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Sales enablement

How to Get Started With Sales Enablement

Posted on by Jacob Høgholm

The sales enablement platform market is expected to keep growing in 2023, as more and more people across the globe turn to this solution in the hope of increasing their sales. When implemented well, a sales enablement strategy will improve both your customers’ and your sellers’ experience, and ultimately increase your revenue. Sounds appealing, right? But with so much information on the topic, and so many tools available on the market, it is normal to wonder: how to get started with Sales Enablement? No need to worry – this blog post is here to guide your first steps.

Sales Enablement is the people, processes,
technology and data that enable your sales
organization to sell at a higher velocity and more effectively.

Who is the Sales Enablement Team?

Before even starting to think about a Sales Enablement strategy, one questions springs to mind: who is responsible for Sales Enablement? Should it be Marketing? Sales? Both? Neither??

Sales Enablement is about aligning Marketing and Sales. Research shows that businesses with Marketing and Sales alignment experience 36% higher customer retention and more business growth. It is all about communication and collaboration: working together to achieve common goals.

Sales enablement has reached such a maturity level, that some organisations have started to establish sales enablement departments. However, many companies are still in the early stages, which is why many people want to know: who owns sales enablement?

The answer to this question will depend on your organisation’s unique structure, size, number of sales reps, resources, overall strategy, and goals. Where it is not possible to have a dedicated team for sales enablement, the best solution would be to divide tasks between Marketing and Sales, so each team can contribute with their area of expertise.

“When it comes to sales enablement, the best organizational rule is that marketing is a better creator and sales is a better enforcer.”
Gartner
Infographic that shows the advantages and disadvantages of sales enablement being owned by marketing, sales or sales enablement as a standalone team

Ultimately, regardless of who owns sales enablement, it is important to ensure good communication and collaboration not just between Sales and Marketing, but across all of your organization’s departments, to make sure the sales enablement plan is enforced.

How Do You Build a Sales Enablement Strategy?

The first step for getting started with sales enablement is outlining a clear sales enablement strategy. This may seem like a daunting task but don’t worry, we are here to guide you step by step and to show you that it is definitely worth the effort.

  • Step 1: define clear, measurable goals
  • Step 2: assess and organize your content
  • Step 3: create your sales enablement playbook
  • Step 4: standardize training and onboarding
  • Step 5: build your tech stack
  • Step 6: measure your results

You might be surprised to find out that there are a few actions you can easily take to set your organization onto the sales enablement path, even before considering investing in any new technology or other resources.

Start from Content:

  • Assess the quality of your existing content
  • Establish if new content is needed and, if so, who should be in charge of content creation
  • Organize content in a way that makes sense for both Sales and Marketing, so everyone can easily find what they need

After this assessment, start doing some research on what sales enablement tools can assist you in content creation and management, and decide if it is worth investing in them.

Read more on how to build a sales enablement strategy

What Are Sales Enablement Assets?

There are several types of content pieces that can constitute an organization’s sales enablement assets. These can be grouped into three main clusters: internally used content, assets to share with buyers, informative content.

Content for internal use

These are assets used by the sellers within the company to perform their daily tasks. They have the purpose to guide sellers and/or facilitate their work, and can include:

  • E-mail templates
  • Buyer personas
  • Training material
  • Sales playbook

Content to share with buyers

These are the materials that help sellers showcase value in a sales meeting. Their purpose is to pitch your offer and move leads down the sales funnel and towards the closing stage of the deal. They can include:

  • Interactive presentations
  • ROI calculators
  • Case studies
  • Testimonials
  • Quotes

Informative content

These are pieces of content that are aimed at a low-intent audience, i.e., top-of-funnel consumers who are still in the information-searching stage. The purpose of this type of content is to create brand awareness, increase your organization’s credibility, and build a reputation as industry experts. They are also great for driving traffic to your website and improve your SEO ranking. They can include:

  • Educational blog posts
  • Reports
  • Guides and e-books
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Explainer videos
How to create quality content that drives revenue

How Do You Build a Sales Enablement Tech Stack?

Now that you are successfully getting started with sales enablement, it is time to build your tech stack.

When choosing your sales enablement tech stack, you need to know which areas are most important for you, so that you know what to prioritize. In general, sales enablement tools should:

  • Allow you to follow the entire sales process from the prospect stage to the closing stage
  • Connect sales and marketing with the content they need
  • Track analytics and content usage
  • Speed up and simplify training and onboarding
The advantages of Sales Enablement Technologies
Final Thoughts

In this article, we have tried to answer some of the questions that might arise when getting started with sales enablement, and to break what may seem like a daunting process into small, actionable steps.

