This week we take a look into how to choose the best sales enablement software for your company and customers. Choosing the right platform can feel like a daunting task. This post will break down some key aspects to look for in a software system to help set you up for sales enablement success.
Background: Delivering Content to Customers Just Isn’t the Same Anymore
Let’s face it, in this day and age trying to decide the best sales enablement platform to disseminate your message to your customer is getting more complicated by the day. With today’s ever changing technological environment, opportunities to communicate to your audience are endless. The large variety of available sales enablement software solutions on the market makes it difficult to determine which unique aspects will best suit your sales process.
Meanwhile, delivering the right content at the right time to your customers also isn’t an easy task. In fact, 33% of B2B marketer’s argue that this is in fact one of their biggest struggles (Source: Act-On, 2015).
The growth of connected technology, and the evolution of sales content management strategies have revolutionized the way we do business. Customers are now more empowered than before, having more control over the buying process.
No longer can we send mass messages to our audiences and just be done with them. Customers want to feel valued, and they want unique answers for their individual needs. Most importantly, customers want tailored content that enhances every aspect of the decision journey. Customers expect to see authentic content from the companies that they work with instead of overly scripted service (Source: Forbes, 2014).
Want to know more about sales enablement, check out our previous blog that explains what is sales enablement, and provides a relevant definition for 2015.
What Changed?
The behaviour at many companies suggests that sales and marketing alignment is still a very uncomfortable practice. However, this kind of strategy is essential for achieving truly tailored digital content communications that delight the buyer at every turn. In actuality, almost 50% of B2B sales reps miss out on opportunities for a sale (Source: Forbes, 2014).
If you’re interested in learning more about sales and marketing alignment check out our past post about why use sales and marketing alignment, and 5 best practices.
These missed opportunities may be no fault of the sales process set in place by businesses. Instead, many missed opportunities are due to the fact that customers feel as though their experiences with you do not add up to their interactions with your competition (Source: Forbes, 2014).
Top performers are keeping up with today’s customers because they know their preferences, behaviours, and the new power that they hold. They also know how to be more relevant, and how to listen and respond effectively. As a result, those who use software for sales enablement tend to have 53% more leads converted into marketing qualified leads (Source: Inconsive, 2015).
The Role of Software Enablement for Evolving Customer Expectations
Due to the changing nature of society and technology, customers have come to require a lot more from the companies that they do business with. For starters, they expect a fast response time paired with impeccable accuracy (Source: Forbes, 2014). Unprepared sales calls, or reps equipped with the wrong information; can anticipate unfavourable outcomes.
Sales Enablement software allows businesses to control the marketing that its reps show to its customers. Having all of your files located in one content management system means that your reps have easy access to all of the updated information that they need at the click of a button.
Due to the nature of the online world, customers have also started to expect that most businesses will also engage during non-business hours, and that their communications with you will always monitored (Source: Forbes, 2014). Having the ability to access a mobile sales application not only gives reps the ability to access information anytime, and anywhere, it also gives them the opportunity to share all digital content with customers.
How will the Best Sales Enablement Solution Help You?
It Produces Relevancy
Top performers understand their customers better than the competition does. They know what’s required to create a successful Face-to-Face interaction, and what is required to stay relevant to the customer.
Relevancy comes from understanding where customers are in the decision journey, and sales reps use this knowledge to create an engaging sales call. Crafting a successful presentation means focusing on the message; in short, the more targeted the message is, the more relevant that it becomes to the customer. The more you relate can to the customer, the better experience they will have.
Good sales enablement solutions give you the tools to help you set your sales reps up for sales enablement success. Giving your sales reps the ability to be able to customize your marketing content to better reflect your customers will in turn allow your customers to better relate to the products and services that you are providing. .
Enduring customer relevancy is a crucial concept of effective sales enablement software, check out this more comprehensive post on the issue of how to produce more relevancy from the sales process.
It’s More Conversational
Understanding your customer means that you are able to relate to them better, and allows you to open the floor up for a deeper, more meaningful conversation. The Face-to-Face interaction should be customer-centric – not based on messages that have been crafted to demonstrate how great a brand is. The best sales enablement solution will allow your reps to customize their sales presentation to your customer and open the floor for a better conversation.
