What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of strategically leveraging the right people, process, tools and technology to support your sales team in their goal of driving more revenue for your organization.

You’re probably thinking, “Well yeah isn’t that the point of business?”

You’re not wrong, but the truth of the matter is that most business leaders just assume this is what everyone is doing and unfortunately assumption is not effective at making sure something is actually happening. Which is why sales folks report that about 1/3 of their time is actually spent selling.

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How To Formalize Sales Enablement So It Actually Gets Done

Hopefully that stat about how little your sales team is spending on the sale has motivated you to move past the assumption phase and into action and here’s your step-by-step on how to do that.

Step 1: Assess Your Current Efforts

Maya Angelou said it best, “If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.”

Here are the keys things to examine when assessing your current sales enablement state:

1. People, Process, Technology: Describe the current processes, technology, rules and SLAs within your marketing, sales and client experience teams. 
2. Metrics: Describe the current sales, marketing and client experience metrics you are achieving on average. This includes: 
   1. Traffic 
   2. Leads 
   3. Customers 
   4. Time to Close 
   5. Sales/Marketing touch points 
   6. Testimonials, client survey results, etc. 
3. Offering: Describe the current product/service being offered, its positioning in the market and differentiation/value drivers. 
4. Marketing Efforts: Describe your current marketing efforts used to attract and delight potential clients during the buyer’s journey. This includes: 
   1. Content strategy 
   2. Social media strategy 
   3. Email marketing strategy 
   4. Advertising strategy 
   5. Event attendance 
5. Buyer’s Journey: Describe the current buyer’s journey and how the buyer interacts with your team (marketing, sales, customer experience) at each of the following stages:
   1. Awareness 
   2. Consideration 
   3. Decision 
   4. Post-Decision

When you are assessing these things keep the following in mind:

• In steps 1-2, do the things I have in place currently reduce friction for my teams and allow them to be as efficient as possible with their time?
• In steps 3-5, do ALL of our efforts support our ideal buyer throughout his/her experience with our organization?

If you can answer a confident YES to both of those questions then feel free to pat yourself on the back and move on to the next thing because you are leading a sales enabled organization!

If not, do not feel even the slightest ounce bad and keep on reading. It is important to note that sales enablement, just like your larger business strategy, is constantly evolving and to effectively manage your efforts you should run 1-2 in-depth assessments and 2-3 lighter assessments annually depending on how dynamic your industry is.

Step 2: Identify Opportunities To Decrease Friction And Increase Force

Remember those things I said you should keep in mind? Well that’s because you are going to write those down here. To make sure your list is extensive, you may also want to perform a SWOT analysis on your business as it relates to your ideal buyer. Typically, your strengths and weaknesses will relate to friction and opportunities and threats will relate to force.

In this context, friction is anything that works against progress in your marketing, sales and customer experience efforts. Some examples of sales enablement friction include:

• Manual data entry/reporting
• Lack of email templates
• Lack of automated nurturing or referral campaigns
• Increased time spent on tasks outside of your wheelhouse

Force, on the other hand, is the support you have to maximize your efforts. This could mean:

• Supportive content targeted to your buyer in the form of case studies or blog posts
• Easy to navigate content library to find what you need quickly
• Real-time social proof and testimonials to leverage
• Training on tools and techniques to increase your efficiency
• Playbooks on common sales objections

Step 3: Decide What Should Be The Focus Now And Later

Chances are you will end step 2 with a lengthy list and fervent zeal to get it done now!

Stop. Take a breathe. Repeat these words until they sink in “You Do NOT Have To Do ALL The Things”

Sales enablement is the long haul. It is not a get it done and move on strategy. It also depends on a lot of people working together so diving into it without a strategy will only lead to failure and disappointment.

Instead, create a list of your low-hanging fruit, the quick changes you can implement with little support or budget, and then a list of the larger plays that will require you to mobilize and empower multiple teams to execute.

Once you have your lists, treat each item like it’s own project and come up with realistic short and long-term plans to tackle them. Then, take each day at a time as you start changing your organization’s mindset to be more sales-focused.

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