Six ways to improve the way you enable sales at your business 6 ways to transform sales enablement at your organization

In a typical day, the average sales representative is likely to spend less than a third on selling to prospects. The rest of their time is consumed by other tasks including sending emails or scheduling meetings, joining internal syncs, as well as making contact with leads. A mere tenth of their time is devoted to training... If they're fortunate.

With how crowded the calendars of sales reps is, there's no reason to believe that sales can slow down if new reps are added on to your team. What if there were alternatives to keep your sales team constantly evolving? How can you spend that 10% of time spent in training improving the results sales representatives see within their short sales hours?

That's the question the team responsible for sales and enablement at asks daily, and it's one of the reasons that has helped our sales team increase their performance across all departments.

Before we dive into a few ways that you could do this first, let's go over some basic.

In this article

•    What is sales enablement?
•    How do you create an effective strategy for sales enablement
•    Six ways to create your sales enablement program to build a highly-performing sales team

What exactly is the term "sales enablement?

It is a crucial job that works throughout the company to provide team members who interact with customers with the necessary tools, education and support they require to support a business's approach to market. Every piece of sales enablement content is created to assist internal teams to have the best possible conversations with customers from outside.

Three pillars of sales enablement Content

We generally divide the content we provide to help salespeople into three three pillars.

Onboarding of new hiresgets the new sales representatives ready for business. Sales enablement content for new hires might include:

• The self-paced path to learning is an instructional management system
• Interactive workshops to practice applying what they've learned
• Cheat sheets or reference material for certain personas or industries

Training and development on a regular basis ensures that teams are current on the latest best practices, sales skills and any other new items or products or. This usually includes:

• Training on the latest sales techniques and sales skills
• Virtual interactive workshops and AMC's (ask questions to me about anything)
• Video demos showing off new features

Communications channels and cadence ensures that sales representatives receive all the info they need at the time they're in need of it. It means they can be notified when they need it through the use of communications channels such as:

• Weekly Newsletters
• Just in time video updates
• Monthly sales All Hands
• Annual Sales Kickoff (SKO)

If the sales team is the surgeon on the table at surgery, you can think of sales enablement as the nurse who hands them the scalpel in time. The hospital's benefactor giving them new equipment as well as the medical college offering their continuing education.

What is the best way to create an effective strategy for sales enablement?

A sales enablement team works in conjunction with multiple teams within an organizationbecause it has a wide range of aspects. It assists a business's go-to market strategy. Therefore, leadership must be included; this involves onboarding and training which is in conjunction with Human Resources; and sales enablement must work in conjunction with Sales Operations, marketing and product marketing in order to ensure that they have all necessary tools and resources that they require to succeed.

Because sales enablement can be so wide-ranging, it's important to develop a sales enablement strategy in a methodical manner. that starts by laying the foundation.

1. Make an organization charter.

While this step might seem elementary, a team charter sets the stage for the work that lies ahead, and serves as a reminder to keep your day-to-day work aligned with the direction of your North Star.

Here are a few details that you could think about when you craft your team's mission statement:

• Your vision and mission
• Team roles and responsibilities
• What will you define and how will you measure success
• The way the team functions

2. Know the status of the Union.

Prior to establishing your sales enablement strategy, it's important to deeply understand your company's unique goals, challenges and potential. This means getting all relevant stakeholders in the room, conducting a thorough analysis of the strategy for your go-to-market, as well as taking note of all your current sales metrics.

The most important questions to ask during this time are:

• What do we want to accomplish with our go-to-market strategy?
• What is currently working well? What isn't?
• Where can sales enablement be an important factor to help us achieve success?

This is a crucial step because every business faces unique challenges and opportunities. Strategies that may have worked beautifully for one organization could not work in another, so don't assume you can just "lift and move" an existing plan of action for another business.

3. Make a plan.

Your conversations with stakeholders can reveal a myriad of opportunities and challengescertainly higher than you're able to tackle in a year's time. Instead of taking each issue or opportunity individually, find the consistent themes that emerge in these discussions. They will be the foundational blocks of your roadmap.

Ideally, your plan must include just three or four big opportunities or challenges which you'll have to face in the next year. If you spread yourself too much or attempt to tackle too many problems, you'll not make any meaningful progress on any of them.

One of the very first issues we took on as a sales enablement team was to enhance the onboarding process for new employees. During our exploratory phase, one of the issues we encountered was "It's the reps taking far too long to bring them fully up-to-speed." After digging through the information and found that we were forecasted to recruit more than 140 sales reps over the next few years, yet the onboarding process was monitored in an Excel spreadsheet. It wasn't scalable and it wasn't getting us the results we needed.

