What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is a holistic approach to increasing the performance and productivity of sales teams. It provides sales teams with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to engage and close leads, prospects, and clients.

Key Points:

• Sales enablement increases productivity and helps ‌close sales.
• Small and medium-sized businesses have increasingly adopted sales enablement to compete with enterprise organizations.
• Employees feel more empowered and motivated with sales enablement.

What is sales enablement?

Have you ever wondered why some businesses become far more successful than others, even with similar products? It’s because they use sales enablement.

Sales enablement is an approach to training your sales reps based on supporting and providing resources. This can include providing training materials, updated collateral, and solutions to streamline processes. It also provides technology for lead management and reporting. Sales enablement basically means supporting your sales reps as much as possible so they can optimize their selling efforts.

Organizations increase the likelihood of success by creating a strategy for sales and lead follow-up. This ensures that sales teams always have the support they need to close deals and exceed quotas. Sales enablement also helps with team morale and performance by letting employees know they are valued. Additionally, with sales enablement, management has the data needed to review and improve performance.

With more competitive markets, sales enablement helps teams to stay on top of their game. There's been a 343% increase in adoption rates of sales enablement platforms over the past five years. Sales enablement is about empowering individuals to deliver exceptional customer experiences. This drives long term growth for the company. In an economic downturn, sales enablement can make all the difference.

What is a sales enablement platform?

A sales enablement platform is essentially a set of tools that provides sales staff with all of the necessary support they need to be successful, from efficient onboarding, training, to templates and other resources.

Its primary goal is to support and enhance the sales process by providing teams with the content, tools and resources they need to sell. The platform typically includes features such as content management, training and coaching tools, and collaboration capabilities.

Specifically, there are several core functionalities every sales enablement should have. These include:

• A sales playbook: sales reps should be able to get a clear picture of the steps they need to take to succeed. TigerLRM, for example, provides playbook templates and can help sales reps set up their own playbooks.
• A learning management system: sales reps should be able to take training on the go, and access courses and videos wherever they are. TigerLRM uses Moodle for training and courses.
• A sales asset bank: reps should be able to quickly access all forms of sales collateral, like decks, case studies, blog posts, and other forms of media center management.

Sales enablement vs sales coaching vs sales operations

Sales enablement can sometimes be confused with sales coaching and sales operations. That’s why it’s important to understand the differences between each term.

We’ve already defined sales enablement, but what about sales coaching and sales operations?

Sales coaching is just one part of the larger sales enablement process. It covers everything from the onboarding process to ongoing training. Both sales enablement and sales coaching give reps the information they need to succeed in their roles, but sales enablement covers a much broader range of activities.

You can think of sales operations as the back-end processes associated with selling. If your sales reps are the front line, sales ops managers allow them to be effective by setting up and maintaining infrastructure like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management — a software that helps organize customer communications), creating sales territories, establishing targets, and managing commissions.

Why is sales enablement important?

With competitive markets and economic downturns, companies need to be more efficient. Additionally, employees need to be more empowered.

Potential clients need decision-enabling materials, while sales teams need training with best practices. Both need to use automation as part of the sales process. Managers need to be able to view and react to market and client information streams. Sales enablement uses automation to accomplish this, which results in much higher closing rates.

A good sales enablement platform will help bring in new clients and revenue.

Here are five of the most important reasons why sales enablement is essential:

1. It helps sales reps close more deals

Sales enablement gives teams processes, tools, resources, up-to-date product knowledge, and training. This improves performance and increases the likelihood of closing deals. Without sales enablement, sales teams may struggle to stay organized. They may be unaware of the latest features and benefits that can help them sell more effectively. Sales enablement translates into increased closed deals and higher revenue for the organization (and the sales reps!).

2. It enhances your competitive advantage

In a competitive market, businesses must stand out and establish their unique value proposition. Sales enablement gives sales teams the knowledge and resources they need to communicate. This improves performance and sets companies apart from competitors. Potential clients have already researched your company — but they need more. Organizations must respond to customer concerns and objections with relevant and up-to-date information. This leads to more successful sales conversations, giving companies an enhanced competitive advantage.

3. It reduces costs

The sales process can sometimes involve many departments and resources. Sales enablement streamlines this process by providing sales reps with the needed tools and training to close deals. This not only improves the success rate of sales, but also reduces costs for the company. By improving communication between departments and using AI data-driven techniques, sales enablement helps to optimize resources and cut wasteful spending.

