Sales Enablement in the Digital Age: Strategies for Success

Good sales enablement is buyer-centric and iterative. It is enabled first by a granular understanding of the buyer’s problems and preferences, then by the providing of content tailored to those problems, along with ROI/TCO calculators and other value-based selling tools for the reps.

You also need a talent-management organisation, which will: (a) train your reps and managers, and (b) manage the flow of new talent, identifying skills that need to be recruited for, or that need to be trained, and then training the recruits (new hire onboarding). You also need an expert sales enablement team that can design and constantly revise sales content (playbooks that help reps progress through opportunities at each stage of their journey, and training material, and case studies and other assets).

1. Align your platform with your sales strategy and objectives.

Prior to purchasing a sales enablement platform, you should draft your sales enablement strategy and goals. Those goals could entail increasing efficiency, improving customer retention or streamlining workflows – whatever they are, the best platform can help you achieve them.

If you were involved in getting seller performance to the next level, your team might benefit from a learning platform with in-context training and guided selling for increased response levels and faster deal cycles.

A robust platform should also provide cross-functional synergies, aligning with the marketing, product development and customer services departments to supply the buyer insights, content and feedback tools your sales team needs to succeed.

2. Create a buyer persona.

A good sales enablement strategy starts by creating a buyer persona of your audience – a playbook that captures professional information, goals and pain points for your potential customers.

One of the best ways to fill in your gap is with qualitative information from interviews with sales reps and customers, or social listening into what matters to your target market.

Having an efficient buyer persona built will allow your sales enablement strategy to resonate with your business goals. Based on the key attributes, you can build training programmes and also provide input in the content production. It will also train your sales representatives on how to answer any pre-sales-related questions from their prospects, thus improving the overall customer service experience.

3. Invest in content.

At Allego, Peter Kyranakis’ focus for his sales enablement efforts hasn’t changed: he wants to give his team tools, insight and tailored content they can use to make every conversation with a buyer count, but he’s seen an evolution along the way: digitalisation, shifts in buyers, and improvements such as Generative AI.

Smart analytics and a sales enablement platform that serves as a single source of truth will help sales teams be more effective in performance and broaden buyer engagement. The platform will streamline workflows, help sellers increase revenue with real-time feedback capabilities and sales content management systems – and marketing will know what works so they can scale up and optimise accordingly.

4. Automate your sales process.

While sales revenue growth lags for the market as a whole, those firms that commit to investment in sales enablement technologies – the cadence of speeding up and automating the sales process – will lead the next wave of revenue growth as improvements in sales efficiency and effectiveness reduce customer friction and accelerate revenue.

That means setting specific and measurable goals and tracking whether those goals, such as sales quotas, hit rates or win rates, are reached and sustained. Learning must stick. And what’s more, learning must be recorded. To ensure that training is effective in both experiences and results, key learning metrics – completion rates, adoption of sales content, like emails to send to prospects – must be tracked.

A sales enablement tool needs to give your team access to the content, tools and analytics that will help them succeed. It needs to make the buying experience an easier one so more customers convert; it needs to make cross-functional collaboration easy, so that every member of your team can access everything they need; and it needs to be agile so that it can adapt to variations in customers and your company environment.

5. Invest in training.

For instance, while sales enablement tools such as automation, digital content and data-driven insights are necessary for creating a sales success, investing in sales training will empower sellers to hone the skills necessary to win the hearts of buyers.

Be sure to share evidence of the bottom-line benefits of sales enablement (such as higher quota attainment and lower buyer attrition) and to provide frequent updates about which resources are available, what is being changed, and how your team is performing.

The need for a digital version of sales enablement – as I call it – has become a business imperative. In the new digital normal, teams that sell must become nimble, data-driven and future-forward in order to adapt to expectations as they evolve, and in order to deliver the right content at the right time to the right people.