What on earth is Sales Enablement?

Sales and marketing are meant to work together to reach the achieve the same goals but they usually don't. This means that neither can reach their potential - sales won't get the quality leads they need from marketing and marketing don't get feedback so that they can fine-tune their approach.

These maddening inefficiencies make life harder for businesses all over New Zealand. The good news is that there's a solution.

What is sales enablement?

Put simply, sales enablement refers to the processes, technologies and strategies that enable your sales team to be more effective and efficient. While it usually involves certain tasks, sales enablement is more of a philosophy and a culture that guides your strategy, than a specific set of actions.

With that said, what exactly does sales enablement involve and what can it help your business achieve?

Sales enablement bridges the gap between marketing and sales

Marketing and sales should have the same goals and two closely aligned strategies, but this is rarely the case. One of the essential outcomes of a sales enablement culture is a better alignment of these two departments, which inevitably improves business outcomes like revenue and sales. 

This happens as a result of several key actions, including:

• Regular consultation between marketing and sales. 

• Aligning marketing content with sales objectives and revenue driving. 

• Allowing sellers to access content for each stage of the buyer journey, which they can personalise and deliver at the right time to help improve customer engagement. 

It's not enough to simply require your sales and marketing team to work together, to make them truly effective they'll need the right training and the tools to enable collaboration. 

Sales enablement empowers your sales team to sell efficiently and effectively

Sales enablement creates consistently effective communication and consistent operational methods that support and improve your sales department. 

Using smarter tools that can profile and identify leads quickly, marketing is better able to pass the right prospects onto sales. Thanks to the improvements enabled by sales enablement and an improved pipeline from marketing, your sales department will be better able to customise their approach and target quality leads instead of chasing time-wasters. 

How to create a culture of sales enablement

Buying a smart CRM or scheduling meetings between marketing and sales isn't enough - sales enablement needs to be embedded in your company's culture to be truly effective. Start making the change by:

• Embracing open communication between sales and other departments.

• Encouraging marketing and sales to seek feedback. 

• Providing consistent feedback

• Utilising smarter technology.

• Using data to inform decision making

• Using a service level agreement between marketing and sales that clearly spells out expectations.

• Ensuring that marketing, sales and your business as a whole are working towards common goals. 

Sales enablement is defined as the processes, technologies and strategies that enable your sales team to be more effective and efficient, but it's more than any set of actions. It's a culture that needs to be fully adopted to align your sales and marketing teams and boost your results. 

Get in touch with the sales enablement experts at Engaging Partners for a hand getting started.