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    Sales enablement is just what the term indicates - enabling your sales team to work more effectively and succeed. This is done by arming them with the right resources and sales technology such as HubSpot and more importantly providing content with context to help a buyer make a decision.

    Sales enablement is not just about helping your sales team close more deals (i.e., more revenue for your company); it's aimed at improving sales results and productivity with resources like training and knowledge and using software that can help with creating standardised pricing materials, email templates, drag-and-drop proposals and more! 

    Here's 4 ways sales enablement can help with business growth:

    1. It gets marketing and sales to work together and for each other.

    You work in marketing and put all this effort into a social media campaign or a blog, and you can see the results are good. Customers are engaging with your content. Surely, you must be helping the sales team, right? Possibly, but often these teams work so siloed, they don't know how they are affecting or how to help each other's efforts. The marketing team might be succeeding on their own terms, but not actually be creating content that's helping the sales team. While sales might not be getting the right leads or have a stack of contacts that aren't quite sales-ready and need to be nurtured, but the marketing team has no clue.

    With the sales enablement process, marketing and sales have to align. They have to understand how each other work and how to communicate. Sales enablement also pushes companies to get tools that can help with reporting to show what's working and not working between sales and marketing. With HubSpot's attribution reporting, for example, we're able to see how all our assets from landing pages to email campaigns to social media posts contribute to our revenue.

    2. It doesn't take long to show results, and it really improves how technology works for sales. 

    When I started in sales consulting, my first meeting was with the head of sales and business development. They'd been using HubSpot's CRM and Sales Pro for awhile, so they had a great tool in place, but their team wasn't using it as well as they could have been. This session was about understanding their sales process and what a day in their life is like, with the goal of establishing what we'd aim to accomplish over time and map out quick wins for the upcoming quarter.

    Here are a few pain points we noticed and were able to alleviate.

    Pain Point Quick Win Solution
    They were sending at least two three emails per prospect to set up a time to do a demo. We set up a meeting link with HubSpot's meeting tool that they could include in emails, so prospects could book a time that works for them in one swoop.
    They had no cadence for following up with contacts. We set up automated reminders when it had been 5 days since a contact had last been contacted. 
    They were drafting up the same emails over and over to new leads. We created those emails as templates in HubSpot's template tool. With their emails integrated, they could just insert the template from within their email platform and click send. 
    They had no record of phone conversations with leads. They started logging their calls in HubSpot, so they could quickly recall past conversations. 

    Within a month, demos were up 15%, overall revenue has increased by 10% and the team said they felt less bogged  down with tedious tasks. As a I mentioned, these were just a few quick wins. We ultimately revamped and standardised their proposals and contracts, implemented leading scoring and more automation, and eliminated unnecessary tools in their tech stack. What I'm trying to show with this example is how swiftly we were able to make a difference with how this team worked. While there are long-term goals that can take some time to achieve with sales enablement, you start experiencing the benefits nearly right away. 

    3. It supports the rest of the team to perform better. 

    By bringing on the right technology platforms and equipping your whole sales team with the right tools, everyone can perform better. I've noticed that often companies have top performers who they rely on too much. With the right resources, the whole team has the opportunity to rise up. This goes for marketing too. Having the tools to track and see results ensures time is being put towards the right efforts. Being able to measure success at work, irrespective of the team you're in creates a solid avenue for overall business growth.

    4. It allows you to get to know your customers better. 

    By automating processes, standardising communications and implementing technology that helps you understand who your customers are, sales enablement not only gives you the data you need to personalise your interactions but frees you up to take the time to do so. If we know anything at the moment, it's that people respond to being treated in a way that seems tailored to them. How can anyone remember all those details or communicate with all their leads so personally? This is where a CRM, if used properly, can help you collect and keep a record of those details as well as automate some engagement. 


    If you couldn't tell already, our team at Connect Labs loves helping organisations with their sales operations and enablement efforts. Learn more about our workshop and how we can work with you. 

    Sales Success

     

    Tags:
    Sales + CRM
    Courtney Cervantes
    Post by Courtney Cervantes
    April 6, 2020
    Hi, I'm Court. I'm an Online Experience Strategist and love making sure businesses find success online. I particularly love consulting on the details of how to make something work and remove unnecessary actions from workflows.