Best-in-Class performers are always working on engaging with customers through a one-on-one basis by focusing on their needs. They converse with customers in an organic and free-flowing manner, without the use of jargon that only serves to alienates the customer. Listening to the needs of the customers means delivering a more personalized message, and that translates to engagement on a personal level.
The end goal is a sales call that is truly a value-added conversation, not a dedicated pitch with features and benefits. You may enjoy this post about being conversational, with tips to getting more out of your sales presentation. Alternatively, I suggest checking out our post that explains sales enablement for Reps who are just walking, talking, turnoffs.
It Contributes to the Development of a Viable Sales Strategy
Creating a strategy means basing the Face-to-Face interaction on metrics. The sales process needs to provide a financial ROI and this is only achieved by having a sound sales strategy. In as little as 12 months time, it has been reported that 75% of companies using marketing automation have seen ROI (Source: Focus Research, 2013). ROI can be attributed to the software’s ability to eliminate unessential and repetitive tasks by offering actionable data, and improving marketing contribution to revenue.
From marketing campaigns, to the sales call and the follow-up process, top performing Marketing and Sales execs are analyzing and benchmarking their performance in order to refine future sales calls so they become more targeted and personalized. One of the biggest values of content management, according to 63% of users, is the ability to set measureable objectives for each of their campaigns (Source: Gleanster, 2013), thus, allowing Sales teams to enhance their sales strategy with actionable data-driven decisions.
How to choose the right metrics for your sales process can be a challenging task, check out this post for some interesting insights on the matter.
Determining What Works for You
Choosing the right sales enablement solution can seem daunting. Not all content management software will be right for you or your customers. Understanding the makeup of each platform and matching it to both your needs, and those of your customer, will help weed out platforms that are of no use to your company. Above all, the needs of your customer must be kept in mind. At the end of the day, if your customer is not happy with their experience with you, you could potentially lose that sale.
Sales reps typically reach out to customers, engage in conversations to try and understand the buyer’s individual needs and wants, and apply communications in an effort to align needs with solutions. While this may have been working for your sales team in the past, you will begin to notice declining effectiveness over time.
Getting connected with customers today means keeping them engaged with personalized and targeted messages. Of those companies currently using a sales content management system, 59% are able to use intelligent targeting to deliver content specialized to a particular customer (Source: Act-On, 2015). In order to determine the best sales enablement solution for your company you must understand your customer is by:
- Considering/defining your audience
- Understanding how you will reach them
- Defining your own goals
Defining Your Audience
Understanding the demographics of your audience can help you profile them better (Source: Accion, 2015). Defining a specific type of customer to target will help you understand your customer needs, relate to them, and open the door for stronger conversations.
In fact, 30% of those who have adopted software for sales enablement say that sales enablement has helped their companies to better target their prospective and existing customers (Source: Lenskold & Pedowitz, 2013). Understanding your customers and where they sit in their decision journey can help you to better target their needs. The decision journey is the process by which a buyer decides about a product or service through information searches and other influences. Tailoring information to reflect the customer’s current thought process will make the decision process that much easier.
This process is easier said than done, but something we can offer insights with through this post we made about how to tailor digital content to purchase decision stages.
Reaching Your Audience
Depending on their demographics, certain customers respond through different platforms. Understanding how to reach them can strengthen your sales and marketing alignment (Source: Accion, 2015).
While reaching your audience is important, it’s also important that your marketing team is able to track their efforts. If you can’t tell if you’re reaching your audience, how will you know if your efforts are on the right track? Selecting a sales enablement solution that incorporates sales analytic software can help you keep track of your audience and understand whether or not you are actually reaching them.
As a matter of fact, those companies that use a content management system are actually three times more likely to not only track, but also attribute their content marketing efforts to multiple defined touch points (Source: Lenskold & Pedowitz, 2013).
Due to the inherent nature of customer facing interactions found within both sales and marketing teams, it is crucial that audience awareness is shared and influenced equally by both teams. To learn more about achieving sales and marketing alignment for a viable sales strategy, check out this post on the subject.
Defining Your Goals
Defining the type of information that you want to get across and how you are going to accomplish that is also an important aspect of determining which content management software works for you (Source: Accion, 2015). When looking for the best sales enablement solution, you should consider what is going to help you accomplish your company’s goals, while at the same time appealing to your customer.
