B2B Sales Enablement: Best Practices
Time and experience have taught businesses some significant lessons, most notably the lucrative integration of sales and marketing teams that eliminates siloed technologies. The B2B sales enablement approach refers to enhancing customer involvement and loyalty.
THE PAST AND THE PRESENT OF B2B SALE
Historically, there have been instances where the marketing and sales departments within businesses function independently, the causes ranging from feelings of complexity and channel conflicts to name a few.
However, in the year 2017, a new term called “Smarketing” was coined to describe the alignment and integration of both the crucial departments of sales and marketing as a consequence of people realizing their nurturing importance, called the business to business sales enablement strategy.
Unfortunately, however, the sales and marketing teams still work separately in most businesses and have been unable to apply the disciplined approach, causing it to remain a concept.
This lack of cooperation and the existence of siloed approach between departments causes a lacuna in the customer journey and in multiple ways disrupts the customer experience and loyalty.
THE 5 TACTICS OF B2B SALES
Pearl Lemon has identified certain pitfalls and of the above and presented to you the 5 Best Practices for B2B Sales Enablement aimed at achieving skyrocketing sales, revenue, and building through refining and securing valuable customer relationships.
1. Educate and Coach
Photo Credit: coachtechsoccer.com
Sales reps need to be coached in selling as well as marketing skills for a well-rounded understanding of the product and industry to thrive in a sales environment.
Moreover, reinforcing sales training is going to ensure sales enablement since research shows that 87% of new skills are rendered ineffective or lost within the first month.
2. Complement Sales with Marketing Content
Pool the effortsof your marketing team to facilitate a sales-enabling environment. All the relevant content that maps the customer journey produced by your marketing team can be strategically employed to support the selling process.
It’s important to shape and support every step of the selling cycle by pooling the resources of the marketing team and using it as an advantage- videos and blogs can be created for product promotion.
Photo Credit: business.linkedin.com
Subsequently, provide constructive criticisms and advice to your team. Communication is key, therefore, providing opinions and suggestions would bring efficiency to the process of building materials such as videos, blogs, that are likely to facilitate selling.
3. Develop Executional Strategies
Photo Credit: strategyskills.com
After every department discovers and identifies their roles in the process of enabling or even increasing sales, they become more involved and vested in sales initiatives.
4. Get the Right People On Board
Appointing a skilled and experienced candidate who welcomes and appreciates the ambit of sales enablement to lead the sales department alone could have dramatic effects. As a sales professional with expertise in marketing, sales, and related disciples this person could assist in the alignment of sales and marketing departments to improve the customer journey.
Photo Credit: jobmonkey.com
While building these sales enablement teams differ across the size of businesses, the kind of people you bring together dictates the benefits that are to be enjoyed; such as increased revenue.
In large businesses, sales experts recommend launching when the sales team reaches 50 reps. The smaller ones, however, don’t necessarily require a sales enablement organization but someone to take responsibility and ownership so that the business can profit off sales enablement benefits and grow.
5. Seek Technological Aid
The internet has made it relatively easier for you to find software that is compatible and aligns with your sales enablement strategies. Use this to your advantage and be on the lookout for enablement tools that can drive your sales. For example, suppose you operate in the European market. In that case, you can use Dealfront, a go-to-market platform that helps sales and marketing teams identify their ideal customers quickly and efficiently. Sales automation can have dramatic effects and boost your sales through forecasting, goal-setting, training, and many more.
Moreover, it is recommended that you adopt software that is used by the marketing team since they usually have the best of breed solutions that support sales enablement strategies.
Some of the standard software are editing and SEO tools for content, project management software to streamline projects, time tracking software to manage time, and an expense report software to manage business expenses incurred in these projects.
Photo Credit: eutd.eu
More importantly. These apps or software should be easy to use and understand so that your team can regularly use them and understand the benefits of the same.
Businesses that dedicate appropriate resources towards structured and methodized sales enablement programs are the ones that are truly releasing the improvements in their revenue growth.
RECOMMENDED SALES ENABLEMENT SOFTWARES
Pearl Lemon Sales has shortlisted some of the best sales enablement software for you to skyrocket your sales!
Seismic
Seismic is the recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement, equipping global sales teams. Powerful content intelligence and analytics enable marketers to prove and improve their impact on the bottom line, revealing what is really driving revenue and what needs to be adjusted.
Highspot
Highspot’s intuitive platform combines intelligent content management, training, contextual guidance, customer engagement, and actionable analytics. Go-to-market teams use Highspot to deliver a unified buying experience that increases revenue, customer satisfaction, and retention.
Mindtickle
Mindtickle leverages the most comprehensive data-driven Sales Readiness platform on the market so that you gain the ability to develop, coach, and improve the performance of your sales reps independent of their location. Reduce sales ramp by 60%, double competitive win-rates & increase deal sizes w/MindTickle.
CloudApp
Guru
Guru is a a real-time knowledge management solution that knows when, how, and where to deliver knowledge to you without you having to look for it. With Guru, you don’t just manage your knowledge; you create a network out of your company’s collective intelligence. Guru does this by unifying your joint knowledge and suggesting relevant information to you – all in real-time and in every application you work in.
DocSend
DocSend helps business professionals share and control the content that drives the business forward. DocSend ‘s powerful link-based system makes it easy to set security preferences for each stakeholder, receive notifications each time someone views your file, analyze content performance, and create lightweight virtual deal rooms.
Mediafly
Mediafly’s technology combines interactive sales presentation tools, AI-powered content automation, seamless CRM integration, in-depth content usage analytics, and support for virtually any content type to ensure the solution is flexible and scalable enough to meet current business needs and grow along your unique sales transformation journey.
Klue
Klue is an AI-powered Competitive Intelligence platform designed to help product marketers and CI teams collect, curate, and deliver actionable competitor insights to empower Sales to win more business. Klue enables enterprise sales teams to win more business by providing dynamic insights about competitors.
The platform uniquely brings together external competitive intel and internal knowledge from your team in the field. Then, it makes it easy for Sales to access the information wherever they are. Built by product marketers to give organizations the advantage in every competitive environment.
Covideo
Covideo allows you to record, send, and track personalized videos that improve response rates, increase sales opportunities, and close more deals. Video communication conveys empathy, helps differentiate from the competition, and increases message comprehension.
Paperflite
Paperflite is the leading marketing collateral and sales enablement software that allows sales and marketing teams to organize, distribute, and share their content. Paperflite tracks the content across its entire journey, get a deeper insight into what works best when and how the prospects engage with the content on multiple channels, so it can instantly engage with hot leads and nurture cold ones.
With Paperflite’s real-time engagement analytics, know-how end-users interact with the content when your content is accessed, viewed, or shared, so you always know exactly what to do next.
THE FUTURE
In recent times, your customers and clients take the journey with you, whilst expecting relevancy, premium services, and alignment with their needs. This in many ways translates to the sales teams predicting and managing client expectations which can be very daunting.
However, the development of a sales enablement team can take a considerable extent of this pressure off, while subsequently generating revenue that reaches or even exceeds your sales enablement efforts, increasing customer loyalty ensures positive long-term benefits.
More importantly, to avoid any future uncertainty in your business, book a call with the Pearl Lemon Sales team today for personalized advice from industry experts to guide you about building effective sales enablement strategies, tailored according to your needs!
