Sales enablement: Definition, strategy, and content planning

Are sales pitches falling flat, causing your team to miss their quotas? Do new hires struggle to understand the full extent and benefits of your product? Does it seem like the clients you acquire aren’t the right fit and are constantly nickel and diming you? If so, it might be time to develop a sales enablement strategy.

Committing to a sales enablement strategy can help your team:

• Prepare to answer any question a prospective customer asks

• Understand your company’s ideal customer

• Learn how to identify qualified leads

• Set expectations with potential customers

• Close deals in record time

• Meet revenue targets

Sales reps today need resources to keep consumers moving down the funnel. They also need well-defined implementation strategies to help them make the best use of available resources (like marketing collateral and lead magnets) so they don’t miss out on valuable opportunities.

This is where sales enablement comes in. When you have a sales enablement strategy in place, you can empower your team to close more deals and boost your company’s bottom line.

In this guide, we’ll define sales enablement, explain how you can create an impactful strategy, and explore some of the most effective sales materials.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of giving salespeople (and other customer-facing teams) the resources they need to convert more leads. These resources can include content, tools, or any general information that helps your team sell products or services more effectively.

A well-planned sales enablement strategy can teach your sales team how to nurture leads and guide buyers through the sales funnel with more speed and consistency.

Purpose: When does sales enablement come into play?

Today’s consumers want to experience a seamless buyer journey, get top-of-the-line support, and receive a personalized pitch from their sales rep.

A sales enablement strategy makes this happen by detailing processes for every stage of the funnel, identifying specific tasks for each team member, and creating useful assets that reduce the time to profit.

By examining consumer insights, providing relevant content, and equipping reps with the tools and knowledge to act quickly, companies using sales enablement can develop the best approach to selling to their ideal buyer.

What is the core strategy behind sales enablement?

The goal of sales enablement is to align the efforts of your sales, marketing, and product development teams. This ensures that messaging across the funnel is cohesive and consistent, leading to more favorable outcomes.

You can create a more effective sales enablement strategy and develop content that yields better results by:

• Selecting someone to carry out the implementation plan

• Encouraging collaboration between the sales and marketing teams

• Sticking to a single subject on each piece of content

• Targeting a specific audience

• Telling a story that keeps readers engaged

• Using accessible language

• Emphasizing benefits rather than specs or features

• Incorporating a clear and compelling CTA (call to action)

Why is sales enablement important?

A strong sales enablement strategy is essential for any sales-driven organization because it outfits your team with everything they need to be successful and hit revenue targets. It also ensures your sales staff stays aligned with company goals and adequately educates buyers.

Sales enablement is important because it helps:

• Reps focus on selling rather than scrambling for basic information

• Keep marketers attuned to content performance

• Marketers understand what assets the sales team needs to do their jobs

• Track sales and marketing performance metrics

• With data-driven decision making

• Organize assets in an easily accessible way

Who is responsible for sales enablement?

At its core, sales enablement is a collaborative effort between a company’s sales and marketing departments. The product development team may also be involved.

Sales enablement team

Dedicated sales enablement teams generally:

• Handle hiring, onboarding, and coaching

• Hold ongoing training sessions covering effective selling techniques

• Conduct research

• Implement new sales tools, methods, and technology

• Develop buyer personas

• Create or improve sales pitches

What is a sales enablement manager?

A sales enablement manager is the point person who helps coordinate the sales and marketing teams. The person assigned to this role is responsible for:

• Training sales reps

• Connecting the sales and marketing departments

• Documenting processes and best practices

• Providing tools, resources, and marketing collateral

Sales enablement managers are generally skilled at project management and communication, and they have a deep knowledge of the sales cycle and methodologies.

Marketing team

The marketing team is generally responsible for:

• Creating and refreshing content

• Developing, managing, and tracking the performance of the content that sales reps use

• Writing sales collateral and training materials

Sales operations team

Meanwhile, the sales operations team takes care of:

• Territory planning and development

• Contract and proposal management

• CRM and sales management

Sales operations vs. sales enablement

The sales enablement team creates a plan for operations to put into action. They also help by developing sales materials, coaching sales reps and helping them onboard new clients, improving accessibility and payoff across platforms, and increasing productivity.

The sales operations team uses those tools, plans, and resources to meet its acquisition goals. It involves a lot of strategizing, data analysis, recruitment, training, sales forecasting, sales process optimization, and territory design.