In summary, here’s what you should do to get started with sales enablement:

  1. Establish who should own sales enablement. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, and it comes down to what makes sense for the way your organization is structured. Decide who should be in charge of what, but always make sure there is good alignment and clear communication across all departments.
  2. Set clear, achievable, and measurable goals
  3. Assess the resources you already have, and identify areas of improvement
  4. Decide if you need to invest in sales enablement tools
  5. Do your research to find the tools that are most suited to your goals
Want to know more? Read our Ultimate Guide to Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement explained

What is Sales Enablement?

Enable your sales organisation to sell at a higher velocity and more effectively!

  • Read time: 12 min
What is Sales Enablement
Why is Sales Enablement important
Who owns Sales Enablement
How is Sales Enablement Practiced
Final Thoughts

Implementing a sales enablement content strategy has proven to increase the win rate
by 27.1 percent.

Miller Heiman Group
Turn Key

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the people, processes, technology and data that enables your sales organisation to sell at a higher velocity and more effectively. It is about increasing sales and productivity with the same people, same company, same products and services, but with a different approach.

Sales enablement is a strategic collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results.

What you get with
Sales Enablement

  • It allows customer and managers to add value in every customer interaction.
  • A sales enablement tool will go hand-in-hand with your CRM system.
  • An ideal tool will automatically input your data from before, during and after your sales meetings into your CRM system.
  • You will be able to save time by not having to manually enter data into your CRM system.
  • This ensures high quality data and makes your sales organisation more intelligent and more professional.
  • The best tools will enable your sales force to improve the sales dialogue and engage the buyer throughout the decision making process.
  • It will align sales and marketing, boost overall sales intelligence, and increase productivity.

93% of sales reps believe they could work
more effectively in their sales

In a world where time is money, you do not want to do tasks that can be done automatically.
We asked over 400 sales reps how they spend their time in sale.

This could mean less time on preparing your sales meetings.

You could be more present in the meeting and your notes would automatically be added to your CRM system.

Saving time means you can work more effectively and increase your conversion rate.

Why is Sales Enablement important?

Sales enablement helps your sales force to have a more effective sales process and increase your win-rate.

A proper sales enablement strategy will automate CRM related tasks. It will provide your sales reps with continuous coaching and the content needed to engage the buyer and giving them more time to actually sell.

Enabling your sales force is about focusing on selling and minimizing administrative tasks. This is because a great sales enablement tool provides sales reps with everything needed to engage the buyer in the buying process.

Best practice

Best practices and optimized sales content will provide a great foundation for new sales reps to succeed.

Hands-off

This is a great, hands-off way for your sales leaders to let new sales reps hit the ground running.

Buyer engagement

It gives vital seller insights that can be used to coach sales reps on a daily basis based on sales analytics.

Simple Learning

Ensure that the new sales rep that they’re immediately getting trained on-the-go simply by learning how to use the software.

Faster onboarding

Having a sales enablement content strategy can help onboard new sales reps faster as well as making less productive sales reps more effective.

Buyer insights

Buyer insights that will show you what to focus on going forward in the process.

Sales enablement is important because salespeople only spend 32 percent of their time actually selling.

Miller Heiman Group

Sales Automation in
Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is important because automation makes managing your meetings before, during and after a smooth process. Automatically feeding the sales meeting interactions into your CRM system, lets your sales reps focus on selling.

By having all sales-related materials in one place your sales reps will be able to view and keep track of all material that can be used. This is a great system for sales reps who tend to stick to “tried and tested” methods like hard copy brochures. In this way, they can pick, choose, insert and retract everything that is available to them during their sales process. Your whole sales process will this way become much smoother and more ingrained.

Content Management Section 2

Who owns Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement has reached a maturity level that some organisations have started to establish sales enablement departments. However, many companies are still in the early stages, which is why many people want to know; who owns sales enablement?

In this context we have already established that sales enablement is about aligning marketing and sales but the answer to this question will depend on your organisations unique structure, size, number of sales reps, resources, overall strategy and goals.
It is important to note that sales enablement content play a big part here. Content is a big investment with many different departments contributing. Having a formal sales enablement strategy with clear accountability and truly understanding the overall investment will set you up for success.

Only 28.1 percent of companies know how much they invest in content.

Miller Heiman Group

If Marketing owns Sales Enablement

  • Commitment from marketing in the sales content creation with a focus on the buyer’s needs and wants.
  • Gain insight into the performance of the sales content in order to continuously improve it.
  • Alignment between sales and marketing with emphasis on brand control and effective sales content.
  • You might not have full knowledge of what content your sales force needs and what works in the everyday sales process.
  • You risk that it becomes a time consuming task for marketing that might result in beautiful content, but lack the precision to close sales.

