablement partner to add substantial improvements in technology implementation. Bristol Strategy is a HubSpot Platinum Partner, which means they are certified by HubSpot and have helped many companies implement their CRM solution. They can support clients with sales enablement or when migrating and using HubSpot Sales Hub.
Staying a step ahead of the field is made easier with these programs. If you have questions about using sales enablement, reach out to Bristol Strategy for more information.
Bristol Strategy is a full-funnel inbound marketing agency and inbound sales agency offering the full complement of Inbound Marketing services that enable our clients to surpass their business objectives by transforming the way they engage with their buyers online. Reach out to us to learn more about how our experience and capabilities can help your business grow.