What is sales enablement?
Conducted with the intent of improving efficiency and accelerating revenue, sales enablement is the process of empowering your sellers with the training, knowledge, resources, and tools they need to do their jobs effectively—i.e., to create and close opportunities.
If you want to build and implement a successful, sustainable sales enablement strategy, adhere to the following 7-step process:
- Assemble your team. This should include your sales leaders and anyone who will be overseeing the creation of collateral (e.g., battlecards).
- Establish specific goals & KPIs. Obviously, you want to close more business. But how, specifically, will you go about that? Will you overhaul your case studies library? Spin up a business case template to empower your champions? Build an ROI calculator to win over decision-makers? All of the above? And how will you measure the success of whatever it is you end up doing?
- Delegate action items. Generally, you know who is involved and what needs to happen. Now, specifically, determine who is responsible for what.
- Create collateral. Whether you're focused on case studies, business case templates, ROI calculators, or something else entirely, now is the time to bring it (or them) to life.
- Develop your roll-out plans. So, you've just created some game-changing sales enablement collateral. How are you going to ensure that your sellers know (1) where to find it, (2) why it's important, and (3) how to use it?
- Distribute collateral. Now that you've answered those 3 questions from the previous step, make it happen.
- Analyze & optimize. We included KPIs in step 2 for a reason: Because the work of sales enablement is never done. Use your KPIs to determine what's working, what's not, and how you can continue to improve results over time.
