Product Marketing
Growth Marketing
Sales enablement content helps growing businesses to unlock the true potential of their SaaS sales team. Help your sales reps to exceed their quotas and optimize their deal sizes and customer satisfaction. Break down barriers between your marketing, sales and operations teams while increasing your marketing content return on investment (ROI).
What is sales enablement?
Seismic defines sales enablement as "an ongoing, strategic, cross functional process that equips sellers with the content, coaching, tools, and insights they need to effectively engage buyers and close more deals."
Gartner frames sales enablement as "A system of activities, processes and tools that support knowledge-based buyer interactions." Sellers have to earn trusted advisor status to educate clients on the products and services that best suit their needs and objectives.
Training onboarding sales reps about what to say to prospects and clients when they are face-to-face, on the phone, or via email is generally more complicated than you would expect. A Gartner survey found that 75% of buyers prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all when they are buying products or contracting services for their company. A few key insights from the survey include:
- 43% of surveyed buyers that used self service commerce said they regretted their purchases.
- Sales enablement strategies should focus on keeping their skills, behaviours, and knowledge up-to-date
- Sales leaders need to identify and adopt technology that can make sales enablement content accessible, personalized by role, and focused on helping buyers to make data-driven decisions.
The survey found that many sales and marketing teams have conflicting priorities, such as too many meetings, complex business processes, and undefined decision making ability. Streamlining collaboration workflows and aligning rules and processes with commercial priorities is necessary for sales enablement programs to succeed.
Empowering SaaS Teams for Peak Performance
Before pivoting to a marketing role about a decade ago, I worked in enterprise B2B technology sales, targeting large public and sector organizations. Although I worked for some large, established companies, I didn’t always have the latest sales materials to share with customers. Unlike Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld my briefcase wasn't full of crackers. But on a few occaisions, I met clients equipped with an aging laptop, outdated brochures, and a presentation I created myself over the weekend. Having up-to-date, professional, on-brand sales collateral like sellsheets is important for SaaS teams who want to meet their sales goals, and for marketing teams working toward their own targets.
With a solid sales enablement strategy, SaaS, tech, and mobility companies can make sure their sales teams have the right processes, content, and technology to sell better and close deals faster. When teams use helpful content, like playbooks with tips for client meetings, sales reps feel more confident and can set clear goals each time they talk to a customer. Following a step-by-step plan like this leads to more productivity and faster sales.
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
Sales enablement helps connect marketing and sales teams. It makes everyone work together by focusing on common goals and keeping communication open and honest. Teams often do this by holding regular “smarketing” meetings (sales + marketing) to talk about problems and find solutions together.
I remember my first Smarketing meeting at Open Text. At first, sales sat together on one side and marketing on the other. But as the meeting went on, we started to talk more casually, and it felt less divided. We built relationships that lasted even after the meeting, and it helped break down the walls between departments. The marketing team learned what kinds of case studies and guides the sales team needed, and sales got better materials to share with their clients.
The HubSpot Academy Sales Enablement Workbook and certification course recommend setting up a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing. This way, both teams promise to help each other. The SLA spells out how many qualified leads marketing must send to sales and how quickly sales has to contact those leads. This structure helps both teams work toward the same goals and get better results.
Deliver the Right Content at the Right Time
Content is a key part of any good sales enablement program. Giving sales reps the right information at the right time makes a big difference when talking to customers and answering their questions. Sales enablement content can include playbooks, cheat sheets, win/loss stories, email templates, buyer profiles, training videos, and product summaries. The best content is made by getting ideas from people in sales, marketing, consulting, customer support, product management, and other teams.
A smart content plan means figuring out what questions prospects usually ask and making helpful content that gives them answers and encourages deeper conversations. This content should be easy for sales reps to find and use, so they can share it with customers and move deals forward quickly.
There are some great tools for SaaS sales enablement, like HubSpot and Dock (special thanks to their Content Lead, Eric Doty, who also runs the Superpath community—a great place for people who write content). I’ve also been writing for the HubSpot Sales Blog for almost two years and enjoy learning new ways to use their Sales, Marketing, and Content Hubs.
Accelerate Sales Cycles with Expertly Crafted Enablement Tools
Sales enablement tools—like playbooks, collateral content libraries, competitive battlecards, buyer personas, and templates for presentations and emails—help accelerate sales cycles. They automate and organize tasks, so sales teams can manage leads, track conversations, and measure how they’re doing.
For example, CRM platforms like HubSpot can save contact details, show how close you are to closing a sale, and create performance reports. Helpful tips can pop up during different stages of the sales process, to guide salespeople to navigate past common obstacles or objections with content like customer testimonials or competitive guides.
Training platforms keep sales teams updated on products and sales tricks, while analytics tools show what’s working and what customers are doing.
Driving Sustainable Growth Through Continuous Learning
Continuous learning is key to giving your reps the best odds to succeed in their role. Sales enablement helps teams to constantly improve their results with regular training and current resources. Enriching classes or microlearning videos with real sales calls (or re-enacted converations), industry data, and authentic customer feedback can help your team keep pace with industry changes and stay on top.
When sales practitioners, sales operations, product management, and marketing teams collaboratively create your sales enablement content, it helps everyon involved with a sense of ownership. Field-testing these tools with partners or customers in controlled environment ensures what you make is actually useful. Keep your sales training updated as part of your product and inventory lifecycles. Encouraging sellers to provide unfiltered feedback, keeps your sellers open to trying new methods, confident in their skills. If your sales and marketing teams work tas one unit, your chances of long-term success will be much better.
Do you need help to expand and update your sales enablement content library? Want help deciding what sales methodology to SPIN, MEDDIC, or Sandler?connect with me with the form below. Let's discuss the sales enablement tools, content and training approaches that will create the best business outcomes.