5 Key Benefits of Sales Enablement Technology

In order to have a successful sales enablement program, you need two key ingredients. First, you need to have buy-in from leaders at multiple departments. Departments have to work together in lock-step in order to achieve the shared goal of driving revenue. However, it’s equally important to have the right sales enablement tools.

The right right tools can enable reps to connect with more prospects, have more intelligent conversations and leverage content in context. And when tools provide analytics, the result can be more transparency and a feedback loop that empowers reps to continuously improve.

Here are five of the most essential sales enablement benefits that companies can achieve by investing in the right tool set.

Creating The Sales Rep CEO

Do you help empower your sales reps to be a “CEO in their own market,” helping them understanding the core competencies of their territory and customers? Give reps a toolset to make business decisions, such as strong data sets in their CRMs and tools that automate key processes. Sales enablement helps reps analyze businesses and territories instead of blindly dialing into their markets every day.

Targeting the Right Accounts

Account-based selling strategies begin with identifying the most likely candidates in your markets. Marketing teams can help sales teams identify the exact right accounts that are going to be most likely to convert, as well as the right contacts within those accounts. Adopt a radical focus on using technologies to find those accounts most likely to convert with data sets and account-based selling tools.

Using Content More Effectively in Context

When sales reps talk to people at those target accounts, they have to have meaningful conversations. B2B sales interactions need to give buyers value from the conversation. Content is often the tool that supplies that value.

Buyers must justify a purchase in their organizations, and also show their buying initiative should take priority over all the other projects they have to prioritize. Sales reps need to support buyers in building a business case internally. Whether that’s scripted content that is supplied to reps through sales enablement training, or content that marketing generates, content can be passed around in your buyer’s internal organization to help build that business case and provide value to the buyer.

Content dedicated to this purpose is not restricted to the traditional set of datasheets, videos, and other content types that are typically created by marketing and shared by sales reps with prospects. Content as a tool also encompasses the conversational points and statistics, frequently asked questions, or a plan for a certain account if you use account-based selling.

More Quality Conversations

For B2B sales teams, all sales activities ultimately lead to conversations with key decision makers. In order to maximize the volume of high quality phone conversations, reps need to leverage tools that empower them to connect with more key decision makers by phone.

Specialized dialers enable reps to have higher engagement rates and be dramatically more productive. These tools can have a powerful impact on sales ROI in part because they automate much of the research that goes into discovering who to call and what to say, as well as optimizing workflow. In addition, the ability to automatically dial prospects from local area codes has been shown to help reps connect with 4X more leads.

Another way reps can have more phone conversations with key customers is by simply following a regular cadence. According to Forbes, 27% of sales leads never get contacted at all. And even when reps do follow-up with leads, they rarely follow up enough. Sales enablement leaders should leverage call analytics that log how many times reps are following up with with leads at various accounts. When reps are following up with a steady cadence of activities, the result is almost always more successful phone conversations.

More Transparency in the Organization

When everyone in the organization can see what sales is doing, and what prospects and customers are doing, you can see everyone in the organization’s impact on sales. You will receive more ideas, responses and adaptations. Sales should be everyone’s business. Throughout the buyer journey, prospective customers encounter marketing, customer success, support teams, account management and others outside of sales. Everyone in the organization should be aware that sales enablement should be a part of company culture.

For example, if marketers can’t see the value of marketing-accepted leads, or marketing-qualified leads, and instead just see a number like “meetings set this week,” or “opportunities generated,” they may struggle to see where their actions affect sales effectiveness or where they could improve. Make sure your sales leadership is having a conversation with other teams in the organization so they see how their actions affect sales and revenue.

This is a guest post authored by Cheyanne Ritz, marketing manager at KnowledgeTree. For more sales enablement tips from KnowledgeTree and other top performing companies, check out our eBook, How to Create a Culture of Sales Enablement!