If you have shown curiosity in learning about sales enablement software for your scaling business, either you’re planning to purchase an enablement software or have purchased one but haven’t seen any benefits yet. We are happy to have you here even if there’s another reason to read our blog. (You may want to start with the basics of sales enablement).
In the last couple of years, sales tech stacks have increased exponentially in most companies where sales enablement tools usage has gone up by 567%. Additionally, we noticed many growing organizations showing interest in sales enablement software.
However, what really caught our attention was that sales enablement teams and the target audience-salespeople -had little to no understanding of this powerful software.
The sales and marketing team blindly invested in the software but failed to receive a return on investment.
After getting in contact with a few experts in the market, we have been able to compile 10 solid reasons why your company needs sales enablement software. If not today, eventually you’ll need to implement the sales tool.
10 Reasons You Need A Sales Enablement Software For Your Business
1. Attract Buyers Before Sales Starts- Inbound Strategy
Selling in the 21st century isn't easy, it’s pretty challenging.
While we are coping with changes, the sales & marketing teams are on a roller-coaster ride.
The selling world has been transformed by the Internet. Earlier, the client would depend (sometimes blindly) on the sales guy for detailed information about the company, its products, price, and benefits.
But those days are long gone. You may be shocked to learn that 70% of buyers’ research is completed before engaging with a sales representative. Today’s buyer is well-read and educated. They know your company and you even before you researched them.
Clients like to come prepared to a sales call, so there’s little room for hard-core sales-buying.
If you don’t want your sales team shouting out of the window, then your sales and marketing team must jointly own the pre-sale period. Wondering how?
Encourage sales and marketing collaboration on sales enablement software tools. They must develop inbound marketing techniques that can focus on nurturing the lead. Insights and ideas from both teams can add more value to online content.
2. Make More Time Selling
Sales guys are occupied with a mountain of tasks. In 2018, Linkedin researched 721 reps, which determined that 65% of their time was spent on non-selling activities.
If you're wondering what is considered a non-selling activity, then here's a list of items your sales team should avoid:
- Client data entry in your CRM software
- Write or reply to client/prospect emails manually
- Prepare and search for sales collaterals
- Work on next steps and send meeting invites
- Collaborate with marketing on a day to day basis for content and collaterals
- Manage and collaborate on proposals
- Chase authorities for signatures
- Take client meeting notes and analyze the outcomes
- Manually generate sales quotes
To make more time for selling activities such as calling, preparing sales pitches, tailored collaterals, to name a few- sales leaders must strive to automate the non-selling tasks.
Sales enablement software ensures streamlining of all the non-selling tasks. The software integrates with other CRM software, pushing call notes and analyzed data to the relevant account in the CRM. You can notice a whopping difference of 23% in reduction in manual and routine administrative tasks.
On implementing the sales enablement tool, you’ll find your sales team making room for more strategic sales activities- networking, pipeline analysis & management, deal closing tasks, nurture existing clients, work on quality rich proposals, and make time for learning.
3. To Keep Pace With Empowered Buyers
The modern landscape is competitive but salespeople are not worried about competition. They are more concerned about educated and informed buyers. Can you relate?
Until and unless the requirement is very risky or complex, buyers engage with sellers at a later stage in the buying journey.
As per Hubspot, buyer engages with sellers at different levels in the sales prospecting cycle-
- 19% of buyers connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage of the buying process when they get curious to learn about the services and products.
- 60% connect with sales teams during the consideration stage, but only after thorough research of the options and shortlisted vendors.
- 20% show interest in talking to a salesperson during the decision stage, after narrowing down the product to buy.
A sales enablement software does not only solve content management issues but offers the right content at the right time to your target audience.
But that’s not all.
You can maintain client records along with market insights to be ahead of your client’s requirements. Essentially, you’ll have access to all the information about your prospect, irrespective of prior engagement.
4. Better Quality Of Sales
Salespeople are used to number crunching, there’s a target for everything, even your average number of calls per day. Completing 45-60 calls per day is commendable, but these calls are useless if they don’t last for even 15-20 minutes.
As simple as it sounds, the quantity of calls & meetings makes no sense without quality.
What did your rep deliver? What areas did they touch? Were product benefits discussed? Was their storytelling? Was pricing touched?
The objective of sales enablement software is to empower salespeople and support them in performing better.
The software solution provides a better quality of content, more collateral, better collaboration with marketing, etc. Moreover, client calls are influenced more by data than intuition. Data-driven and predictable client-centric decisions make sales smarter.
Even conversational intelligence tools have gained popularity in aiding reps to perform better by providing analyzed insights of previous calls with the prospect. Moreover, the call quality is analyzed and evaluated to help the rep perform better.
5. Maximize Your Time With People Likely To Buy
And minimize time with people not interested in your product. Agree?
Presently, most sales guys depend on cold calling leads generated by data management companies. They end up engaging with the wrong set of people- not interested in the product.
As per a study conducted by Salesforce, only 13% of leads get converted to opportunities and the conversion happens in around 84 days. Now, comes the surprising element. Only 6% of opportunities convert to deals, but it takes about 18 days on average to convert.
Yes, the opportunity to deal conversion rate is even lower in comparison to lead to opportunity. Now, we’ll like you to revisit the first point of discussion.
