What is Sales Enablement? Why are we interested in it?

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales Enablement: Definition

Sales enablement encompasses all the practices, tools, and strategies designed to make your sales team more effective at their core job: selling.

It's a holistic approach that, contrary to popular perception, isn't centered on tools but rather on a broad objective of sales effectiveness.

This term has emerged in recent years alongside a whole suite of software designed to help salespeople. But in reality, the need to integrate sales enablement into your sales strategy is driven by the increasing complexity of selling.

The Stakes of Sales Enablement

The goal of sales enablement is to help your sales team perform at their highest level. While the objective is straightforward, the stakes are high.

Any leader who still thinks selling is just about talent and that the only management approach needed is carrot-and-stick (bonuses vs. firing) is heading for a wall. Sales have become more complex because today your fiercest competitors are just one click away from your prospects.

Your prospects' needs are becoming more sophisticated, and there's almost always an equally effective alternative within reach.

If you don't support your salespeople with an effective sales strategy and a real sales enablement approach, you're going to lose.

The 3 Fundamentals of Sales Enablement

In our view, there are three key concepts to understand for successful sales enablement:

1. Sales cycle success isn't solely the sales team's responsibility: Marketing and sales teams must work hand in hand. The marketing department's reason for being is to make the sales team's job easier, not the other way around. This doesn't put the sales team above the marketing team—it's simply an obvious reality to anyone who understands the customer buying process.

2. Sales enablement is centered on the buyer's journey and the relationship between the salesperson and the client: This might seem obvious, but sales enablement isn't about "monitoring" your salespeople or micromanaging them. The entire approach aims to streamline the client-seller relationship to sell more, faster, and at better prices. Let me repeat: the goal isn't to create pretty PowerPoints to show how well we understand what's wrong and that it's the salespeople's fault for not knowing how to sell (I know you're not like that, but I'm clarifying for others).

3. Sales enablement requires a culture of leadership and coaching: Well yes, if we don't fundamentally believe that our teams can improve and that we can support and help our colleagues perform, sales enablement has no value.

How to Implement a Sales Enablement Strategy

Structure Your Sales Process

Sales enablement focuses on how to close a sale. Without a precise model of your sales cycle and the key elements that comprise it, your sales enablement strategy will be nothing but empty gestures.

You absolutely must think through what your sales process should be, how to know whether or not to initiate a sale, how to convince a prospect, and how to trigger the buying decision.

Once this is done, you'll have a foundation to understand what your team is missing, how to equip them for success, and how to evaluate their progress.

For more on sales processes, I recommend reading this article.

Train Your Sales Teams

Your sales team must be trained continuously. You need to ensure that all information about your products, services, and market has been made available and understood.

But you also need to ensure your teams are trained in new sales methods like inbound sales if you've implemented inbound marketing, or using social networks in sales, for example.

Training must be ongoing and adapted to the weaknesses in your sales process (hence the importance of starting by structuring it).

Equip Your Teams

Your teams are trained and know your products, market, and sales process inside and out? Now it's time to give them the right sales tools to help them perform. There are TONS of tools to help sales teams, and if many companies are disappointed with them, it's simply because they skipped steps by starting with tools rather than the sales process.

But the tools provided to salespeople aren't necessarily software—they could be content, template documents, websites... It all depends on what they need to facilitate exchanges with their prospects.

Manage the Sales Enablement Process: Setting Up a Sales Enablement Team

I'm often asked about the relevance of setting up a sales enablement team. Honestly, I don't think you need to hire anyone whose sole mission would be sales enablement. This role exists—it's the sales director. That's their job.

However, there can be sales enablement project leaders within teams whose role is to quickly identify problems and escalate them to management to be addressed as rapidly as possible. This team should consist of members from both the sales team and marketing team—people who are in the field and can more easily identify operational gaps.

Sales Enablement Tools

Don't Confuse Sales Enablement with Sales Enablement Tools

At the risk of repeating myself, it's vitally important to understand that sales enablement is not synonymous with "software." Yes, there are tools whose role is to help the sales team. But there's no tool that will turn any sales team into world champions simply by using it.

The tool will facilitate certain actions and allow you to move faster, even automate some tasks, but there's no favorable wind for those who don't know where they're going.

How many of you have deployed a new prospecting tool thinking you'd multiply lead generation by 10, only to discover that nothing changed, or almost nothing?

How many CRM migrations have led to absolutely nothing conclusive when at launch we guaranteed it would enable at least 20% revenue growth? (No, COVID isn't the problem here.)

Learn to differentiate the concept of sales enablement from its manifestations (the tools).

The 3 Essential Types of Sales Enablement Tools

CRMs

This is undoubtedly the most widespread sales enablement tool in companies. This is very important and therefore excellent news, except that most CRMs aren't sales enablement tools. And the vast majority of companies use them poorly, more like an extension of productivity surveillance services.

Any sales enablement tool should primarily help your field salespeople. A good way to verify this is to see if they use it or if you have to threaten them month after month to make them do it.

We've written a guide on choosing CRMs here for those interested.

Lead Generation Tools

Lead generation tools are obviously very important since they support your salespeople through a particularly difficult phase. In reality, there are tons of tools of this type, ranging from:

• Prospect list generation tools: LinkedIn scrapers, email verification, prospect list management, etc.
• Email or social media messaging tools: Email automation tools, social media automation tools, prospecting video generation tools, etc.
• Marketing automation tools: Of course, marketing automation is a form of sales enablement since it identifies, nurtures, and converts visitors into prospects.

Once again, you must focus on identifying your weaknesses, propose a new working method, and then implement the tool that will allow you to do it faster and more easily.

Sales Meeting Tools

It's quite amusing when you think about it—these tools should be the most numerous because they're absolutely crucial. It's during sales meetings that everything is decided, so why is this where everyone abandons salespeople to their "talent"?

In reality, there are a number of sales support or sales meeting tools. Most are fairly recent and aim to provide a digital experience to respond to the virtualization of sales meetings that has obviously accelerated significantly in recent years.