Transform your sales efforts, increasing your effectiveness, your ability to convert leads, close more deals, and drive revenue for your business, with a sales enablement strategy. The right sales enablement strategy consists of the tools, knowledge, training, and coaching you need to successfully sell your product to customers. Implementing an effective sales enablement strategy can also play a key role in helping a business scale its sales efforts.
At its core, sales enablement is a joint effort between sales and marketing. You might even think of sales and marketing as two sides to the same sales enablement coin. Sales enablement is most effective when marketing teams create materials or resources that help your sales team close more deals.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement aims to improve the entire sales process by increasing collaboration between sales and marketing and unlocking insights that can lead to better business decisions. A sales enablement strategy includes the tools and content provided to your sales team so they can target your audience and increase sales.
How To Create a Sales Enablement Strategy
Although each business’s strategy should be tailored to their specific sales team’s needs, here are three best practices that can help you to create your own sales enablement strategy.
#1. Establish Business Goals and Outcomes
To create your sales enablement strategy, you need to determine where you are currently, as well as identify the goals and outcomes that you aim to achieve. Ask yourself:
- What are our overarching business goals?
- What challenges are we currently facing in trying to achieve these goals?
- What are the biggest objections our sales team is facing?
- How closely aligned are our sales and marketing teams?
- What can we do to enhance the sales content creation process?
Once you have this information you’ll be able to establish goals regarding how your sales enablement strategy will integrate sales and marketing, overcome ongoing sales challenges, and streamline the overall sales process. Common sales enablement KPIs often include conversion rate and quota attainment. Rather than arbitrary objectives, tracking specific metrics can help your business improve its sales efforts over time.
#2. Place the Customer Journey at the Core of Your Strategy
Sales have always been about building relationships, and about offering prospects the right solution at the right time in their customer journey. A strong sales enablement plan should include curated messaging for each step along the customer journey, from initial awareness all the way through adoption.
By placing the customer journey at the core of your sales enablement strategy, you are equipping your sales team with the information they need to have effective and impactful conversations with customers no matter where they are along the path to purchase.
#3. Create High Quality Sales and Marketing Materials
For sales enablement to be the most effective, it’s essential to ensure that quality sales and marketing materials are created and that they are easy for sales reps to find, use, and customize for each specific prospective buyer. DFS can help print businesses and resellers with a wide variety of sales materials to promote your business.
DFS offers print marketing materials including product sell sheets, full-color catalogs, product digests, brochures, and more. These high-impact sales materials can help you tell your story to customers throughout their engagements with your business, so you appear professional and efficient.
The Benefits of a Sales Enablement Strategy
An effective sales enablement strategy can have far-reaching results, including higher customer acquisition rates and better overall customer relationships.
Marketing and Sales Alignment – Successful sales enablement requires the alignment of sales and marketing processes, creating an environment where they work together to target customers throughout their journey, create more conversions, and drive more sales.
Sales Efficiency – Sales enablement is a data-driven strategy, which aims to help sales teams operate more efficiently. Using key metrics your sales team can become more strategic with their time, enjoy better forecasting, and improve their one-on-one performance.
Improved Cross-Selling and Upselling – Upselling and cross-selling are both valuable ways to increase sales. By helping a business better understand its customers, and knowing what products and services would help them achieve its goals, sales enablement strategies can empower sales teams in their efforts to cross-sell and upsell to existing customers.
Make Sales Enablement an Ongoing Process
Creating a sales enablement strategy isn’t something that you just do once and then move on. These strategies need regular, consistent evaluation. Not only does a business need to be regularly monitoring how its strategy is performing against the goals and KPIs it established, but sales teams need regular refreshing on the information, content, and tools they’ve received to make sure they are using them to their full potential.
Print businesses and resellers can depend on DFS as a partner in developing their sales enablement strategy. Partnering with DFS allows you access to professionally produced print marketing materials to help you grow your business. DFS advisors help to solve problems, offer advice, and provide award-winning customer service and support. Contact us today to be matched with a DFS business advisor.
Key Takeaways
- Sales enablement aims to improve the entire sales process by increasing collaboration between sales and marketing.
- A sales enablement strategy includes the tools and content provided to your sales team so they can target your audience and increase sales.
- The benefits of a sales enablement strategy include sales and marketing alignment, sales efficiency, and improved cross-selling and upselling.
- Partnering with DFS allows you access to professionally produced print marketing materials to help you grow your business.