Additionally, leads can be very expensive. By optimizing each lead with enhanced data and a guided process from lead to prospect, new leads are more efficiently used, and companies can save on marketing and lead costs.

4. It increases client satisfaction

Sales representatives can find better solutions when they have the correct information. This leads to higher client satisfaction as well as increased upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Sales enablement also helps streamline the sales and client service process. It reduces misunderstandings and ensures that all team members clearly understand their responsibilities. Providing exceptional client service can make your company stand out from the competition.

5. It boosts morale

Sales companies often face a conundrum — how do they keep successful sales reps in their company? A great office atmosphere and high commissions may not be enough.

In a recent study, almost half (41%) of sales professionals said they were satisfied with their role but still searching for a new job. The figure is even higher among the best performing reps, 44% of whom are satisfied but still on the lookout for new opportunities.

Sales enablement could be the answer. Sales enablement strategies provide teams with the training, tools, and resources to close deals. But there’s another benefit to these strategies: they can boost team morale. When sales reps have everything they need to succeed and hit their targets, they feel confident and motivated in their work. This can lead to increased productivity and a positive workplace culture.

Here are 4 great ways to use sales enablement:

1. As a training and onboarding tool

One of the essential functions of sales enablement is training. Salespeople need to learn how to sell their products or services. This includes learning about the features and benefits of the products, as well as how to close a sale. Sales enablement can also provide training on the company’s CRM system, website, and marketing programs. New salespeople can onboard as well.

2. As a database for sales tools and resources

Salespeople need access to a variety of tools to be successful. This includes product information, pricing, marketing materials, and customer case studies. Sales enablement can provide salespeople with all of the necessary tools they need to sell effectively. It can also help them customize their selling style to meet the needs of their customers. Salespeople can also take advantage of automation tools in the sales process.

3. As a support system

Even the best salesperson can’t do it all alone. They need support from their manager, teammates, and other departments within the company. This includes access to customer data, order processing information, and technical support. Sales enablement provides this support by allowing salespeople access to needed information. This helps them work more effectively with other team members, which, in turn, increases productivity and customer service.

4. As an automated sales tool

You can use a sales enablement platform to build out a sales playbook that outlines all the steps reps need to take to succeed. Once that’s established, you can use pre-built cadences and templates so that sales reps can automate parts of the outreach process. TigerLRM even has an auto follow-up feature, furthering its automation potential.

A CRM like TigerLRM has sales enablement tools embedded, so it makes the sales pipeline the most efficient it can be. Not only do you have your playbook, you also have online training available at all times, and a media center with every resource you might need. Sales reps can use these tools to automate their sales process — allowing them to spend more time on following leads instead of sorting through their documentation.

See how Tiger’s AI-driven CRM and sales enablement services combine to guarantee more closed deals.

Sales enablement best practices

Define clear goals

The first step in creating a winning sales enablement strategy is to define what you hope to achieve. Set out one or more clear goals like:

• Reducing ramp time
• Improving win rate
• Increasing deal size

Next, lay out the tasks that'll help you achieve these goals. That could be improving a specific sales skill, creating specific kinds of content to help reps sell, or assigning managers to be responsible for training.

You can summarize this information in a sales enablement charter, so that everyone in your organization — from marketing executives to sales reps — are clear on your goals and processes. This is exactly what TigerLRM’s playbook feature is for: digital storing of any and all information about goals and leads.

Create exceptional content and store it in a digital library

Sales content can take many forms, including case studies, ebooks, blog posts, product spec sheets and more. It’s basically any material that helps your sales reps pitch to clients. TigerLRM, for example, stores these materials in their Media Center, the foremost place for digital asset management in the platform.

All of your competitors are creating the same types of content, however. That means you need sales collateral that cuts through the noise and speaks to your customers’ pain points. The more specific insights you can use when creating sales content, the better.

Once sales content is created, your team needs to have easy access to it. If they’re speaking to a prospect, for instance, they need to be able to send it over as soon as they’ve put the phone down. That’s why storing all of your collateral in a single place, like a digital library, is so effective. Everyone knows where each piece of content is and they can access it from anywhere in seconds. TigerLRM’s Media Center allows sales reps to easily access this information at any time.

Train sales reps to use sales enablement collateral

There’s no point creating sales collateral if your reps aren’t going to use it. That’s why you need to create a specific training program that drives behavior change and encourages them to adopt your new collateral.

