Long ago, sales was approached intuitively, and the best salespeople were the ones who were just “good with people.” Some had charisma. Some were smooth talkers. Some were more interested in resorting tricks that would result in a sale, but not repeat business. The 1960s saw the advent of a more scientific approach to selling, and since then we’ve seen a proliferation of sales methodologies, but the fact is, there is still no one-size-fits-all solution to sales.

This is especially true in this time of economic uncertainty, supply chain disruption, and reduced customer loyalty, where B2B sales teams can’t always rely on long-established relationships. You have to know your customers and how to address their needs. You have to know your products inside and out. Every interaction has to be researched and personalized. To sell today, you need more than just better sales training. 

The problem with training salespeople and then setting them loose is that all of that information is easily forgotten. When you’re forced to think quickly in front of a customer, it’s easy to forget your training and revert to intuition. So instead of giving your sales team lots of training up front, you integrate that information into the sales process. Instead of training people to sell, you enable them to sell with a sales strategy, product knowledge, ideal customer profiles, and a system that will keep the goals of each salesperson aligned with the goals of the business as a whole. That’s what a sales enablement strategy provides.

Remove Sales Roadblocks

When everybody is selling more or less the same products, the main differentiator isn’t price. It’s the quality of your customer interactions. Without a sales enablement strategy, it can be difficult to know if your salespeople are effective, and if they aren’t, how to pinpoint where your sales processes are breaking down. With the rise of online B2B sales, it can even be difficult to see why you need a sales staff in the first place.

The gap between the preferences of B2B buyers and the outcomes of those preferences make offering great service a challenge. During the pandemic, B2B buyers discovered the ease of a fully online, self-service sales process. They just go to your website, browse your catalog, fill out a form, and pay, without ever having to talk to another person. The problem is that self-service buyers, without anyone to guide them to the best products for their needs, often end up regretting their purchases. The result is lower customer satisfaction.

You lose something important when you remove the interaction between the buyer and the sales rep. The buyer knows what they want, but they might not know your products. Your sales rep knows your products and can steer the buyer toward what they need rather than what they think they want.

No amount of training will help a salesperson make a sale if they’re not involved in the process. The key is to design a sales enablement strategy that recognizes what B2B buyers like and don’t like about the self-service experience so that you can make your sales staff available with the right information and the right moments, at every point in the buyer journey.

Enable Collaboration Between Departments

Without sales enablement, sales staff might end up isolated from the marketing department, left to create their own marketing materials and use their own methods to find and qualify leads and convert them into customers. Or, if they are in contact with marketing, they’ll take whatever marketing gives them and they adapt it to their own needs. In both cases, sales and marketing are not on the same page. There’s no overarching sales enablement strategy pointing them both in the same direction.

It’s not just sales and marketing that might be working at cross purposes. Sometimes, salespeople aren’t armed with a thorough knowledge of the products they are selling. Maybe they know how to sell, but they don’t have practical, technical knowledge of a particular industry. Or maybe they learned all about your products during onboarding and have since forgotten some of the details. In these cases, sales needs a process for consulting with and learning from product development. Of course, you want to sell benefits, not just features, but understanding the features equips the sales team to translate product specifications into benefits for the customer.

Playbooks

To make a sales strategy work, you have to get everybody working from the same playbook. This isn’t just a metaphor. Your sales playbook transforms sales training from a bunch of stuff salespeople have to memorize on day 1 to an ongoing, evolving process that provides a guide for every lead, every sale, every customer interaction.

Sales playbooks are most effective when they live inside your Customer Relationship Management system. From your CRM, sales staff can access scripts for communication for different stages of the sales funnel and sales materials from brochures to white papers. Criteria for qualifying leads, answers to common sales objections, detailed buyer personas, it’s all there in the playbook for your sales team to access at any time.

To Grow More, Sell More

In uncertain times, you don’t grow by cutting back. You grow by selling more. Sales enablement aligned with strategy makes it easy to see what’s working and what’s not. It brings everything a sales rep needs to be successful into a sales playbook and keeps your whole team pulling in the same direction.