Sales Enablement is supposed to be strategic
The goal of an effective sales enablement strategy is to help your sales team find, engage, and close more deals using the help of marketing, tech, and automation. Support covers the entire customer experience, from lead acquisition to customer close.
And, if you're like the vast majority of all other B2Bs in existence, you're probably doing it all wrong.
You don't have the right sales enablement software or resources in place... Sales content management is essentially the Wild West. You have a toxic sales culture. And your B2B sales process is a mishmash of splintered agendas from the past and individual contributors' hidden genius that never scales.
These 6 sales enablement best practices will improve your rates of success with both outbound and inbound lead management.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is a method of using marketing to drive stronger sales outcomes in b2b. By getting Sales and Marketing working together, you amplify the impact of both.
But working together is no easy feat. Years of ineffective attempts to merge their vectors have led to deep-rooted distrust and scapegoating.
By following these sales enablement practices, however, you increase your odds of success ten-fold
1. Create Balance
Balance comes from collaboration.
Step one in your sales enablement process is to give Sales a seat at the table. Put Sales and Marketing in the same room to:
- Define success
- Define individual roles contributing to success
Sales should have a say in what Marketing does to support them. Conversely, Marketing should have commitments and follow-through from sales with the opportunities created by Marketing.
Neither can happen unless they are face-to-face and neither reports to the other.
MORE LIKE THIS: Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices
2. Deploy a Modern CRM
There's no point in any of these exercises unless you have sales management software that puts your sales enablement strategies first.
It's time to upgrade your most important sales enablement tools: your CRM and anything you can get your hands on that supports sales people.
Your CRM can't just be a data warehouse. It needs to be an active participant in your sales process. Salesforce, out of the box, is not a modern CRM. If you want to improve your b2b sales process, you need adoption.
Neither are 99% of the products on the market today. Many of them can be modernized, but if we're talking about out of the box options, I'd say that Hubspot Sales Pro is the only one that really gets it.
Not sure if yours is modern? If it is, it will do the following:
- Automate data entry - ANYTHING connected to email and your calendar
- Automate scheduling
- Automate email nurturing
- Elevate sales insights when and where they are needed most
- Don't make sales dig through multiple platforms
- Marketing actions (website visits, etc) should be visible
- Alert sales of buying signals LIVE
- Provide quick access to measurable email templates
- Provide quick access to measurable sales collateral
- Leverage ai and machine learning
- Constantly update to incorporate the latest sales trends, such as video
Download our Essential Sales Enablement Playbook:
3. Sales Enablement Resources
Outside of calling, emails are your salespeople's most leveraged form of communication. But there are so many unknowns when it comes to helping your salespeople succeed via email, such as:
- How do you tell what emails are effective?
- How do you improve the performance of their emails?
- When is the best time to send an email?
You can answer all of these questions and enable better sales outcomes by creating email templates in your Modern CRM, then measuring results and optimizing based on objective data.
Here's a small example of the kind of data you can glean:
You can see how often they're being sent as well as open, reply, and click rates. With this kind of data, you can improve outcomes through A/B testing.
Your salespeople send the same emails day in and day out. Leverage email templates to create messaging cohesiveness along with hackable success.
Other sales enablement resources include:
- Presentations
- Contracts
- ABM campaigns
4. Upload Measurable Sales Collateral
Email isn't the only collateral that you can put into template form. In fact, anything you put into digital form can be measured.
In Hubspot Sales Pro, we have a tool called "Documents." This allows us to upload anything from flyers to sales presentations. Doing so gives our salespeople a distinct advantage.
- Sales gets live notifications every time somebody opens the collateral
- Sales can see a history of who opened it, when, and how long
Take a look at some of the amazing insights sales AND marketing has access to thanks to this incredible tool:
This is a composite of two screenshots showing the same document... On the top you see basic dashboard type information. Under you'll see which specific visitors have viewed it (censored to protect our clients' anonymity). In the middle you'll see a list of times it was opened by a specific individual, and to the right you'll see information based on a single visit.
Based on this kind of data, your marketing team can see where the bottlenecks exist for future iterations. And your salespeople can see how engaged or not engaged a prospect is.
5. Use Different Scheduling Links for Different Events
One of the best ways to kill a deal fast in its tracks is to make scheduling a meeting a painful and tedious process. Thus, the advent of programs such as Calendarly.
But as a sales enabler, this just checks one of the boxes (automation)... it still leaves room for understanding the impact of these tools.
Over the years, I have learned through personal experience how important it is to provide different links for different purposes.
See below for a matrix of different links based on different purposes:
By giving your salespeople MORE options, you give their prospects FEWER options, which tends to improve overall performance.
You also gain all sorts of valuable insights based on how these links are being used, and which better serve the sale.
For example, the 15-minute tire kicker has a strong showing, but not as strong as the 30-minute introduction.
Additionally, with the right technology, they can link multiple calendars to accommodate inside and outside sales teams.
6. Execute an SLA between Sales & Marketing
Putting together a Service Level Agreement between sales and marketing may seem more like a way to resolve alignment issues, but it also provides sales with a clear roadmap to success.
A properly executed SLA will tell them exactly what's expected when an inbound lead comes in or how to respond to specific buying signals.
7. Test, Measure, Analyze, Report, Repeat
At the end of the day, scaling is all about achieving performance goals through repetition. So, it's important to hold sales accountable to the plan you bestow upon them, and to ensure marketing continues to support sales with objective improvements in the collateral they provide.
You can accomplish this by setting benchmarks, and testing different changes. It's important to keep changes incremental, and only focus on one metric at a time.
With emails, start with your open rates. This comes from improving subject lines and timing. The other two metrics depend greatly on your goals of the email.
CONCLUSION:
By deploying these 6 sales enablement best practices, you should have no problem growing your business with confidence. In fact, many of your growth objectives can be reached in relatively short order by making adjustments in these areas rather than putting your eggs in the marketing basket.
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