What Is The Sales Enablement Framework?
Today, sales are no longer limited to maximizing revenue. With the growth of e-commerce marketing, brands need to focus more on virtual enablement and selling. This is where a sales enablement program comes in.
Sales enablement includes equipping your teams with the appropriate content, strategies, and tools required to help them increase engagement and maximize revenue. It ensures the alignment of people, processes, and priorities in an organization using the right training, coaching, content, and communication. This correlates with superior sales performance, leading to greater sales, deal size, and win rate.
Typically, the key components of a sales enablement framework include collaboration across client-facing teams, cross-functional strategies to support groups, automation of sales-related administrative tasks, and developing sales skills such as prospecting, relationship building, negotiation, etc.
Sales enablement processes are often customer-focused, with the underlying target of helping sales personnel identify the right buyers, engaging them effectively throughout the customer journey, and ensuring a seamless buying process.
The Sales Enablement Process
Every business has its own sales enablement process. The framework is tailored to your sales team’s specific needs so that they can target audiences more effectively and close deals faster.
An ideal sales enablement process should include an analysis of the resources, content, and strategies that are provided to sales teams to ensure that they lead to high conversion rates and revenue maximization.
Here is what you should include in a sales enablement model for your company:
#1. Identify the target buyer personas for your team
While targeting customers, it is important to understand whether the personas that your marketing team has for various campaigns are optimized for use in sales. Once the sales reps have aligned with the marketing team, they can identify the right buyers, design strategies that actually work and resonate with clients, improve the sales cycle, and boost revenue.
#2. Align the sales process with your buyer’s journey
As you align your content, tools, and strategies, paying attention to the buyer’s experience is important. You can start off by conducting research on the buyers’ decision-making process, what information they look for, how the information is sourced, why they choose certain brands over others, and who they consult before making a sales decision. You can also collect insights from your sales reps or prospects to help you align your sales strategies and buyers’ needs.
#3. Customize business communication tools
To stay in contact with prospects at all times, consider implementing an omnichannel communication strategy for your company. These can include communicating with potential buyers through email, phone, and social media apps. Moreover, you can also integrate different social media channels with chatbots, video conferencing tools, and calendar scheduling apps for organizing meetings and appointments.
#4. Create a feedback loop between teams
When implementing a sales enablement framework, sales teams cannot do all the work alone. An effective sales enablement program involves multiple teams and disciplines while placing the client at the center of everything. This involves getting customer-related feedback not only from your sales personnel but also from customer support agents and the marketing department. It helps share valuable insights on how to target buyers more effectively and train employees to drive conversions.
Why Is A Sales Enablement Framework Beneficial For Your Company?
Today, it is necessary for sales, marketing, and customer service teams to be aligned. A sales enablement model enables teams to bridge the gap by providing valuable insights into consumer behavior while equipping them with the tools to close deals faster.
Here are more reasons why a sales enablement framework benefits your business.
#1. Helps scale success faster
By providing teams with the necessary tools, knowledge, training, and resources to drive conversions, companies no longer need to rely only on top-performing employees. This helps them achieve targets faster and attain success sooner.
#2. Better access to sales data
With a significant volume of retail sales taking place online, sales enablement technology has made it easier to collect and organize data. Further, companies can also gain insights into buyers’ persona, preferences, and pain points to adopt a more personalized approach toward prospects.
#3. Better alignment with marketing
A key component of the sales enablement framework is to align all strategies with the marketing team. If the marketing and sales teams are not on the same page, it will be difficult for the business to achieve its targets of increasing revenue or driving conversions. Given that, a sales enablement program provides teams with the necessary tools and resources to meet the company’s objectives, it helps the marketing and sales teams align and work collectively.
#4. Improves brand reputation
When sales personnel are well-informed and knowledgeable about their company and its products, they can resolve client grievances with ease. This leaves a positive impression on prospects' minds, which, in turn, improves the company's reputation.
Common Areas to Focus On While Building Sales Enablement Framework
The three most common areas to focus on while building a Sales Enablement Framework:
People
All the teams must agree with the Sales Enablement Framework. A solid sales enablement framework includes leaders from both marketing and sales departments. It’s a shared responsibility between them, and they should decide who is responsible for what.
Typically, a marketing team is responsible for creating resources such as blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, etc., that helps salespeople nurture and qualify leads. While the sales team helps collect feedback and insights from prospects and customers that help improvise the entire sales process.
Process
The process shared between both teams is crucial–get feedback, work on new content, set goals, and be accountable. These are all steps to take to see the strategy succeed.
Technology
In the 21st century, nothing moves without technology. Technology helps with communication between both teams as it helps save time. Some of the technology that should be a part of a sales enablement framework include:
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Sales Enablement Framework helps empower your sales rep with the right CRM system. CRM platforms act as a centralized database whereby both your marketing and sales teams can access all resources at their fingertips. Besides, it ensures efficient communication between teams.
