I started my sales career immediately after graduating from college in 1995. At the time, most companies had extensive onboarding training for new sales representatives that included basic sales skills and product knowledge. Some industries are notorious for hiring entry-level sales and training them in the general profession. For example, companies that sell transactional low-investment items or industries that have a high attrition rate for their sales team.
My first sales job was in an industry with high attrition—selling copiers and fax machines. Fun fact: To provide perspective on the technological advances at the time, MFD—multi-functional devices—were just becoming available. These are now the standard printers we all have in our home offices.
My onboarding experience was focused on learning the introductory basics of sales from building rapport to handling objections to understanding buying signals to closing techniques. We also learned product knowledge. The material was taught in a traditional classroom with one instructor, out of a binder with quizzes after each section and a final assessment and role play in front of the class at the end.
Fast forward to my first sales trainer role in 2007 and the approach wasn’t much different. When I joined a sales training team in 2012, digital training resources and virtual training were finally gaining some good traction.
Now, in 2024, I have a strong partnership with an enablement company and value their platform. I’ve implemented their software in my past two organizations, due to their functionality but also their collaboration and excellent customer service. The evolution of my sales enablement experience was a slow burn but now it’s truly invaluable.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is often referred to as sales-readiness. Enablement is providing the right content to the sales team when they need it to boost productivity, provide replicable success and ensure the sales team has the right skills to engage buyers and drive revenue. It includes the tools, processes, resources and people that prepare the sales organization. A large component of sales enablement is training. Ensuring the sales team has the knowledge they need is critical. But that isn’t enough. They also need the components that supplement the training for maximum effectiveness.
The goal is to create a reliable strategy that can be implemented internally. The strategy can vary based on the industry or customer specifics but having a set approach with identified resources (emails, marketing documents, etc.) at specific intervals (stages of the sales process) that have been proven to work—is key. By shortening the sales cycle, increasing win rates and securing higher growth margin sales, sales enablement must be a strategic part of the organization.
Salespeople (including yours truly) can be impulsive and spontaneous. But creating a formula for success—a structured process—is ideal for replicable results. The buying process can be unpredictable. So, when an organization designs a selling process (based on previous success rates) that is executed consistently, that is the best predictor of future success.
Recent research by Seismic indicates that there are an average of seventeen interactions during the buying cycle and there are eleven stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase. Sales enablement not only helps internal sales and marketing teams, but it also provides go-to-market teams with information and data to make improvements for future growth potential.
History of sales enablement
The first use of the phrase “sales enablement” was in 1999 by John Aiello and Drew Larson, who sought a new strategic approach related to sales operations. Their main goal was to solve common problems related to inconsistent sales processes with materials that weren’t resonating with the buyer, and ineffective tools. Sales enablement slowly evolved but finally gained significant traction in the 2010s, when technology companies provided platforms to make sales enablement easier.
Onboarding training has been a strong component of sales enablement for many decades. Helping new salespeople learn their organization, sales process, tools and product knowledge is common. Adding the additional sales enablement described in this article has been a more recent improvement.
The recent pandemic added new urgency to identifying optimal sales enablement best practices. Historically, selling was an in-person activity, long assumed that face-to-face interactions were required to build relationships with buyers. However, when employees (buyers and sellers) needed to work from home unexpectedly, the selling process was changed forever. Working remotely has changed new employee onboarding, sales coaching, sales meetings, presentations and negotiations.
Sales enablement has evolved as buyers become more informed and buying processes become more matrixed. The sales team must adapt to provide customized interactions with the buyers. An example of a response to the buying process is the “DSR”—the digital sales room—a term used by Gartner in 2020. These are customized online portals for customers to get access to the materials they need.
But, even more importantly, the clicks are tracked so an organization knows what a buyer is interacting with. Having one internal online portal also allows organizations to have multiple contributors, like marketing, sales, sales leadership and learning and development. A DSR allows the organization to keep content relevant and updated and keeps the buyer engaged.