You’ll be able to recall the importance of inbound marketing. Inbound strategy is by far the most successful method to generate MQL leads showing genuine interest in the product. The sales team can be easily directed to these leads for further engagement.
The software tool for sales enablement captures such critical sales issues to ensure sales activities are more productive by the day. Having a software solution alongside strengthens the process and makes the marketing and sales team collaboration effective.
6. Develop Lead Qualification Framework
Sales teams always rely on lead vetting processes. The process ensures that the lead requirement and your solution are a perfect match.
Earlier, only sales teams actively worked on lead qualification, however, now, both sales and marketing participate in the construction of the lead qualification framework.
Leveraging the sales enablement software functionalities, you can maintain a lead qualification criteria list. Both sales and marketing must brainstorm on 3 fundamental questions:
- What is the target audience like, and what are their characteristics?
- What makes a client a good match for our product/service?
- What are the trigger points highlighting a client is ready to purchase?
With the sales enablement software in the picture, it’s possible to collaborate on a lead qualification framework in a more sophisticated and streamlined way. Any new update or criteria can be easily uploaded to the software tool.
7. Get First-hand Information For Content Preparation
Sales collateral management is a common practice, followed by several sales organizations. However, in the absence of an automatic software tool, the content is haywire, duplicate, and not up-to-date (Can your sales team make time to verify every stat in the incumbent content?)
If you invest in the best sales enablement software in the market, you no longer need to second-guess your content or prepare content in the nick of time. The idea is to expose your sales team to a user-friendly sales enablement software that makes searching, uploading, and sharing content with your peers more effective and efficient.
This brings us back to the essential question- Are sales enablement practices making room for more strategic sales activities?
Yes, that’s exactly where first-hand content on the tool helps your sales team.
8. Analytics Is A Reality
One of the biggest advantages of investing in a vendor offering sales enablement software is the access to analyzed marketing, sales, and customer content data.
Analytics captures key areas of customer engagement-
- Understanding customer sentiment- Find out what your customers lean towards. With the help of a data-backed AI-powdered tool, identify the customer’s emotions as well as the semantics of the conversation.
- Smell hidden opportunity- Analytics keeps a tab on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities without manual intervention.
- Predict sales targets- Sales forecasting algorithms in the latest software plays a vital role in presenting relationships and trends, thus predicting numbers with a high level of accuracy.
With Convin’s AI-powered conversation Intelligence solution, you can capture your client interactions across any channel- video meetings and phone calls. By analyzing the transcribed interactions, your sales team will gain intelligent and useful insights. Care to know more?
9. Faster Ramp Up Time For Sales
You’ll be shocked to learn that 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or more to become productive and capable of contributing to company goals.
Is it possible for sales teams to invest in a sales rep for 10 months with no expectation of ROI?
That’s a scary number and needs immediate attention.
No doubt, scaling firms face a big challenge in bringing new sales rep up to speed quickly.
A practical solution to reduce the time is by introducing new sales hires to structured training content and previous call recordings on sales enablement software. You decrease your reps’ ramp-up time by more than 40% to positively impact sales productivity.
For instance, reviewing demo calls can not only train them on the product but also, highlight tips and tricks to handle client questions. Participating in a live demo may not help your rep as much as a recorded and transcribed call.
Ramp-up time is closely associated with coaching and training your salesforce.
Addressing the call coaching gap improves sales productivity and decreases ramp-up time.
Earlier, sales leaders purposely jumped on calls to evaluate the rep’s performance but with data coming into the picture, it’s an easier and more agile process to coach reps.
As part of the sales enablement process, sales and marketing managers must allocate dedicated time in preparing training content and sales playbooks on the sales enablement platform.
Reps should be able to access both content and call recordings for quick access and learning. Developing a formalized process around coaching reps and implementing the program on the enablement software should be categorized as a mandatory activity for training new hires.
Any sales enablement tool vendor will be able to offer content management encouraging training of the sales team. However, we want you to keep an eye on a smart sales tool that automatically translates customer calls into learning lessons.
Because the idea is to remove sales teams’ dependency on the senior sales managers for training.
10. Support teams Beyond Your Salespeople
The primary focus of investing in sales enablement software is empowering your sales team. But apart from sales, other customer-facing functions can gain from sales and marketing content- includes customer success, channel partners, and support teams.
Just not content, anyone who deals with buyers also needs training on the overarching sales strategy and buyers’ requirements. Your stakeholders will also need your input on product updates, GTM strategies, expert advice, industry dynamics, important events, and challenges faced with customers (note: always document challenges and pitfalls for better learning).
How Can You Ensure That Both Sales And Marketing Are Benefitting From The Sales Enablement Software Solution?
You are more or else convinced that sales enablement software can turn your business around with invaluable benefits.
But the next question that should ring a bell is how do you keep the two teams in check to deliver the best sales enablement software experience?
Simple. Fix a shared goal for sales and marketing.
And what could be better than revenue as the shared goal? Both teams can aim to achieve the revenue targets with all the available resources.
To give your team a revenue goal, you’ll need to have a vision for the organization and translate it into a revenue goal for sales and marketing. But remember to have an audacious goal for the teams. However, a goal that is close to being achieved.
If you need more help in understanding sales enablement software and how to purchase it, here’s some detailed information for you- 10 Things a Sales Leader Should Learn Before Investing in Sales Enablement Software.
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