If Sales Enablement is a standalone department

  • If you have the resources, your sales enablement leaders owns sales enablement.
  • Better overview of the most cost-effective content strategy.
  • Given its cross-functionality department it does not have the bias that your sales and marketing will have.
  • It will ensure sales and marketing alignment with the best of both worlds.
  • Your sales enablement leader will be responsible and accountable for implementing and managing all sales enablement tools.
  • You might not have full knowledge of what content your sales force needs and what works in the everyday sales process.
  • You risk that it becomes a time consuming task for marketing that might result in beautiful content, but lack the precision to close sales.

If Sales owns Sales Enablement

  • Sales force and sales leaders would be responsible and accountable for their own productivity and optimisation.
  • Your sales force have the best knowledge within your company of what your customers want and need.
  • Alignment between sales and marketing with emphasis on brand control and effective sales content.
  • You risk content anarchy that can result in varying messages communicated to clients with very little brand control.
  • You might not have full knowledge of that content your sales force needs and what works in the everyday sales process.
  • You risk that it becomes a time consuming task for marketing that might result in beautiful content, but lack the precision to close sales.

How is Sales Enablement practiced?

1- You need clarity

An overall strategy of what you want to achieve, which platform and tools do you want to work with so it is an integrated part of the whole.

You need a willingness and acceptance within the company to align sales and marketing. You have to establish how are you going to work together; sales, marketing, customer success, product management. How are you going to have governance? Are you going to build a sales enablement department?

2- You need to know what results you want to achieve

How do you support and enable your sales force and other customer facing employees on the buyer journey, so you create value in the entire journey? How do you ensure that training, coaching, content and tools are connected so customer facing employees can perform and deliver.

Only 31.8 percent of organisations has a sales enablement content strategy.

Miller Heiman Group

Sales Enablement
Content

A Sales Enablement Content Strategy should define your purpose of having content. Likewise it should define the goals your content should help achieve and how your content should be designed, created and managed.

Blog Quotes Illustration

Your content will vary depending on what type of product and service you sell. Your content can include presentations, case studies, competitor comparisons, one-pagers, product sheets, impact calculators, roi calculators, proposal templates, contracts, white papers, sales scripts, email templates, and much more.

A Sales Enablement Content Strategy should define your purpose of having content. Likewise it should define the goals your content should help achieve and how your content should be designed, created and managed.

It is important that sales and marketing are aligned in this process. Having a formal approach is the way to go!

You are 5 times more likely to have a content strategy by having a formal approach as opposed to an informal approach.

Only 28.1 percent of companies know how much they invest in content.

Customer-facing content that needs the greatest
improvement (Miller Heiman Group):

Presentations

ROI justification assets

Case studies

Collateral

Internal content that needs the greatest
improvement (Miller Heiman Group):

Value messaging guidelines

Competitive comparisons

Objection handling guides

Playbooks

Buyer insights and
improving your content

Once you have a sales enablement content strategy in place, it is important to get insights into the effectiveness of your content. You can do this by surveying your sales reps and sales managers, but be aware of their bias.

You can find all-in-one platform for insight as well as integrate several softwares to collect this data. You will have to use trial and error and track what works.

If you already use a sales enablement tool you should be able to:

Gather useful sales analytics

Track usage that gives you insight into what is being used by your sales reps

Qualify leads faster

Qualify leads faster based on their engagement with you sales content.

Know what your client wants

A Sales enablement software will make it very clear what part of the content the client was most interested in.

Anticipate your next moves

This provides your sales reps with a direct line of what to focus on when they make the next contact.

Get a report of interactions

Your will be able to see a summarized report of how clients are interacting with your content.

Know what to change

This provides you with immediate insight into what specifically needs to be changed around.

Coaching and training

Make sure that the insights enables you to also collect valuable information about your sales reps interactions. This insight will allow you to connect it to your sales reps performance and develop best practices. By using the best practices you are turning sales into a science that can be thought to the least productive sales reps.

It is not easy to develop a content strategy, but the benefits are very significant.

" You are 5 times more likely to have a content
strategy by having a formal approach as opposed
to an informal approach. "

Create a Sales Enablement Content Strategy

Final Thoughts

To sum up, only 31.8 percent of companies has implemented a sales enablement content strategy. The organisations that have implemented a SE content strategy has increased sales by 27.1 percent. For an enterprise company with a revenue of USD 1 billion this would result in an increase in revenue of USD 271 millions. This is all done with the same people, same company, same products, by implementing a sales enablement content strategy. This leaves the question; why has the remaining 68.2 percent of companies not implemented a sales enablement content strategy?

Want to learn more?

If you want to learn more about how sales enablement can transform your sales, then join our sales enablement webinars.

Join our Webinars
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