Sales enablement. This buzzworthy term rolls off the tongue and sounds great on a conference call. It’s also a powerful concept that helps sales reps increase performance. Unfortunately, many companies nowadays are endlessly touting its benefits without actually understanding the keys to creating an effective enablement strategy. Dumping a bunch of relevant information on your sales team isn’t enough to help them convert. If you want them to close those hard-earned leads, you’ll need to pay more than just lip service to this trending topic and implement the following strategies ASAP.
Eliminate the Communication Gap
When creating a sales enablement strategy, it’s easy to get caught up making snazzy presentations and writing poetic product descriptions, but sales enablement is all about one thing: communication. When marketing probes for potential customers, they don’t just end up with a list of names, phone numbers, and e-mails. They gather valuable information on what it is customers really care about. When consumers click a link or answer a phone call, they tell you a ton about what they’ll actually respond to. If after every effective campaign, your rock star marketing department is too busy high-fiving each other to share what’s working with your sales team, you’re leaving a treasure trove of intel on the table. When a customer communicates their interest to your marketing team, that information should flow immediately over to sales where it can be used to let potential customers know you understand what it is that they value.
Optimize Your Sales Portal
A child asks his mother for a red bike for Christmas. The mother hears the word “bike” and ignores the specific color, chalking it up to just a passing detail. Two years later, the blue bike she bought sits in the garage, unused.
It’s pointless to pour your efforts into creating wonderful sales tools if your team sees them as a blue bike. Nice, but not something they love using. Ask yourself: When your team looks at your sales portal, do they see a set of tools they’re excited to utilize? Ideally, you want to stock it full of fun toys and useful gadgets that make the job easier and feel right to the people using them. A great handyman is always excited to find scenarios that allow him to use every carefully chosen tool in his belt. Create sales tactics that make your salespeople feel similarly, and you’ll be sure to see positive results.
Train and Develop
Of course, all this information and content can only help if your team is being educated, challenged, and encouraged every step of the way. Training shouldn’t end three weeks into the job. As they engage with your customers, salespeople should have continual support and be fed updates on everything from product updates to customers’ profiles and industry trends. If you want them to shine, your reps should be as well-informed on the workings of your company as you are. At OSR, we spend one hour per week on Friday afternoons doing fun training exercises to keep our salespeople ahead of the game. If they can recall minute details about products and services to extoll their virtues at the drop of a hat, your future customers will undoubtedly be impressed. And as a result, they are more likely to trust your sales team and listen when they speak.
Get Some Expertise
If you’re looking to assist your marketing and sales teams in implementing real initiatives that generate leads and convert sales, contact Osprey Strategic Research (OSR) right now. The truth is people can find your company a million ways, but calling prospects on the phone and starting a dialogue still leads the way in creating a real connection. An industry leader like OSR can fine-tune processes like sales enablement to make your company stand out in a crowd, generate leads, and attract more customers. Get in touch today and let us show you how.