Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Sales Enablement Planning

Heard about sales enablement and wondering if it’s all it’s cracked up to be?

The answer is yes. You need sales enablement strategies to keep up with current B2B competition.

If you’re just now hearing about sales enablement planning, here’s what you need to know…

Defining sales enablement

Sales enablement is about getting the marketing department and sales department to work on the same page. In traditional strategies, there are barriers that keep marketing and sales from working together effectively.

But you don’t have to work around those barriers anymore. Modern tools and technology, like HubSpot marketing automation and sales enablement tools, remove the barriers and better align the goals of marketing and sales teams.

One of the biggest hurdles sales managers have is getting the sales team to properly utilise the content put out by marketing. Simply put, sales reps just don’t know where to find the content they need or what to do with it.

A sales enablement strategy not only helps them learn how to utilise that content to close more sales, it also provides them with organised search tools so they can actually find the content they need to show a lead, when they need it.

Remember that time is a top priority in lead conversions. If the lead doesn’t get the information when they are interested, they are likely to look for answers somewhere else rather than with your business.

Understanding the benefits of sales enablement

So what does sales enablement do for your company, exactly?

Here are the key benefits:

● Sales reps start using more of the content your marketing team has worked so hard to create.

● More leads are directed to relevant content, further increasing ROI from sales and marketing teams.

● The boost in guided content traffic leads to more conversions.

● And ultimately, your sales reps generate higher amounts of revenue for your business.

So here’s how to get started…

Best practices for sales enablement beginners

These are the essential beginner practices for sales enablement:

1. Organise content into an effective storage system. This allows your salespeople to find content faster so they don’t lose the lead because of wait time -- something completely preventable.
2. Optimise old content. Creating new content is great, but if you have low-performing content pieces, you can quickly increase sales and marketing ROI by simply updating or archiving those pieces. If they can’t be fixed, they need to be gotten out of the way so they don’t bog down the sales process.
3. Make sure contacts and leads are synced between sales and marketing. Using a marketing automation platform that has sales enablement tools, like HubSpot, allows you to connect the marketing platform and your CRM. That means sales and marketing teams can work together. They can see each other’s notes, and you can rest assured that everyone has the most current information about contacts and where they are in the buyer journey.

Aligning your sales and marketing teams through sales enablement strategies and technologies could make a big difference to the efficiency of your sales team, which in turn will make a big difference to your ROI.

If you are interested in starting to use sales enablement and turning your leads into customers, click here to find out more about how BBD Boom could help you get started.

To learn more about sales enablement click here.