Sales to business clients (B2B selling) is one of the most complex types of selling. It requires deep knowledge of your audience, products, and services, and the ability to create relationships with your customers. But traditional sales methods are no longer sufficient to reach your sales goals. Today, most prospects do extensive research online prior to alerting you to their interest and don’t encounter a salesperson until much later in the sales cycle.

Many B2B buyers now prefer online to in-person sales interactions. As a result, they expect personalized experiences and access to information at their fingertips, which requires shifting your efforts to digital sales channels and providing value-added content.

Where do sales people fit in, if so much of the buying process takes place online, without their knowledge? The sales role is still very important, but today’s salesperson needs tools to help them strategically engage at the right time, facilitate the buyer journey, and function in a highly consultative role.

That’s where sales enablement comes into play.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is exactly what it sounds like: enabling sales to be more effective.

It is the process of providing sales teams with the tools, training, and support they need to achieve their goals. It involves aligning sales, marketing, and management teams to create a cohesive sales process and ensuring that salespeople are equipped to effectively engage with prospects and close deals.

The goal of sales enablement is to make the sales journey easier for the customer, wherever they encounter you and to whatever extent they want to control the transaction. 

It all starts with creating a buyer persona, a detailed semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This helps to tailor marketing and sales efforts by envisioning the audience you want to reach and attract to your business. Once you understand your buyer persona, you then start working on their customer journey, a visual representation of the customer experience, to identify pain points and opportunities. Sales enablement systems include creating specific information and materials to address questions, concerns, and needs from each stage of the customer journey. These guides are called "sales playbooks" and they are built to support salespeople with talking points and fast links to content at each stage of the sale. You would then use sales pipelines, tools for tracking sales progress and identifying bottlenecks, to manage your sales activities. All of this needs to be supported with a good CRM, like HubSpot or Keap.

Navigating the maze of CRM options and technology software is no easy task. Thankfully, you’re not alone in this — we can help! We are a technology agnostic company that partners with many technology providers that provide the tools necessary to achieve business growth. If you feel stuck and need a consult, we are happy to help you find, implement, or improve your sales and marketing systems and processes.

Book a free consult now!

Why Is Sales Enablement so Important in Today’s B2B Landscape?

The complexity of the B2B sales cycle, involving multiple stakeholders and technical considerations, requires sales teams to have a deep understanding of their customers' industry. This means you have to equip your salespeople with the training and resources to understand their customers' industries in depth. This means not just knowing what they do, but what their specific needs and challenges are.

B2B buyers are already doing their own research. They don’t need a “pitch” — they need you to address their needs and pain points. Why is your product better than your competitors’? Or is your advantage your service experience, your knowledge of their industry, or your personalized approach, care and expertise?

In a competitive market, where multiple organizations are selling the same product or service, differentiation is essential. A good sales enablement process equips your sales teams to position their offerings and provide exceptional customer experiences.

Sales Enablement in Action

Here are a few examples to help you picture sales enablement in your own organization:

1. Content Marketing: The best way for your marketing team to support sales is by creating content that salespeople can use in real time, while talking with prospects. For example, a series of informative blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and other sales collaterals that address common pain points for the target audience can also be turned into quick links to send to prospects. The salesperson can say, “Oh, I see you’re concerned about security in cloud-based systems! Here’s a link to an article that addresses that!”
2. Sales Playbooks: Playbooks help sales people follow best practices and reinforce their sales training in real time. It’s like having a sales coach at their elbow to provide resources, quick answers, and encouragement. A sales playbook can help sales people ask the right questions at each stage of the sale, handle objections, negotiate contracts, and remember to ask every required question when closing deals. When sales people know what to do at any given time, your sales organization becomes consistent, mistakes are not made, and customers find you more trustworthy.
3. CRM Training: The sales team needs to receive training on how to use the company's CRM system to track leads, manage opportunities, and analyze sales performance. The technology is there to help sales, not create work for them. We call this “technology as a teammate.”
4. Dynamic Content: With the right type of CRM, your sales team can dynamically generate content based on the prospect's behavior, interests, and preferences. And we’re not talking about simply putting your customer’s first name in the greeting. That’s no longer sufficient. Imagine instead triggering a personalized email to your prospects immediately after they’re visited a specific page on your website or opened the quote you sent them.
5. Social Media Platforms: Training salespeople on how to leverage social media platforms like LinkedIn can help them build relationships by engaging with their contacts, establish thought leadership through blog posts, and generate leads thanks to industry-specific groups and forums.

Sales enablement is essential for empowering your sales team and driving business success. By providing the right tools, training, and support, you can help your sales reps achieve their goals and contribute to the overall growth of your organization.