Boost the 4 Pillars of Your Sales Enablement Program

Having a strong sales enablement program allows you to be confident when you send your salespeople off to a meeting with a buyer. But how can you know if your program is effective?

Sales enablement programs and strategies look different for every organization. Your program should be tailored to fit your organization’s needs and your capabilities. Just because something Company A does worked for them does not mean it will work for Company B. If there is no “right” answer on what to do to give your own program a boost, what can you do?

Over the last 17-plus years in this arena, Mereo experts have helped many organizations create sales enablement programs that drive sustainable revenue performance. From this experience, we have identified four must-have pillars in any sales enablement program. Each pillar acts as support for your program. If one weakens or is absent, your program will suffer. Keep reading to learn what your program needs to succeed.

Align with the Buyer Journey

An important part of a successful sales enablement program is understanding your ideal client profile’s unique buyer journey. The buyer journey is everchanging with market conditions and technology advancements, so it is important to keep yourself up-to-date.

In today’s environment, your salespeople will only get 5% of the buyer’s time . Most buyers now spend half their time researching possible solutions online. Ask yourself these questions to determine where you can improve your sales process to best engage and serve your buyers along their journey:

• Are our sales processes strategic?
• Are our sales processes aligned?
• How can we engage the buyer earlier in the buyer journey?
• How are we training our people about the buyer?
• What results have we experienced? What do we expect into the future?
• What can we adjust to Seek to Serve? our buyer on their journey?

Equip Your Teams with the Proper Assets

Salespeople can waste a lot of their time creating their own sales assets — and end up missing the mark on value messaging and other key parts of your solution strategy. Worse yet, an estimated 90% of sales-ready assets go unused by sales (American Marketing Association).

Drive consistency with your value messaging and differentiation by instead encouraging your salespeople and marketing department to better collaborate. When these two teams work together, marketing creates more-relevant and better tools salespeople will actually use along the buyer journey . Here are a few examples of assets to arm your sales force:

• Prospecting Asset Examples: prospecting insights / entry points, prospecting conversation templates, ideal client profile
• Discovery Asset Examples: business / financial / personal pains of buyers, discovery questions, value drivers / business case
• Proposition Asset Examples: sales plays, solution differentiation, client value stories, proposal templates / demo scripts
• Negotiation Asset Examples: value proposition / business case, objection reframes, client references

Train Your Team to Win

Similar to a sales enablement program, your sales training program will not look the same as your neighbor’s and should be tailored to your needs, goals and your salespeople. Here are a few aspects your sales training program should cover:

Information about the buyer. In this part of the training, you should cover aspects such as the ideal client profile, uses cases and buyer pains (the business, financial and personal pains your buyers want to fix, accomplish and / or avoid).

• Information about the product. Your salespeople should know what they are selling — not just product features but the benefits and how they serve your buyers too. They should fully understand the value proposition and differentiation aspects.
• Sales skills. Ideally these are skills your salespeople already possess, but if not or if they need a refresher, this is a great opportunity to do so. This portion should cover aspects such as prospecting, discovery, proposal, objection handling, negotiation and account expansion.
• Sales tools. Do not just give your salespeople the right tools — teach them how to best use the prospecting campaigns, discovery questions, conversation templates and more. Use exercises and role-plays to help the salespeople internalize them and practice employing them.
• Sales operations. These are the backbone of your sales data and how your salespeople can easily keep up with who they are talking to and what they need to talk to them about. These operations include sales process activities, CRM and contracting / commercials.

It is always good practice to keep up with training to provide refreshers for your team, accountability follow-ups and continual leadership support. After all, professional athletes do not train once and call it good, do they? Neither can top-performing sales professionals. Remember to incorporate a mix of instruction, role-play exercises and activation strategies in your training sessions for best results.

Click here to learn more about how proper sales training benefited a B2B organization.

Align Your Teams and Their Efforts

Often, I see fragmentation contributing to issues organizations face. Unfortunately, your internal teams may not communicate. In order for your sales enablement program to thrive, you need to create it using collaboration and commitment from your teams’ leaders. Your teams align with a common purpose. Let us discuss three ways you can align your organization :

• Organizational alignment starts at the executive level. Who has a say in the foundations that govern the whole operation? How do they represent the different segments of your organization, and how do they contribute? How often? And how does this allow for buy-in on a united approach across operational disciplines, geographies and departments that cascades down to teams?
• Foundations the executive board sets must be shared and embraced across your organization. How can you drive common processes and procedures? In what ways has your organization developed consistent tools and made these accessible to the important functions? To what degree does everyone in your organization understand and agree on the target audience, the value proposition, the ins and outs of your solution and brand?
• This alignment should permeate through a unified culture that informs everyone on how to behave. While competition can be healthy and necessary within organizations, what unifies everyone — from sales to marketing to product to even human resources and other supporting departments? What are your shared goals and values? How are these expressed through a shared language, events, leadership consistency and accountability?

Evaluate Your Sales Enablement Program

An optimized sales enablement program can boost your salespeople’s performance from about half to more than 84% meeting their quotas. Download the full 30+ question checklist and begin optimizing your program.