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Sales are the lifeblood of any business. If you want to improve sales figures for a company, sales enablement processes can help you do that. What is sales enablement exactly? A sales enablement plan includes the processes that provide a sales team with the information and tools that they need to sell effectively. If you are a sales manager, incorporating sales enablement tactics into your existing operations could be the best thing you ever do for your team. Learn the best sales enablement processes to incorporate into your sales department operations below.
Gather Intelligence
Intelligence gathering is one of the crucial components of all sales enablement plans. In order to create a sales enablement plan for your department, you need to identify what information your sales professionals need to succeed. This can only be done by collecting data on current sales processes on top of using your usual sales forecasting software. Going forward, improvements can only be made if you continue gathering business intelligence. This is a must have element to any successful sales enablement strategy.
Provide Content
Sales enablement strategies also require you to provide marketing content to your sales team. The content can be produced by your marketing department. Then, you will be responsible for getting it into the hands of your sales people and making sure they actually use it. Wasted content is one of the biggest problems in business. If you are not providing content for your sales team, your sales enablement plan will be useless.
Offer Training
Sales enablement training is also a crucial component to an effective plan. Your team needs to know what sales tools are available to them, whether they work in telesales or B2B sales. Otherwise, how will they know to take advantage of them? This will also prove to boost sales team morale. It lets them know that you have their back and will do all that you can to help them succeed in sales. Training programs are one of the must have sales enablement activities if you want to bring everyone on board with your plan.
Foster Competition
Fostering competition is another important part of creating a sales enablement playbook. One of the most popular sales enablement activities is sales competitions. Holding a sales competition, particularly fun, themed ones, is a great way to motivate employees. Winner prizes do not have to be expensive. They can be as simple, and cheap, as a coffee shop gift card or a company t-shirt. These fun sales competitions will help to instill your sales team with a competitive drive and motivation to succeed. This will promote better sales figures on an individual basis and for the whole department overall. Just be sure you know your sales team, as some sales professionals may not appreciate the more cut-throat, competitive environment.
Be Strategic
You, the sales manager, have to be strategic when deciding when to use which sales enablement ideas. This requires you to know the sales process inside and out. That way, you can determine the best sales tool to help a team member close a deal at any stage of the sales cycle. For example, providing content will be particularly useful during the prospecting stage of the sales funnel. However, it may not be effective during the conversion stage. Know what your sales team needs and when they need it. Then, make strategic decisions based on that knowledge to have one of the best sales enablement plans around.
Sales managers are some of the biggest proponents of using sales enablement playbooks for business. If you want to create a sales enablement process for your team, make sure it includes the five elements above. These sales enablement activities will help your team perform to the fullest extent of their abilities. That will improve your overall sales figures and business performance more than customer management software ever could. Let us know how these sales enablement strategies work for you in the comments below.
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