Is it your company’s New Year’s resolution to close more deals?
With sales enablement, your salespeople can achieve sales success. Organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% who don’t. So, what is sales enablement?
Sales enablement involves both people and technology. It helps organizations streamline and shorten the sales cycle by giving buyers the relevant content they need to make purchase decisions. It addresses buyers' concerns, provides in-depth product information, and proves why your product is superior to others in the marketplace. It gives your sales team the tools and support they need to win more business.
What Is Sales Enablement Content?
Sales enablement content solves customer problems, answers product-related questions and turns interested buyers into customers. Examples of sales enablement content include product cheat sheets, case studies, pricing guidelines, video testimonials, explainer videos, sell sheets and more.
While the value of sales enablement is undeniable, finding the time to create sales enablement content may be difficult for busy teams. Fortunately, creating sales enablement content doesn’t have to be time-consuming to be effective.
Here are some tips for creating sales enablement content that works.
Include All Teams in Content Creation
Don’t leave the task of creating sales enablement content solely to one team. It is highly beneficial for your organization to include and gather input from sales representatives, the customer success team, managers, product team members and marketing professionals in the development and execution of the sales enablement strategy. This not only reduces the risk of content creation burnout, but should help produce even better content.
Provide Pre-Call Sales Checklists
Fully equip your sales team with a pre-call sales checklist. This is a list of actions your salespeople should carry out before making a sales call. This will prepare the salesperson and give them the confidence to address the customer’s specific needs and overcome any objections.
Some items to include on your pre-call planning checklist include qualifying the lead, researching the lead and the company, setting a goal for each call, creating an opener, having a list of questions to ask, and mentioning the lead’s competition. It ensures best practices are used for every call, and you set your sales team up for success with a new prospect.
Create a Feedback Channel
Create a channel where sales reps can share success and ask questions. These conversations can aid new trainees and encourage existing reps to improve their responses.
Moreover, this data can be used to update procedure checklists and call scripts, and used for case studies, to identify best practices, to overcome problems with messaging and more. Managers can also monitor the chat to offer feedback and praise when necessary.
Repurpose Product Documentation
While product documentation is mostly shared internally, it contains essential details such as specifications, comparison charts and technical details that can be used to create marketing materials. These details can create sales assets such as product cheat sheets, one-pagers, product comparison charts and pricing guidelines.
Recycle your demo videos to show customers your product in action, and utilize your FAQ pages to answer any objections or concerns from prospects. Use language in product documentation to provide specific information in your blogs and social media posts.
Customize Your Call Scripts
Creating individual sales scripts for each buyer persona will better nurture your potential leads and spare your salespeople the embarrassment of not having the right information. If the contact thinks the salesperson is inept, they may think poorly of your product and be less likely to convert to customers.
Create a sales script for each buyer persona. This will enable your sales team to quickly and easily answer frequent questions and respond to common objections.
Use a Sales Enablement Platform
Sellers spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing or revisiting content to send to customers. That’s 10 hours that would be better spent following up leads and making sales.
A sales enablement platform will enable your team to quickly find the right content so they can adapt, share, edit, and update your materials and resources. It organizes all your marketing content in a central, easy-to-access location. With it, you can have version control to ensure the most accurate material is what sales uses. You can also remove access to material that isn’t approved, or make global updates to material.
HubSpot’s customer relationship management system gives businesses a complete look at the sales pipeline and access to a full lineup of marketing tools. It enables cross-team collaboration between sales and marketing. Furthermore, the software tracks the usage and success of this content so marketing teams can make smarter decisions on what content works for which audience.
Measure Your Success
Don’t assume your current strategy will work forever. Regularly measure the effectiveness of your strategy to know when it’s time to shift gears or adjust your sales plan. This will help your salespeople understand what content they should use and at what stage of the buyer's journey.
With HubSpot’s marketing analytics and dashboard software, you can measure the performance of all marketing campaigns from one place. Users can identify top-performing assets, check site performance, measure traffic, and review reports across various marketing channels. You can quickly identify best practices and use that data to make smart sales decisions.
Boost Your Marketing with a Partner
While the necessity of sales enablement is undeniable, as a busy team, you are likely struggling with the time to follow leads and contact interested parties. Taking the time to research, design and create content is beneficial, but it shouldn’t mean putting off other critical activities. That’s where a partner who knows and understands sales enablement content can help.
Our sales enablement services will help you align your sales strategy with your buyer’s journey and aid your sales reps in having the right conversation at each deal stage. They can provide an outside perspective and critical expertise that lead to more sales and less friction in the buying cycle.
Let us help you nurture more leads and turn them into paying customers. Contact GO2 Partners today.