Important components of a sales enablement strategy

Your sales enablement strategy should be a well-defined approach covering how you plan to produce the necessary assets to help your team convert more leads to sales.

Once you have a solid plan in place, you can create an official charter. A sales enablement charter will define the purpose of your company and products, outline sales goals, describe the enablement team’s objectives and who they will support, and detail specific ways to achieve them. When you build out your charter, you should consider your:

• Audience

• Mission

• Company’s capabilities

• Onboarding program

• Continued education

• Sales goals

• Metric analysis

Sales enablement best practices

It can be tricky to get sales enablement just right, but once you nail down the processes, content, and training, you’ll be off to the races. As you get started, here are some best practices to keep in mind.

• Choose someone to drive strategy, planning, and execution.

• Always tailor your sales process to the buyer’s unique journey.

• Use data to determine what is and isn’t working.

• Create content for prospects at different stages of the sales funnel.

• Make sure the sales and marketing teams work together.

• Regularly optimize your sales enablement content.

• Investigate the activities of high-performing team members and make them the standard.

• Never stop training your team or taking advantage of coachable moments.

When you’re ready to develop sales enablement content, be sure to:

• Write clearly and concisely.

• Organize the content in a way that makes it easy for readers to find the answers to their questions.

• Deliver relevant materials to the right people at the right time.

• Create assets for different mediums (e.g., email, web, and social) to ensure important information is accessible.

• Craft messaging that reflects your company’s values.

Types of sales enablement content

Content can come in the form of blogs, ebooks, demos, case studies, product spec sheets, and more. Sales enablement content is any material that helps prepare the sales team to pitch products or services to potential customers. Salespeople rely on various forms of content and marketing assets to inform prospective buyers, drum up interest, answer product-related questions, and close deals.

Supplying leads with insightful and informational content, such as case studies or industry reports, can move them a step closer to making a purchase—there’s no shortage of competitors trying to do the same thing, though. Your content needs to cut through the noise by keeping your ideal customers engaged and anticipating their questions.

To do so, map your sales enablement content to each customer stage:

Using detailed insights about your customer base and their phases of the buyer’s journey, your marketing team can craft content that corresponds to the correct stage. Your sales team can continue to engage and nurture leads with personalized content delivered on their preferred channels.

The stages are:

• Awareness: Help consumers identify their issues and start providing information about solutions. Use PR, social media, your blog, and other accessible channels to share educational content without pressuring the reader to make a purchase.
• Interest: Now that the buyer understands their problem, they’re interested in getting information about products and companies that can help. You can provide the necessary details through white papers, ebooks, webinars, and checklists.
• Evaluation: This is the phase where potential buyers are willing to communicate with salespeople and want proof that a company’s products or services will solve their problem. Prove that you’re the best choice by presenting them with case studies, competitor comparisons, and pricing tables.
• Decision and negotiation: The buyer has finally pared down their options and is prepared to make a purchase. At this point, they’re compiling a list of vendors and asking questions about the products or services. Your team can use assets like playbooks and proposals to entice potential customers to buy.
• Sale: Once the team closes a deal, they can lean on onboarding materials to get new customers up and running. From there, user guides, webinars, and live training sessions can teach buyers the value of your product or service.
• Renewal: If a customer has a positive experience with your company and its solutions, it will be much easier to persuade them to buy again. Keep them in the loop with newsletters and emails, and you can pull out your sales playbook again when it’s time for them to renew.

How to develop a sales enablement strategy that works for you in 9 steps

As many as 32 percent of sales leaders say customers want reps to understand their business and the problems they face. Sales enablement provides sales reps with valuable context about their buyers, which allows them to personalize their touchpoints so customers feel they’re being heard.

The good news is that you can plan, implement, and refine a sales enablement strategy for your business in just nine steps. To create a robust strategy, you just need to start with a solid foundation so you don’t miss any important steps.

Seal the deal with sales enablement software

CRM software and other sales apps help customer-facing teams build strong relationships with buyers. By streamlining daily sales operations, automating administrative tasks, and analyzing customer data, these solutions give agents more time to focus on delivering personalized experiences.

Zendesk Sell is a must-have tool that you can use to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks and obtain actionable data. It offers useful features and resources that can help every member of your sales team close more deals. Be sure to implement insights from this platform as you take on cold calling, emailing, prospecting, lead-tracking projects, and more.