Matthew is Founder and CEO of The DVI Group, a strategic communications agency that reimagines business video for brands around the world.
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Sales enablement tools, programs and teams are invaluable for today’s B2B organization. They help sales teams drive growth and foster better client relationships — all essential for a company to meet its goals.
But some business leaders may still see sales enablement as a luxurious “extra” — necessary, yes, but secondary to bigger departments and flashier campaigns. I’m here to change that narrative. Sales enablement has the potential to positively affect many of your company’s departments. The right sales enablement tools can put power in your hands, generate revenue and even foster teamwork among very different members of your workforce. Let’s see how.
Power Up
Some of the most effective sales enablement tools come in the form of content deployment. This is the area I’m most familiar with due to my agency’s own content-focused sales enablement tool — and after all, studies show that sales reps waste an average of 440 hours each year trying to find the right content for their needs. What’s the solution?
Deploy. When choosing a sales enablement tool, favor software that facilitates quick messaging and sharing between your reps and their clients. Built-in content sharing is invaluable for reps, helping them send information to an audience anytime — whether during meetings, within follow-ups or inside instructor-driven courses. Sales teams won’t lose a lead as easily with the ability to access marketing, brochures, contracts and training in a digital environment anytime and anywhere.
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Digest. Look for features that make content searches and content organization easy. Enable your reps to create everything from collections to courses. They can access different learning modules — from microlearning to just-in-time training content — and can even deploy campaign-specific initiatives while filtering through materials. These targeted features allow them to focus more on the relationships that matter.
Dissect. Lastly, search for a tool that includes analytics. When your sales reps have the ability to analyze who opens their content, when they open it and how they engage with it, they can become your eyes and ears in the larger market. And analytics help you and other system administrators gain visibility into your workforce, determining which reps are using which pieces of content. Analytic features ultimately help you determine what content you should continue making and what, if any, you should be putting aside, leading to a stronger workflow overall.
These features give your people the power to do their work in the best ways. Content-focused tools even enable you to facilitate quicker onboarding — you can onboard reps quicker and see them become productive sooner.
Generate Revenue
This leads to even greater success for the entire company. The numbers don’t lie: When sales enablement is adopted, 84% of sales reps achieve their quotas and companies achieve up to 20% increased revenue. Reps simply achieve a higher percentage of sales, faster and more often. I contend it’s because they suddenly gain the power to do their job as they need to.
With the training, agility and — perhaps more importantly — the content that they need, sales teams can increase sales and accelerate the relationship-building process. They’re able to build on the tried, tested and analyzed content we talked about above, establishing themselves as experts for their potential clients. This supercharged pipeline often leads to more clients, more faith in your brand and higher revenue all the while.
Encourage Teamwork
One unexpected perk of sales enablement is the mutual understanding it fosters between your sales team, marketing team, creative team and technology team. Reform in your sales pipeline will trickle down to other important parts of your company. Because as sales reps explore content and use it to its fullest potential, they’ll be able to report back to marketing and creative with what works out in the field. And given concrete examples of how potential clients engage with content, other teams can feel empowered to make the wisest decisions.
Successful sales enablement means your content producers, marketers, technology departments and even executives all have intimate knowledge of what your sales reps do (and how best to help them). That means more team members who understand each other and work better together.
Top of Mind
At the core of every great sales enablement strategy is a leader, or team, who asked themselves how to empower their sales team. They thought through all the pain points and decided to eliminate every obstacle to selling better and faster.
So, as we move into 2022 and think through all the ways to improve work, think about content-centric tools for sales enablement. Your sales team and clients will thank you for it.
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Author: Matthew Lopes, Forbes Councils Member