Sales tools
Sales tools such as sales automation tools, sales pipeline management platforms, etc., help keep all the sales reps aligned with the goals. It provides an overview of the sales activities and ensures every sales rep is on track.
How To Create An Effective Sales Enablement Framework?
Here’s how you can create a sales enablement framework for your company.
#1. Set objectives
Before designing a sales enablement program for your company, it is best to establish the goals or objectives you want to achieve. This will help you frame strategies and design content accordingly, helping align sales and marketing teams better.
#2. Track KPIs
Once you have set the objectives for your sales enablement framework, it is time to determine which sales KPIs or indicators to track. Identifying metrics will make establishing benchmarks and tracking sales performance easier over time. Examples of KPIs can include quota attainment, lead quality, average win rate, and so on.
#3. Provide the right tools required by the sales reps
A sales enablement framework cannot be implemented if the teams lack the resources to succeed. To ensure that your sales personnel know how to meet the company’s objectives, they should be provided with the appropriate tools, knowledge, content, and training. This will help them convince potential buyers of the brand and its products easily and address any concerns, boosting sales.
#4. Measure, analyze, and optimize
The sales enablement framework is not a one-and-done type of thing. In order for it to remain effective, you need to track and optimize its performance on a regular basis. This includes analyzing key performance metrics, generating reports, and making updates to the model.
#5. Collect information in a single place
Salespeople can save valuable time by collecting all important information, such as contact details, conversation history, and buyer preferences, in a single place. This helps them quickly refer to any required information to communicate with potential and existing clients.
#6. Gather and provide feedback
Another crucial aspect of a sales enablement model is giving and receiving feedback. By collecting and providing feedback across teams, companies can ensure that everyone is working towards a common objective. Feedback also helps address any roadblocks, identify obstacles, and find ways for improvement.
Sales Enablement Best Practices
Here are some best practices to adopt while creating a sales enablement framework for your organization.
#1. Focus on the customer’s journey
Today, people want tailored, on-demand experiences. They do not want to wait around to receive their order. Thus, for companies looking to gain more buyers or improve customer retention, it is suggested to adopt a client-oriented sales enablement framework. Sales teams should be trained such that they emphasize more on enhancing buyer experiences rather than using outdated sales funnels to track customer journeys.
#2. Make content accessible
Since content is a crucial component of your sales enablement framework, it should be accessible to all teams involved. Moreover, the content should be audited on a regular basis so that any outdated knowledge is removed and all messaging reflects the current culture of the company.
#3. Provide buyers with the right resources
Effective selling is all about being timely and opportunistic. If you want your clients to keep placing repeated orders, sales and marketing teams must collaborate to identify touchpoints and triggers and create a message that engages buyers.
#4. Measure everything
Successful sales enablement is not just powered by buyer data insights but the company’s internal data as well. By measuring sales performance, you can track what content is effective for buyers and what can be improved.
Common Sales Enablement Metrics And KPIs
Sales in modern times are data-led. Since there is so much data and varied purposes for the same data sets, it can get confusing. This makes the entire process of collecting data unfruitful.
The skill of turning data into a sale is not a tough nut to crack if the right tools are used. This is where the sales enablement framework comes to the rescue. It helps curate specific training solutions that help improve a rep's skill set.
The framework gives the sales team reports and metrics to see their deal through. The sales reps know what works and what doesn't. They know exactly the kind of strategies and plays to use to convert a prospect.
The framework can also standardize the reports and make them simple and accessible. When in a pickle, the reps can refer to this as it provides them with suggestions and recommendations.
The reports can include the following:
- Sales processes followed by reps (communication, walk-throughs, demos, negotiations, etc.)
- Closed/unclosed deals
- Leads generated
- Pipeline
Below are some of the common sales enablement metrics and KPIs measured by organizations.
#1. Sales cycle length
Sales cycle length or time to revenue is a metric that calculates the average time taken to close a sale.
#2. Lead conversion rate
Lead conversion rate refers to the number of leads that have been converted into clients or customers. It is typically calculated as a percentage and indicates how well your marketing and sales teams are identifying leads to maintain a high-quality pipeline.
#3. Average win rate
The average win rate is computed as the ratio of closed or won deals to the sum of the total number of sales. The total number of deals includes both won and lost deals.
#4. Average purchase value
The average purchase value is a metric that measures how much revenue each sale generates.
#5. Sales funnel transition rate
The sales funnel transition rate calculates the time taken to move from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. It measures how quickly your sales cycle is.
Wrap Up
Implementing a sales enablement framework has become the need of the hour. With an effective sales enablement program, teams have the right tools, knowledge, and resources to boost revenue and customer engagement. It redirects focus toward customers, their buying patterns, and what they want. Further, sales enablement frameworks bring about the use of technology correctly and, most of all, ensure a well-oiled sales pipeline.
