Marketing and sales. The two key components to converting customers. They should go hand-in-hand: marketing drives traffic and sales converts that traffic into leads. However, more and more companies are seeing a disconnect between their marketing and sales initiatives, resulting in dwindling Return on Investment. Instead of hand-in-hand, the right hand isn’t talking to the left hand.
This manifests itself as problems such as deals getting delayed in the sales proves, sales forecasting not being based on data and a lack of insight into the marketing campaigns that result in sales.
To rectify these problems, many businesses are employing Sales Enablement. In fact, 70% of large businesses have an in-house team looking after this facet of their business, and each year, more small and medium businesses are understanding the benefits.
So what is sales enablement? How can it benefit your business, no matter the size?
There actually isn’t one hardline definition of sales enablement and how it functions is different from business to business. A general starting point, however, is to think of this as developing processes, practices and tools that improve your sales team’s ability to close deals by reconnecting marketing and sales initiatives.
Sales enablement improves your ability to increase revenue by not only increasing sales, but increasing the efficiency of sales. It is a multi-faceted approach that involves strategy, data analysis, content creation and sales training.
The goal is to ensure that your sales team is optimized for interactions with buyers through possession of the required knowledge, process, practices and behaviours.
Sales enablement should focus mostly on strategy and less on operations. Your team should determine its own metrics for sales success and then analyze the factors that are contributing to both successful and unsuccessful sales interactions. This analysis will give your team greater understanding of the behaviours, tools and techniques that are resulting in sales. Once this is understood, your team can look at how to train more sellers on best practices and look at how to increase efficiency.
These are some of the outcomes of properly implemented sales enablement strategies:
Sales enablement works best when companies commit to it through investment in staff, resources and apps such as SideKick and LeadIn. For this reason, small to medium sized business can find it challenging to integrate these new processes alongside their traditional sales and marketing initiatives. However, it can differ from organization to organization, with some research, you can find strategies that work for you. As always, if you’re looking to jump-start your sales through sales enablement, Hughes & Co is here to help with a team experienced in working with businesses of all sizes and types.