Options range from basic to advanced
The most basic sales enablement approach includes an onboarding program—even a one-day “welcome to your new role/company” can help a new hire become a part of the organization. Companies may use a basic shared folder to make resources available to the sales organization. Keep in mind that a one-hour corporate onboarding should be expanded to address sales-specific needs. This could include a company organization chart, basic sales role responsibilities, tool access and an introduction to the team.
Another approach is to optimize the corporate software programs. Providing resources for sales to use, such as scripts, templates, playbooks, battle cards, presentations, case studies and checklists, can be enough to build a comprehensive sales enablement strategy. According to FitSmallBusiness, “47 percent of sales representatives leave their job because of a poor training or onboarding experience.”Providing the most basic information, coupled with a corporate orientation, can be a good basic onboarding approach.
Some companies also use a learning management system and a customer relationship management tool as their full technology stack related to sales enablement. This can be expanded on with other tools but can be an effective approach on its own.
As an organization considers a more comprehensive approach, a sales enablement strategy may include extensive system training, mentoring programs, role play/simulations, feedback loops, executive and sales leadership involvement and resource-sharing. Cohort training is a great way for sales teams to have an embedded relationship as they grow in the organization. Enablement programs are also evolving related to measurement, tracking and KPI attainment.
Effective sales enablement
The most effective sales enablement strategies are consistent but also flexible. Consistency is related to the company messaging, communication materials and messaging. However, flexibility is related to the capability level of the salesperson and based on the customer relationship.
L&D and specifically coaching are impactful when they are integrated into a comprehensive sales enablement platform, preferably a cloud platform. One that will give reps a one-stop-shop for learning, coaching, practice and skills development. Further integrating with a digital meetings component will give them everything they need to skillfully prepare, present and follow up with relevant content sourced from a robust and constantly updated content management system. An AI-powered enablement platform where L&D and coaching capabilities are connected to buyer engagement and content management capabilities is ideal.
Optimized sales enablement strategies include several additional options, including CRM expansion, constructive feedback loops with various stakeholders, performance analysis and content management. Understanding buyer roles and psychology is a helpful approach to designing sales strategies based on past behaviors.
As a training executive, I am concerned about this statistic: “Sales reps spend 11 hours weekly searching for training info.” Sales enablement is meant to reduce that time significantly.
What’s next?
“Adding AI tools in the sales process increases sales leads by 50 percent.”This could range from upskilling the sales team to embedding guidance in feedback and coaching conversations with sales leaders. With the right sales enablement platform, the most helpful product knowledge, industry news or marketing material can be customized and provided to each sales representative. AI can also learn which marketing campaigns are most likely to be successful based on close rates, for customer needs, industry, demographics, or the sales stage.
According to Ringover, “sales teams of business-to-business companies can use AI to handle repetitive tasks, such as recording customer data and logging sales team activities. That way, they can focus more on selling and improving your sales process. Businesses can save $89.07 billion a year if salespeople use AI to complete non-sales-related tasks, like data entry and admin work, which take up 70 percent of their time.”
Sales is a challenging job. Organizations will need to minimize the noise and simplify the sales process. That will be a competitive advantage as sales enablement evolves.
Sales enablement will:
- Continue to evolve at a rapid pace. The use of AI will become even more central to the success of a sales enablement approach—using AI to write training material, to create customer facing marketing resources, to help internal teams find the best possible answer to their just-in-time need and to provide the right content at the right level of access to external partners.
- Continue to build strategic partnerships across the organization, from marketing to product development to post-sales support, to maximize and align resources from people to tools.
- Focus even more extensively on the feedback and coaching loop, from integrating with call recording software to AI and machine learning analysis of uploaded practice pitches. This will require oversight by sales leadership but with less administrative burden and more quality interactions.
One thing is certain, organizations will continue to prioritize enabling their sales teams to generate revenue from current customers and prospects in the most efficient, cost-effective way. Sales enablement is the answer.