Software for sales enablement can vary in terms of what the different applications can offer your company.
Defining your sales performance management goals and what you expect out of a content management system can help you easily determine which software is best suited to your needs. For example, the tracking of content usage can allow your company to tailor sales force communications to actual field effectiveness. And if this is what you want to get from the platform, you need a system that can supply that data.
One of the most popular desires for sales content management is to help increase productivity effectiveness within the marketing departments in most companies. According to 36% of sales enablement users, the content management software takes repetitive tasks out of the marketer’s hands, so they can work on other projects (Source: Lenskold & Pedowitz, 2013).
Top 4 Things to look for in a Sales Enablement Platform
To help narrow down your search, we picked out the top four areas we think the best sales enablement solution should incorporate in order to best benefit you.
Content Management
We’ve said it before, and we will say it again. Content is king. Content keeps you relevant, your customers engaged, and influences the overall success of a call. A sales enablement platform that has a strong content management system is critical and should not be considered lightly when selecting sales enablement software.
Think of your content management system as a content hub- a place which controls all content and distribution. All existing content is loaded up onto the platform where it is syndicated to each sales rep. As a result, all of your sales reps gain access to the content that you have uploaded. The best part? Your reps have access to your content anywhere, and anytime, through a mobile sales app on their preferred device.
Through content management, making changes to your content and updating new content has never been easier. Once a new version of a document rolls in, uploading only once ensures that all sales reps have the latest and most refined materials.
If you want more detail about which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage, check out this post for a breakdown of 15 of the most popular digital content types, and how they apply in a variety of interactions.
Sales Analytics Software
Data and analytics are key components of an effective marketing and sales strategy. Without the proper metrics to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, sales calls, and the follow-up process, Marketing and Sales execs wouldn’t know which areas need improvement and which efforts they should emphasize more.
Knowledge of key data metrics not only helps determine the effectiveness of your campaigns, it also empowers your sales reps when it comes to the customer relationship. Knowing more about your customer and their buying behaviour enriches the conversations that your sales reps are having with those customers.
Looking at KPIs will help maximize sales performance, increase the effectiveness of your team, and improve your results.
Multichannel Engagement
The practice of interacting with customers through multiple channels (both directly and indirectly) in order to sell them goods or services is commonly referred to as multichannel marketing (Source: TechTarget, 2015).
Multichannel engagement is important because customers are utilizing various media channels to get more information on products and brands. Effective communication entails knowing what to say, when to say it, but most importantly, where to say it.
Having customers at different stages in the decision journey can also influence the medium in which you present information to them. Being able to present and manage your content across various platforms will allow you to have better, more relevant conversations with your customers.
At the end of the day, customers typically do not have a preference when it comes to what medium you choose to operate on. What they do want is to be able to operate on their own preferred device and medium, which means having a platform that enables just that, seamless omni-channel interactions.
Here’s a link to a quick brief on multichannel engagement that you may like to read.
Closed Loop Marketing
The process of gathering data on a sales call and reverting it back to the marketing team is called Closed Loop Marketing. Understanding customer tastes and preferences is a job made for both Sales and Marketing.
Gaining insights into critical data and metrics works to boost sales and enables marketers to develop targeted messages that produce world class content. Closed Loop Marketing allows for sales and marketing alignment, which in turn enhances and impacts the performance of sales reps.
Closed Loop Marketing has been attributed to increasing conversation rates, reduced marketing costs, improving customer experience, more effective lead management, and a better understanding of companies’ ROI (Source: Adobe, 2013).
While it may seem that choosing the right sales enablement software is a complicated process, it is important to keep in mind two important key players: your customers and your company.
By determining what works best for your customers, and their specialized needs in comparison to your company goals, you’ll be on your way to finding your best sales enablement solution. Remember that not all software for sales enablement offers the same solutions. Finding a sales enablement solution that best relates to your needs will set you up for success from the very beginning.
[RELATED CONTENT] If you found this post interesting, and want to learn more about sales enablement specifically, I invite you to check out the free whitepaper below about sales enablement best practices.
Otherwise, please feel free to book a demo, and let us show you what real sales enablement solutions look like.
