Can a sales enablement strategy lead to sustainable revenue growth? Will you do just fine with your existing process or does your organization need to invest in sales enablement to help your sales reps reach their sales goals? We discuss five signs that will help you decide whether you need to invest in a sales enablement strategy.

Sales enablement, as defined by Hubspot, is the technology, processes and content that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. Sales enablement can help in improving the execution of key sales activities like making sales calls, pursuing sales opportunities, managing accounts, and targeting top prospects.
If your business is showing the following five signs, then investing in sales enablement could hugely benefit your sales team:

1. Difficulty in Identifying Sales Content
Content is central to creating brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing conversions. Sales reps struggle with sales content on many fronts:

Identifying the right content for their sales meetings or calls
Presenting relevant content at the right time
Identifying content that is important and that will resonate well with the buyer
Pin-pointing if and which content was effective
Over-spending on content creation: According to a report by SiriusDecisions, “60 to 70% of content produced by B2B marketing organizations goes unused.”

An effective sales enablement strategy can help solve a lot of content problems for your sales team. It will help in the following ways:

Sales enablement platforms can centralize approved content, where a sales rep can find, use, and share content. Versioning systems can also help track changes made, current content user, and the latest copy to be used.
The sales system can tag content to be searchable by topic, opportunity level, industry, etc., so the right content will pop up at the right time – increasing efficiency and productivity.
Incorporating analytics in sales enablement tools can reveal valuable information: which content generated most engagement, which content resonated best with buyers, which content triggered a buying decision, and which content was ineffective.
Analytics can help you measure content performance, to determine the most effective content and allocate resources accordingly.

2. The Onboarding Process Takes Too Long
If you have a non-existent onboarding program or the ramp-up time for new hires in the sales team is too slow, it will affect your ROI. A sales enablement program can help structure the sales onboarding process by interweaving training, practice, and refresher sessions.

Sales enablement technology can streamline the process for new as well as experienced employees, while making training sessions accessible on demand, irrespective of location or time. Sales enablement managers can track employees that have completed the training, evaluate their learning, and tag the reps according to varying potential levels to adjust their training accordingly.

3. Low Sales Productivity
According to a study by CSO Insights, “Salespeople are spending 35.9% of their time selling, with the rest of their week consumed by other tasks.”

Low productivity is a result of:

Time being consumed in administrative tasks
Challenges in understanding unique buyer personas
Below-average quota attainment, when they have limited access to data when presenting to the buyer, or perform guesswork in content strategy

Investing in sales enablement can help in:

Setting up systems to reduce administrative tasks and improve efficiency
Implementing a CMS that supports content search at a granular level
Ensuring better team collaboration to improve messaging and insights

4. Aggressive Revenue or Growth Goals
Whether you are a big brand that is launching a campaign to stay ahead of the competition or a startup that’s trying to plant its feet on the ground, you must have aggressive revenue or growth goals. Sales enablement can help you align with:

The recruitment team – to bring in more employees
The marketing team – to generate more demand
The training team – to accelerate the onboarding processes

5. Insufficient Coaching
As the pressure of performance mounts, sales reps skip steps in coaching and start selling without understanding how to sell on value. Sometimes, learning capabilities and coaching styles also differ, leading to inconsistencies in implementation.

Sales enablement tools can help in:

Improving the value selling skills and product knowledge of sales reps
Coaching sales reps on how to use technology to optimize sales efforts
Help self-coach or take coaching assignments at one’s own pace

Conclusion
An effective sales enablement strategy is worth the investment if your organization is struggling to keep up with your financial goals. If you can pinpoint where you are slipping, a sales enablement strategy can help you gain control and steer the company in the right direction.

 

This article was taken from here.



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