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Sales enablement is about aligning the stars by hand so that sales representatives can deliver the right message to the right person, consistently. You’re certain that your sales people are delivering some message to some people, but how can you determine if it’s “right”? When a sales team has the proper sales enablement solutions at their disposal, they will exhibit the following indicators:

Speed.

Rep onboarding is a breeze. Sales rookies become engaged in quota-carrying activities and comfortably transition to sales rock stars, like clockwork. There is no “one size fits all” time limit for onboarding, but consider this: every day that a sales rep is not performing is a lost opportunity for revenue.

Effective salespeople aren’t spending time constantly entering data, browsing social media feeds of prospects or playing phone tag. They use those hours to actively sell. How much time do sales reps spend actually selling? If they are writing their own sales playbooks or Google stalking prospects, then the answer is: not enough.

Successful sales teams harness sales enablement strategies that shorten the sales cycle. That means adhering to playbooks that include: closed loop marketing with CLM platforms and highly communicative sales and marketing teams.

Accuracy.

Effective salespeople are knowledgeable about the product and up-to-date brand messaging. Successful sales teams don’t stop learning after training. No, they are continuously educating themselves about their company and product.

They’re also knowledgeable about the customer. Effective salespeople aren’t scouring Twitter because they have access to technologies that deliver valuable insight into customer accounts.

Delivery.

The best sales teams are able to deliver the right sales materials at the right time to the right person on any device. They meet their customer on the customer’s preferred platforms. That means utilizing digital sales aids to create a mobile sales force. Advanced mobile sales forces are able to recreate that synchronicity of message, timing and audience over and over again. That is the pinnacle of sales enablement success.

Is your sales team falling short in one, two or all three of these areas? The first step is recognizing that you have a problem. Do you need help finding the solution?

Google+ Kent Potts

Targeted messages, personalized content and more effective sales calls are just some of the benefits of sales enablement. When sales reps use sales enabling tools to communicate with HCPs, they are better prepared for the face-to-face interaction as well as the follow-up stages. When meeting with a HCP, a sales enablement platform works to enable Sales to create more effective and personalized presentations which elicit a positive purchase decision from customers. 

Earlier this month, Salesforce presented a good article which addressed the importance of using high-quality data to impact revenue and ROI head on. In the article entitled ‘6 Ways to Grow Your Business Faster with Quality Data’, Amanda Nelson,the Director of Marketing at RingLead, had come back from the Salesforce1 World Tour where she says “It seemed that everyone was talking about data.” In the article, Amanda talks about 6 key ways to grow a business with quality data. 

Let’s take a look at her round up.

Before the advent of technological advancements in the sales process such as various sales enablement tools, sales reps used to operate as lone-wolfs. They would either generate their own leads or wait for aggregated leads to be sent to them from the marketing department. From there on out, they would start the communications process all on their own, conducting customer research and figuring out what content would be most relevant to present to the prospect.

When things go wrong and sales opportunities don’t materialize, you might jump to berate your salespeople, especially if the buyer dropped out after speaking with them. You resentfully ask the sales team if they’re up to date on your flurry of e-mails filled with case studies, or if they aren’t properly using your new and improved sales portal? You shake them, thinking you’ve given them every sales enablement tool they could possibly need, and you begin to wonder if maybe they’re just ignoring you. You bury your head, sigh, and think about hiring a new sales team. Maybe you have a group of duds?

Instead of assuming your salespeople are failing you, explore the idea that maybe you are failing your salespeople. Your salespeople are in the trenches of conversation with your potential customers. They’re working hard to make a sale, and if they are not using your current sales enablement solutions to do that, it’s probably for a good reason. The tools probably aren’t useful to them. They would know! If your reps are ignoring your new and improved portal in favor of outdated slides and data sheets, the portal that you are providing them is probably not as engaging as you thought. 

Today’s customers are more engaged than ever and are spending a majority of their time researching products and brands online before making a purchase decision. What’s more is that even after the accumulation of so much knowledge, they are still likely to abandon the decision-making process.

A customer’s decision is comprised of two elements. The first is their perception of your company, and the second is their perception of your product. With the billions of brand conversions happening daily, it becomes crucial to ensure that customers are hearing and saying good things about your company in an effort to differentiate yourself from the competition.

The marketing and sales model is forever evolving. Marketing and Sales weren’t always on the same team. Marketing executed campaigns while Sales acted on prospects thought to be ready for the face-to-face interaction. There was never a real collaborative effort between the two departments. The model begged the question “How do we reconcile the marketing process, which is product focused, with the sales process, which is customer focused?”

Today, the selling model means something entirely different. It’s called “Sales Enablement” – the process of bridging the gap between marketing strategy and sales execution and transforming the selling model into a cross-functional discipline; or as we define it:

Your marketing team works like a well-oiled machine, using strategy to churn out relevant digital content for multi-channel selling. They keep up with the latest and greatest of the constantly changing digital sphere. They track the efforts of their campaigns, and know which platforms work for your product and they use them properly. They analyze results and adjust efforts accordingly. And it’s working! You’re raking in heightened buzz, leads, brand awareness and traffic. But your sales numbers aren’t necessarily matching up. How do you go from customer awareness to customer purchase, loyalty and advocacy? The sales team has to be prepared to give the customer the old one-two. 

1. Reinforce Marketing Message

The digital age has provided us with thousands of tools, one being sales enablement, to help us determine how our sales and marketing teams are performing, what content is converting and how people are responding to our message. But, tools can only tell us the raw facts and data. Humans still need to be a part of the equation to decipher and analyze. Even then, we might not know why someone decided to come to us in the first place; did they accidentally click a Facebook ad or were they intrigued by your CTA on another webpage? When it comes down to it, we’re still dealing with people and the power of “personalization” is going to continue being prevalent.

Data is quickly becoming the essential raw material of any business decision. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) sales and marketing teams now have access to previously unavailable insights regarding the interests and engagement levels of each physician.  GSK can now witness how physicians engage with specific pieces of content—both during and after sales calls using adaptive sales enablement.  This direct feedback is coupled with Skura’s predictive analytics, which suggest the optimal message, timing, and channel to approach individual physicians.  Together, Skura's closed loop marketing solution enables the GSK marketing team to personalize approaches, provide more meaningful content, and build stronger relationships with physicians globally.

Learn more from GSK and understand how they improved their campaigns and doubled the amount of time their reps spend on calls with Physicians in 78 markets around the world.