Sales Enablement Software

How does sales enablement work?

Sales Enablement is defined as equipping your sales force with tools, information, etc., as helping them better navigate the customer’s buying journey. If done right, it helps in defining scalable and repeatable sales practices for closing more deals. 
“According to the 2018 “Sales Enablement Report” by CSO Insights, the percentage of salespeople achieving quota improved by 10.6%, which is an improvement of 22.7%.”

‍Would you send a soldier without his ammunition? You won’t send a soldier to a field without his weapon. Similarly, you can’t send your sales representative to engage with your customers without providing them with the necessary information. Let me categorize this information under two formats:

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• For Salesforce : Remember, as a child, we would study night and day right before any test to excel at it. It's the same, but here it's about winning the deal, not passing. And how is that possible?
  
  The answer is simple-by prepping your sales team or training your sales team with best practices, research techniques, market data, demo calls, and equipping them with the latest sales tools.

• For Buyer : Yes, just internally prepping your sales team with content is not enough. Content to convince your prospect plays a major role in sales enablement. Content such as case studies, thought-leader articles, numbers, etc., can help your sales team to convince their prospect about your product and help them crush their quota.

Sales Enablement Framework

Sales enablement’s presence correlates with a 31% improvement in supporting changes in sales messaging and a 15% improvement in improving low-performing salespeople. -G2

‍The ultimate goal of sales enablement is revenue growth, but how is that possible?

Continuous collaboration and internal communication of the sales team with marketing and product can help define a structure or framework for sales enablement. It is possible by defining the goals and objectives of every team and aligning them with business goals. That would help in determining the process for sales enablement.
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For better understanding, let’s divide the framework under 4 pillars:
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1. Planning and Collaboration

The first step of sales enablement is planning and designing the end-to-end sales enablement strategy. And for a successful sales enablement strategy, communication and feedback between the teams are of utmost importance. A feedback loop between sales operations, product development, and marketing are required for continuous sales enablement. Sales pass insights from leads, prospects, and customers to the product and marketing team. In turn, marketing and product teams, in collaboration, create assets that would help the sales team achieve their goal and drive revenue for the company. 

2. Training

There can be no sales enablement without sales training. The whole aim of sales enablement is to prepare your sales team for engaging with your prospects, and this cannot be done without training your sales peeps with soft skills, product knowledge, and market insights. But training is a mammoth task, one of the ways businesses can automate sales training is by creating a sales playbook of your sales calls. It does not just help new hires upskill faster and uncover skill set training required by your existing sales team.

3. Creating Content and Technological stack

Times are uncertain; one pandemic led to most businesses working remotely. And to keep up with the times, adopting an old-school sales enablement is not enough. But building and adopting a technological stack that drives scales, automation, and efficiency, can keep businesses afloat. Creating business messages and content around sales feedback can align the sales and marketing goals and drive incomparable growth for the company, even in a pandemic.

4. Measurement

Without help sales leaders provide their assistance and measuring your sales enablement team’s effort, you don't know if your efforts are working or if there is a need to change the strategy. Build a reporting and review process to measure, manage and optimize the sales process, to ultimately drive revenue.

Why is Sales enablement important for your organization?

“Effective sales training and enablement can help new reps meet quota up to seven weeks faster than the industry average.” -  CSO Insight

Time is changing and with it businesses and customers’ expectations. The latest study conducted by PWC stated that even in the post-pandemic world most businesses and workers prefer working in a hybrid work environment. And with the times how our sellers approach customers and how they are trained is undergoing a complete transformation. The traditional marketing and sales techniques no longer work.

To adapt to the times, modern sales enablement is a competitive necessity. For staying ahead of the competition, sales and marketing must work together to enable the right content and training at the right time. While evaluating the technological stack available in the market for helping your sales team win that deal. As buyer requirements and expectations change, so must your sales team's requirements to stay competitive. Because, even if you are not doing this, your competitor is!

◼  Sales Enablement Strategies

A study by the Sales Readiness Group found that companies with great sales enablement have the lowest annual sales rep turnover at just 11.9% compared to 19.5% for organizations with less-than-satisfactory sales enablement.

Sales enablement has rapidly evolved in the past few years into a strategic, go-to-market function. With it, its tools and strategies. 

