What is sales enablement? How is it different from marketing automation and lead generation?
When is it time to start evaluating sales enablement solutions? What decision matrix should you use to choose the right tool? How long is the implementation? How long will it take to start seeing results?
These are questions we will explore in this and subsequent posts.

 

Sales Enablement 101

Sales Enablement consists of tools that accelerate the sales cycle, creating efficiencies in either training sales teams, equipping them to succeed, or assessing areas for improvement. Sometimes sales recruitment in the sales enablement category; for our purposes, we will stick to the post-hire sales empowerment process.

Data Dwell Sales Enablement for Salesforce, falls under the “equipping” function of sales enablement. 

Training

Training and coaching is the first set of tools any sales team must bring to bear. An effective sales team needs training assets and collateral for smooth onboarding; exercises for honing the sales pitch; and coaching mechanisms for refining the professional. “Sales Readiness” is another way of describing this solution. When evaluating a solution, teams should consider whether they want an external platform, or a solution that is direct in their CRM.

List of features you should expect in Sales Enablement training solutions:

• Training content portals
• Consumption metrics
• Progress and Opportunity tools
• Coaching and Mastery
• Executive reporting

Equipping

What are the tools that a sales rep needs to do the job? Generally this includes a CRM to manage the pipeline, online portals for marketing to deliver sales collateral, technologies that track and report prospect activity, and executive reporting tools.

Data Dwell Sales Enablement for Salesforce falls under the “equipping” function of sales enablement.

Unlike any other sales equipping tool, Data Dwell Sales Enablement is a native experience in Salesforce, rather than a separate platform. Teams can match winning content direct in opportunity/lead stages, track prospect engagement, and gain executive reporting– direct in Salesforce.

Instead of creating an unwieldy, heavy software platform, Data Dwell Sales Enablement is seamless by design, exists natively in Salesforce, created to be the most lightweight sales enablement engine in the category. Implementation is clean and simple, with out-of-the-box executive reporting and hyper-intuitive platform that any SF admin, marketer or sales rep can easily use to accelerate the sales process. No more separate apps, and no data analysts required.

List of features you should expect in the “equipping sales” category of Sales Enablement:

• Sales content management – a repository to store and push sales content live, this is essential to eliminating “black market” sales content.
• Sales productivity tools – technologies that keep sales reps focused and on-point
• Tracking – mechanisms to track prospects and/or content, preferably both.
• Analytics – analytics on content and sales activity, available both to sales and marketing
• Reporting – executive reports on sales funnel activity.
• Sales and Marketing alignment – this is often where SE software falls short; platforms that are opaque to marketing can cause extra processes and even require a new role in a company just to manage the communication/reporting between the SE platform and marketing.

Features specific to Data Dwell Sales Enablement:

• Content tracking at the Lead and Opportunity level
• Hidden stakeholder tracking and reporting
• Out-of-the box executive reports
• ROI on content – determine in real-time which content is working and at which stages of the sales cycle.

 

Assessment

The processes and technologies used to determine the effectiveness of a sales rep, identify and define opportunities for growth, and facilitate mastery, all fall into Assessment. Teams should look beyond cut and dry methods of measuring reps’ success factors, and today’s software tools are helping organizations with the nuance of taking a sales rep from good to great.

Some of the features you can expect to see in Assesment solutions include:

• Performance Appraisals
• Continuing Education
• Sales Tool Assessment Metrics

 

Sales Enablement Effectiveness

We will explore the evaluation and implementation process further in subsequent posts, yet there are some preliminary evaluation metrics and KPIs to consider going into a sales enablement solution.

• Is your sales team high-tech or low-tech?
• Are they asking for productivity tools or is this being driven by executive reporting needs? Are you providing value to sales reps or simply becoming another process in their day?

Be sure to include key stakeholders in the decision, including executives with reporting requirements, sales operations and marketing leaders. Choosing solutions that sales find valuable and “sticky” is key to long-term engagement; while marketing needs tools that deliver ROI metrics on their content programs.