The field of sales has come a long way since the days of cold calling from the yellow pages. Sales professionals now leverage tools and technology to target and pitch better. Those resources are even more critical now because digital channels are the most prolific for sales and customer interactions. Sales enablement software is crucial for all sales teams.
Why? It supports your sales team, enables greater alignment between sales and marketing, and can increase your sales wins. In this post, we’ll be sharing platform benefits, statistics on its effect, and strategies to ready your team for implementation.
Sales enablement software supports organizations.
The benefits of the software are abundant. It’s a single source of truth while also nurturing collaboration across sales and marketing with easy ways to share data and documents. Sales enablement software also houses robust analytics for insights on impact and optimization. Additionally, it enables personalized sales outreach, which buyers expect now. The tool accelerates onboarding for your new hires and delivers a better training and coaching experience.
The proof of these results is in the data. According to Regalix Research, 76 percent of organizations using sales enablement saw an increase in sales between 6-20 percent. Another study from Sales Enablement Pro revealed that a formal sales enablement program improves win rates, quota attainment, retention, and collaboration.
With all it has to offer, your organization is likely keen on adopting it. For it to be a successful rollout and drive results, you’ll need to prepare your team. To help you do that, we’ve put together some tips and ideas to support the journey.
These 5 tips can prepare you for software implementation.
As with any software deployment, you should develop a strategy to ensure its adoption. Just because you have software doesn’t mean your team will use it. In essence, you have to sell its benefits to your team and leadership. To assist you with a readiness plan, consider these tips for your framework.
1. Outline your goals.
With the introduction of this software, what challenges and problems do you intend it to eliminate? It’s hard to measure the value of something if you don’t have goals. Define what these are along with how you’ll measure success.
For example, if a goal is to make content easily accessible and decrease a sales rep’s time searching, document what it looks like. The metric could be an individual’s productivity or the time from sales interaction to follow-up with content.
2. Get buy-in from leadership.
For any new process or strategy, you need the blessing of those at the top. They shape your company’s culture. By getting them on board and championing the software, others will feel more positive and open-minded about trying something new.
Buy-in starts with providing leadership with data-driven reasons why the software will benefit the company. Besides outside stats on sales enablement, you could include internal metrics that you know can improve with a sales enablement tool.
3. Determine ownership.
Sales enablement needs to have owners. Otherwise, it’s no one's responsibility. The owner is also the advocate, documenting the strategy for the software and developing training for users.
The best combination for ownership is sales and marketing ops. The software is a merging of these two areas of the business, and each should be at the table making decisions. It’s not a power struggle; it’s a partnership, so frame it like this from the beginning.
4. Maintain an open dialogue with the sales team.
Sales enablement software should make sales reps’ lives easier. That’s the overarching mission, so you need to engage with them about what they need for this to be true. From their feedback, you’ll want to plan to deliver on this.
In these conversations, you should also explain how the technology will support them so there’s no disconnect on delivering on expectations. Be granular about how it works, not vague. With this detail, your sales team will be anticipating the implementation, not dreading it.
5. Develop buyer personas and content that aligns with each.
You likely have different customers that you target. They each have different needs, motivations, and challenges. To address those, your organization needs content that speaks directly to them.
What type of content do you need? That varies depending on your business but typically includes sales playbooks, proposal templates, quotes, contracts, case studies, and vertical-specific one-sheeters. Having these in place before the software installation is critical. It’s one of the reasons to use such a platform. It needs to be robust from the start, or it might fall flat at launch.
Post-implementation, how do you know it’s working?
After building your strategy and deploying, how will you know the sales enablement software is working? After it’s been in use, you’ll begin to have data to measure results. Some key metrics to watch are:
Quota attainment
Sales length cycle
Customer churn
Employee churn
Win rate
Sales funnel conversion rates
Employee engagement
Average deal size
Rep lifetime value
That data can inform your approach and ensure that you continue to optimize. It can also tell you if content for each segment is driving conversions. It’s good to keep this fresh. You can review at intervals such as every three or six months. Other factors may also require revisions, such as big changes in that industry or with your product or service.
Sales enablement software can be powerful. Have a plan to make sure it is.
Sales enablement can transform your company’s operations and boost revenue. Before you launch a solution, preparing your team is vital to long-term success.
To realize all its benefits, you need software that’s easy, intuitive, and innovative. vablet is a solution that checks all those boxes and more. It drives performance and agility on any device, anywhere. To see how it works, request a quick demo. Or you can start a free trial today.
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