Is your sales team equipped with the right tools to drive efficiency, productivity, and more closed won business? You likely have some of the key resources, including a customer relationship management (CRM) software, training library, and communication platforms. But how effective are they? Are they truly enabling your sales force? To achieve the best out of your team and allow them to thrive, you should focus on adopting or improving sales enablement software.
To focus attention on sales enablement tools, you need to understand where your gaps are. What are the biggest obstacles for your sales team that are solvable with technology?
These gaps can include everything from a failure to have a centralized document portal to challenges with sales and marketing alignment.
So, how can technology bridge these for your organization?
Sales professionals need a variety of content to nurture prospects once they are sales-ready. Marketing is the creator and owner of the content, but it’s for sales to use. When there is disorganization or material in multiple repositories, it becomes a detractor, not an enabler.
You want your sales team to spend more time on revenue-generating activities, not hunting for content. Additionally, even if it’s in one place, that doesn’t mean it’s accessible by all.
Sales enablement software is the ideal place for content to live. It’s always accessible by your reps, but marketing has versioning control to ensure it’s the right content.
Sales teams need training throughout their career. First is typical onboarding and familiarity with products or services. As a sales rep grows in their role, more training will be necessary for new products and circumstances. The pandemic disrupted all sales activities and interactions, which likely required your salespeople to learn new ways to sell, from mastering videoconferences to developing new ways to connect from afar.
A sales enablement solution can become your training hub. When new content is available, you can push it out to those that need it.
Analytics are critical for your sales and marketing efforts. Knowing how content performs and how engaged those that receive it are is essential to optimizing your processes. The problem that many organizations face is that these metrics often live in multiple systems. That involves aggregation and can delay insights.
With a sales enablement platform, you can automatically record content activity in the field. You’ll be able to see down to the page number and seconds spent on the page to measure engagement. As a result, you’ll have a 360-degree view of what content is nudging a prospect to become a customer.
Sales presentations are your rep’s opportunity to win over prospects. The more personalized and engaging presentations are, the more likely reps are to close the deal. The problem that most salespeople face is not having a custom deck for every meeting.
What if they had marketing-approved presentation content at their fingertips? That’s the possibility with sales enablement software. Further, they’ll be able to develop interactive presentations that incorporate rich media.
Another challenge that salespeople face is spending too much time on administrative work or data entry. It’s time-consuming and frustrates your team. Integrations are an excellent way to eliminate this busywork.
A sales enablement software can include fillable forms to take orders, collect signatures, and more—even with Wi-Fi. Also, an integration with Salesforce automates many of those admin tasks, so salespeople don’t have to duplicate them.
When looking at these opportunities for technology to bridge the gap, what should you seek in a solution to meet these objectives?
Ultimately, the perfect functionality for your sales team will depend on your challenges, goals, and needs. You should begin to develop a list of features or use cases for using such a system. Those things may include:
A comprehensive sales enablement platform is the key to driving more sales. You want to be able to have all these features in one system. If you’re jumping between systems, you might as well be in a swivel chair. That doesn’t make selling easier.
Additionally, when your sales team can work with any type of media, such as video, and leverage it in many applications, technology is not your foe. It’s a friend. As hybrid or virtual selling becomes the norm, these media types are becoming more important. The barrier that now exists may be that your team doesn’t feel comfortable using the technology. With sales enablement software, they don’t have to be tech experts. It’s user-friendly, which means they’ll adopt it.
When you have these tools in one place and can glean true insight from analytics and automated processes, that can translate to salespeople spending more time selling and doing so with the right content. As a result, you’re likely to see spikes in sales.
If you want to ensure your sales team has what they need to succeed, investing in sales enablement software is vital. Beyond the investment, you need to implement and adopt it. That’s how you reap the rewards.
Explore more about how to close sales at greater rates by reading our e-book, Equipping Your Sales Team with the Right Content to Close the Sale.