So one of our key challenges was to create a brand new flexible, scaleable program for onboarding that reduced the time it took new sales reps to become profitable, which is why we worked the role-specific learning pathways and are continuing to refine the program based on comments from managers and reps.

Six ways to create your sales enablement program for an effective sales team

Once you've built your strategy, you'll need to decide how to implement it, by creating content, and distributing it to your sales teams. What you do to implement that will make a huge difference to the success of your strategy.

Deliver content in context

Sales enablement content is useless and sales representatives can't locate it, so create a way for sales reps your information easily.

One method to make sales enablement content more accessible and easily accessible is to develop an online sales portal which acts as a library of content for reps.

For example, at we've revamped the sales portal in order to align to our GTM planso that it's relevant. When you're trying to find the content you need by type such as product, use cases or even a the persona of your choice, you'll get what you want quickly.

Time your delivery

This is where that third pillar of sales enablement content -the use of the communication channels as well as cadence -- comes into play. Go beyond simply organizing content intuitively by proactively serving your sales reps the right data at the appropriate moment.

What does this mean when applied in real life? If your sales rep is in contact with customers, you do not want them to have access to your sales portal looking for specific information or assets regarding your competitors. Instead, bring the information to the customer and present it in a way that's seamless and beneficial.

At , for example, we use Salesforce as our customer relationship management tool. We also utilize the sidebar which aligns content delivery to the stages of the sales cycle within Salesforce. When a sales representative is on a discovery call we'll provide material that offers questions to ask, a technical validation checklist as well as a demonstration video that the customer can view. If the buyer type has specific needs that often comes up  the time, we'll present an example video that could potentially be shared with the customer.

It's all about serving content up within a salesperson's routine, at times at times when it's the most beneficial to the salesperson.

Remember to consider change management

When you're introducing a new procedure that you implement, there's an altering behavior component you need to be aware of. When you're planning to implement any kind of change or introduce new procedures for a group the team members must understand what it means to the organization, your customers, and to them. Get the buy-in of the leadership team, and then communicate the importance of this process to their employees.

Have fun with it

Each enablement professional must consider maintaining content that is fresh and interesting as a crucial aspect of what they do. In the end, the more engaging a piece of material is, the better chance a user will recall the content.

Continuously collect feedback

Once we have launched a new course or certification, we always make sure to distribute surveys to sales reps who completed the course. Also, we meet with sales executives to gain a sense of how teams have reacted to the content. Whether it's good, bad or neutral, the feedback is valuable -- it lets us know how we're performing and where we can improve.

Also, it is important to consider the feedback you receive. The sales team is extremely grateful for everything we've done in order to ease their work and they want more, that's a great thing!

However, we must remain focused based on our resources, so we look for themes within the feedback we receive.

In the case of sales feedback, for instance the time we get feedback from sales, we search at themes such as:

• What do we hear consistently?
• What can we implement to change the direction of our dial?
• Are there any easy wins that can last for a long time?

Identifying those themes can help us evolve our sales capability in the coming week and month, as well as quarter and even the entire year.

Keep track of and take measurements frequently

One of the best things regarding sales enablement is that it's an ever-changing processit's not a simple "set it and forget it." Measuring the progress you make and monitoring the results can help to create a sense that's constantly evolving within your sales enablement team.

There are a myriad of areas that you touch on with regard to sales enablement. each program will focus on the specific metrics that it uses -- from time to ramp, in terms of deal size to percent of reps who are at their quota.

Naturally, sales enablement isn't the sole team responsible for impacting those measures, but we do use them as guideposts that indicate we're following the right track. All functions want to show the ROI of their investment particularly when it comes to consuming salespeople's valuable time.

Following the launch of a new program We also track customer reactions to the change. Sales enablement works alongside reps, the work we do is ultimately meant to deliver an excellent customer experience. We're looking for signals that let us know if we're in the right direction or whether we should change up the messaging or positioning that we're training reps in.

Finally, we look at the retention of sales teams. Our sales enablement content shouldn't simply improve our sales statistics It should let salespeople feel that they've had a great introduction experience, and knowing that their accomplishments are acknowledged as well as that they're receiving regular opportunities to grow as they develop, grow, and progress to new positions. All of these things help build a company culture that employees would like to be within.

Engage your employees with sales enablement content

The sales industry is about relationships- and without an engaged sales team, you won't have satisfied customers. It's no wonder that businesses with engaged employees have 21percent more profit. Sales reps who are engaged feel more motivated and motivated to continue improving their craft, everyone benefits.