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Sales enablement is the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward.
I’ve dug up three unique explanations from the web and bolded the parts that I think are particularly interesting about each.
#1. “Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.” – IDC
This definition from IDC has been around for a few years now, but it really does cut to the core of things. I particularly like how they stress not only the information necessary for enabling sales, but the format it’s delivered in as well. To me, this point is important for two reasons.
First – training. Whether you are onboarding new hires or providing resources for existing reps to access on the go, you need to create content that’s engaging and promotes learner retention. For example, since people are generally better at retaining information they can both see and hear, our customers have found on-demand video to be a valuable training asset when used along with other in-person and traditional learning formats.
Second – you have content as a selling tool. The more assets reps have at their disposal, the more prepared they’ll be to effectively engage with prospects and customers. Once again, video can be a powerful tool for nurturing opportunities and on-demand communications, but whitepapers, data sheets and other content types are also useful. Similarly, approved and compliant PowerPoint presentations or product demonstrations are especially critical for live and in-person conversations.
#2. “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.” – Forrester Research
This is another popular definition, and Forrester has certainly done plenty of research into what sales enablement looks like for businesses today. That they specifically call out “all client-facing employees” is especially significant in my eyes. It drives home the point that sales enablement is about more than just those with the word “sales” in their titles.
Marketers, business development teams, customer service and support reps – all of these people communicate directly with potential and current customers. As a result, they all have an impact on the organization’s ability to drive new revenue and maintain existing business, which makes them important pieces of the sales enablement puzzle.
#3. “Aligning marketing processes and goals, and then arming sales with tools to improve sales execution and drive revenue.” – The Pedowitz Group
While this is hardly the most complete explanation out there, the fact that it starts out with a sales-marketing alignment message shouldn’t be overlooked. Keeping that line of communication open and healthy is a key component of sales enablement. Not only does it help reps become better informed on the company’s products, customers and overall brand messages, but it also helps ensure that the content generated by marketing is relevant to reps and aligned with their sales conversations.
Though not a definition per se, marketing consultant and speaker Matt Heinz recently blogged about what sales enablement means to him. In his post, he writes that “a tactical definition of sales enablement that fits all companies – sizes, industries, cultures – would be next to impossible,” and instead opts to define it as more of a guiding principle.
A systematic approach to help the selling team to prepare for the customer interactions. effectively engage with their prospects and advance the sales process to the close. Moreover sales enablement is still evolving and the term means different things to different companies.
Sales Enablement: Going Beyond Lead Generation
It’s no longer enough for Marketing to deliver a steady flow of qualified leads to Sales. Marketers who want to help their sales teams close more deals are now focusing on sales enablement as a way of providing a complete view of territories, accounts, and buyers.
There are three key ways in which a marketing team can help Sales better understand its audience: by providing insight into buyers, by maintaining top-of-mind awareness, and by developing trusted relationships.
Providing Buyer Insights
Thanks in part to modern solutions, marketers can now provide deep insights into buyer motivations and behaviors. By allowing their sales teams to see and understand the digital body language of buyers, marketers can give them the knowledge they need to figure out what an individual cares about, who within an organization is actively engaged in a buying process, and which organizations within a salesperson’s territory are showing buying interest.
Individual Insight: By displaying for the sales team – in an interactive, graphical format – the activity of each individual who’s a potential buyer, Marketing enables Sales to understand which conversations would be of most interest to them. Marketing can include insights such as the social media discussions that first caught each individual’s interest, or the communications to which they responded best, to help Sales guide discussions along a path that is of most interest to each buyer.
Company Insight: Marketers can also provide their sales teams with enabling insights into the companies they’re selling to. By identifying who within each company is actively engaged, not engaged at all, or taking negative actions such as searching on objection-related topics, Marketing helps Sales understand how best to navigate the buying organizations they’re dealing with.
Territory Insight: By looking at the companies in a salesperson’s territory and highlighting those that are showing overall signs of buying activity, marketers can enable that salesperson to focus on companies that show the most potential to become customers.
Maintaining Top-of-Mind Awareness
Equally critical to sales enablement is for your marketing team to ensure that your solutions stay top-of-mind with buying audiences. You can accomplish this through continual lead nurturing that provides insights and value to each prospect while keeping your company on their radar. Over time, as buying events take place, each prospect will display signals as they begin to conduct more active research on your products and solutions.
Marketing can enable Sales to engage with prospects by providing quick access to nurture campaigns into which salespeople can drop prospects who are not yet ready to purchase. When done right, these marketing automation processes can keep your solutions visible until a buying event develops.
Building Trusted Relationships
As much as your solutions need to remain on buyers’ minds, so do your salespeople. When a buying process finally begins, a salesperson whose name is familiar to the buyer will be in a much better position to sell than a stranger. Marketing can help by ensuring that all communications come from the salesperson assigned to each account – automatically, on their behalf – so that a trusted relationship can grow over time.
B2B Sales Enablement in a Nutshell
Marketers who go beyond lead generation and focus on sales enablement can drive more revenue for their organizations. By providing rich insights into buyers, their companies, and their territories, marketers enable Sales to better prioritize their efforts. And by using nurture campaigns and send-on-behalf-of personalization, marketers can help build familiarity between salespeople and their customers. Together, these techniques can significantly improve sales effectiveness.
Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimise the return of investment of the selling system.
The sales enablement function is evolving as an integral role in aligning marketing and sales. Of course, many functions “enable” the field force, including human resources, sales operations, marketing operations, product marketing, field marketing, account-based marketing and communications. All of these functions build “enablement elements.” The sales enablement function takes these elements and orchestrates their delivery to the field so reps can easily digest them.
Well........thanks for the invitation
Very good question
Sales Enablement are ( the marketing tools & the strategies) to be used by the
sales team to advance the customer,s selection & buying process....
and for more clear about sales enablement marketing tools :
it,s include springboard discussion documents, configuration guides, calculators, pricing matrices, competitive guides, buyer selection guides and roundup articles, implementation guides, challenger questions, objection handling training, trials and demos.
In short, we can assume that Sales Enablement is the process of approaching towards the particular or a group of consumers at the time when they need services or products. The other form of this we can also consider is Place Sales
Dear Ibrahim,
Simply we define Sales Enablement as the mission of increasing the effectiveness of each customer interaction, by increasing revenue with the same amount of resources
Here is our more formal definition, broken into5 Key Components:
Sales Enablement is more than just a “Content” job. It is the rising tide that lifts all boats. It tests reps to ensure messaging and skills are learned. It measures adoption of programs and platforms.
Best Regards,
Hany Sewilam AbdelHamid
Director of Sales & Marketing | HBD
Entrepreneurship Coach & Consultant
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