What is Sales Enablement? And How Can it Increase Sales Results?

What is Sales Enablement? According to Hubspot: “Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.”

And how can Sales Enablement increase your sales results? Marcel Roovers explains what you need. Marcel Roovers is the Chairman of the Board at 4P square.

‘Sales Management Rhythm’

A sales team thrives best when all the components of the sales process follow regular standards. These need to be communicated clearly to the sales & marketing team.

Sales people need to-the-point and updated sales tools. These tools need to allow for real-time results-tracking. Sales dashboards can for example incentivise instantaneous feedback.

Sales individuals also need to feel a need to check in. For example you can structure the work around ‘review moments’.

These regular (weekly) sales meetings should generate control, guidance and motivation in line with the company targets and sales strategy.

For the sales manager, it is a moment of sales coaching, receiving market feedback, detecting concerns/issues and agreeing on sales actions that need to be taken.

Key Performance Indicators

It is mission critical that sales individuals know what is expected of them and when it is expected. Effective sales management requires to provide ongoing communication through which targets and expectations are being defined, repeated, updated and checked.

This way, the sales & marketing team, as well as general management, know how to manage their time in the most effective way and how to prioritise in order to be successful.

There is always a group and an individual target dimension. Both targets need to be communicated to the teams.

Opportunity Funnel Management

Funnel or pipeline management is the main item in the sales agenda that needs to be maintained and reviewed regularly (probably weekly) with each team member (and in group).

How to win deals is being discussed and concrete actions are being defined in order to make deal-closing possible asap.

Sales Process & Methodology

A sales team should work according to a standardised process & sales methodology which defines how to approach, qualify and close the sales opportunities.

Effective sales management will provide all the necessary, easy-to-use tools available to track performance; preferably in real-time (=web-based sales dashboard).

Real-time tracking allows sales people and their managers to discuss and improve performance at all times.

What is useful to measure in the sales funnel?

• Number of open opportunities and their expected closing date.
• Total volume of open opportunities – rolling months = Funnel weight.
• Number of opportunities in the pipeline – rolling months.
• Size of each opportunity.
• Lost & won opportunities.
• Length of the sales cycle per closed deal and average closing time.
• Volume of opportunities per sales stage. In order to detect where opportunities get stuck in the pipeline.
• Conversion rate or success rate: how many opportunities are lost for each win?

Sales enablement: ingredients to sales success are:

CONTENT

• The organisation needs to provide engaging, customer-centric sales content.
• To-the-point story telling is a must.
• Uniform content.
• Easy-to-get-to.

Know that:  30h/month are spent by sales people looking for content! Whilst 70% of the content is not used!

TRAINING

• Develop and use one sales methodology – one language.
• Motivate & train sales people in a personalised way: each individual has a need for different skill improvements.
• Sales system/tool training for sales individuals is a must.
  

On average, a sales person spends only 39% of his/her time in actual sales activities!

SALES TOOLS

When choosing a tool think:

• Mobile.
• Easy-to-use.
• Standardized.
• Dashboard & management stats integrated for all levels.

Tip: Create an internal “Sales Guide” that describes how your organisation expects that sales is being conducted. And make sure to choose and create these tools in alignment with the marketing team!

The key for success:

The key for success with sales enablement is the senior management. Their buy-in and pro-active participation in this process is critical. It helps translate the company strategy in concrete objectives and results.

The leadership team needs to speak the same language, and use the same tools. Moreover, it should ‘walk-the-talk’. Only this way, the business can grow from a rather ineffective sales organisation to a highly-effective, successful sales apparatus.