Let’s look at some of the sales enablement strategies that businesses should consider evaluating to survive in the ever-changing world:

◼  Consolidated Technological stack 

Evaluating your tech stack should be a major priority with the advancement of AI, NLP, machine learning, and automation. Globally, companies are averaging 23 different learning and enablement tools and platforms, double the number from 2011. It is because no one wants to stay behind. Most companies that managed to stay afloat and even grow in the pandemic were their strong sales team and tech stack support.

But it doesn’t mean adopting every tool that is available in the market. Evaluate your sales team’s needs, what tools would help them give their A-game?

And what would help them save time? 

Overburdening with 23-24 tools would create ad hoc, and businesses don’t want that. Single tools such as conversation intelligence platform or AI-powered sales agent dashboard could get the training, aligning, reporting, etc. done, without wasting multiple app navigation time.

◼  Team Collaborations

As stated earlier, no sales enablement would work without constant communication between sales, product, and marketing. Marketing and product, for the most parts are not the first points of customer interactions, but your sales team is. 

By having regular feedback from the sales team, the product team can improve or add features to the product that the customer is looking for. And the marketing team can generate content and messaging that would have a huge impact on generating qualified leads or helping a customer make that final call. Let’s not forget the main aim of every business is to generate revenue. 

◼  Data Deep Dive

Deep dive into your sales team’s tangible process and daily conversations for insights. Use AI-powered objectives and data points to evaluate the current processes and conversations. These conversations and processes contain the key to unlocking success for your business and crushing every sales representative’s quota. From the processes and conversation, the entire organization can find out their weak points, market intelligence, people intelligence, and what content and efforts would help the organization move the customer’s choice needle towards them. 

◼  Analysis and Feedback

No sales enablement strategy is successful without actually analyzing its impact and providing feedback for improvement to your organization. Regularly evaluate your sales and enablement process, what is helping your sales team crush their goals, what areas need improvement, and then tailor your employees training to emphasize those aspects. 

◼  Regular upskilling

As a growth leader, ask yourself:

• Which skills have your sales team mastered recently?
• In which areas do they need more development?
• Which reps are struggling with certain behaviors?

These questions would help you assess what form of training your sales reps require and what would help them communicate better with prospects. With new AI-powered soft skill evaluation and training tools, this process can become a lot easier.

Why do businesses need Sales Enablement Tools?

Sales enablement was once the responsibility of either a trainer or the product marketing or sales operations manager, but now it is taken care of by dedicated teams and tools. This transition is fuelled by the work from home environment and realization to achieve predictable, visible, repeatable, and measurable results; just occasionally providing training is not enough.

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In a virtual meeting environment, sellers have to “get to the point” fast, as customers don't have time or patience for everything the seller has to say. Also, with increased facetime with customers through virtual platforms, sales reps don’t get the time to prepare and research for the call. Tools to enable simultaneous learning, engaging, and recording sales rep activities are becoming a necessity. Gartner recently spoke with 90+ sales enablement leaders to learn the tools and actions they are currently taking in four key areas: 

• Virtual customer engagement 
• Seller productivity 
• Work from home technology 
• Training sellers 

Most leaders in the study had either already adopted AI-enabled sales enablement software or are measuring evaluating; what it, to take care of the above four areas. One of the software that is taking the lead in the seller community is the conversation Intelligence platform. Let’s find out more:

Convin’s conversation Intelligence for Sales Enablement

Convin’s conversation intelligence software can record, transcribe, analyse and share sales conversations with the entire organization. Convin uncovers insights about your target audience and personas by analysing your entire sales team’s daily conversations with prospects. 

With Convin, growth leader’s can:

1. Record Sales Activities

For remote sales enablement to work, there should be a measurement of the daily activities to understand the areas of improvement. Convin on integration with your customer engagement tool automatically records and transcribes the call for you. 

2. Provide Feedback

Providing feedback can be a horrendous task for any sales leader, along with figuring out if your sales rep requires any assistance. Convin highlights and displays the important moments of the call, actionable items, missed opportunities, and any soft skill improvements scope of the reps so that the sales leader can analyze the call in a few minutes and provide due feedback and help at the right time. 

3. Automate sales training

Ramping up any employee can take a lot of time, but with Convin, sales enablement leaders can create the best call playbook for training new and underperforming sales representatives. It not only saves a lot of time, and sales leaders can use it to evaluate new markets for opportunities.

4. Automate data sharing

As stated earlier, Convin records the daily sales call and the importance of saving these conversations. But with Convin, sales reps can easily share the call data or automate sharing call insights with their managers or the entire organization. It would help sales leaders provide their assistance and help marketing generate the right messaging and content at the right time.