The most basic solution is to teach them how to use the platform and download the material. But why not go further and use your sales collateral to teach other sales principles, like addressing pain points or selling on value rather than benefits? If you have specific tasks that you require sales reps to complete as part of your sales process, you can create training around them, too. If you use TigerLRM, you can store them directly in the Learning Management System, for all sales reps to use.

Use a sales platform to connect your CRM and sales enablement

Sales enablement platforms and CRMs are great on their own, but they are even more powerful when used together. A sales enablement platform like TigerLRM can help you eliminate the need for manual data entry between the two platforms by providing accurate information, helping reps to better score leads, and provide prospects with the most relevant content based on past interactions.

Better still, you can use an all-in-one CRM and sales enablement platform like TigerLRM that lets reps access everything they need to sell from a single platform, while using AI-driven features to automate parts of the sales process.

Make sales enablement a continuous effort

You can’t let your sales enablement strategy be a one-off event. Or let sales training happen just once a year. If you do, sales reps will quickly forget everything they’ve learned and regress to their old habits.

Sales enablement needs to be a continuous effort, something both marketing and sales teams engage with once a week or more. Regular meetings between departments are essential to ensuring content continues to be created. Weekly catch-ups between sales managers and reps can ensure that reps continue to access materials and training found on your sales enablement platform.

Who owns sales enablement?

This is a complicated question with a complicated answer. In most companies, the sales enablement process is organized between the sales and marketing teams. If a company really wants their sales reps to function as efficiently as possible and have reliable support, they’ll hire a sales enablement professional that can fill the gap between the sales team and marketing.

The marketing team is usually responsible for creating sales enablement material, so that sales reps have the collateral they need to sell. Involving them in the process has the added benefit of making them more familiar with the sales process and ensuring every piece of marketing content they create is geared towards your buyers’ needs.

The sales team is responsible for telling marketing what they need, generating sales insights for marketing to use when creating collateral, and collecting feedback from their reps on how the process is working.

Of course, every company is different. In cases where headcounts are smaller and marketing is only a couple of people, sales enablement may be entirely owned by the sales team.

How do you structure a sales enablement team?

A good sales enablement team can make the difference between a successful and struggling sales organization. You want to structure your team so that sales reps can sell more effectively.

Define a clear structure and delegate responsibilities to team members

We’ve already discussed who should be responsible for sales enablement in your organization. But if you want to structure a sales enablement team successfully, it’s not enough to say marketing should do “X” and sales should do “Y”. You need to get specific and delegate responsibilities to each individual team member.

Dedicate a stakeholder from both marketing and sales to take responsibility for the program, and then assign more specific tasks. Who is responsible for designing and writing sales enablement content, for example? Who will lead training on the sales side? Who will take control of reporting and analysis? Make sure every part of your sales enablement process is assigned to a specific person.

Outline the role of sales enablement for different teams

Sales enablement isn’t just for the benefit of sales reps. Marketers and customer service teams can use the information found in your sales enablement platform to improve their job performance.

Marketers, for instance, can use feedback from sales teams to create marketing campaigns that more accurately target a prospect’s pain points. Understanding how sales teams use collateral further down the funnel can also help them create better sales material in the first place.

Customer service reps can use the information stored about prospects in sales enablement and CRM tools to improve their interaction with customers after they’ve made a purchase. Understanding what motivated them to purchase your platform in the first place can help customer success teams ‌showcase your platform’s most relevant features and help clients ‌see value and ROI as fast as possible.

Track and analyze sales and other data

Don’t just leave your sales enablement strategy to chance. Arrange a time (at least twice a year) where sales and marketing teams sit down to analyze the impact your sales enablement strategy is having on sales. Or, even better, hire a sales enablement professional to monitor sales’ support and resources in real time.

Are behavior changes taking place or are reps still sticking to their old routines?

What about content? How's your collateral being received? How many reps are downloading it? Which content is proving the most popular?

Reporting on and improving your sales enablement process is a joint effort that shouldn’t be left to one department or the other. It should be in the hands of a sales enablement professional.

The takeaway

In the past five years, searches for “sales enablement” on Google rose by around 51.2% yearly. This is because sales enablement is an effective tool, and more businesses are recognizing this fact. More and more small to medium-sized businesses are adopting sales enablement platforms as they seek to become as competitive as enterprise organizations by using the same productivity tools.

See how TigerLRM’s AI-driven CRM and sales enablement services can help you close more deals, guaranteed.