One team stands out for its ability to unify the entire organization behind sales to improve revenue and performance: sales enablement.
This guide explores what sales enablement is, its goals, and how it works. We also share a four-step strategy for starting a sales enablement program and how to measure success, so you can build or refine your organization’s enablement program.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a strategy for equipping salespeople with the insights, information, training, and tools they need to engage effectively with buyers and drive more revenue.
A relatively new practice within sales, sales enablement transcends traditional revenue siloes, drawing resources from marketing, sales, product, and the company as a whole. It’s generally operated by an individual or team under the revenue operations umbrella, though it might be treated as part of sales, marketing, or human resources, depending on the company.
The sales enablement team is involved in sales strategy, training, deal support, and other strategic decisions. Their efforts help sellers develop their skills, hit their numbers, and manage their pipeline.
Sales enablement vs. sales operations
Sales enablement and sales operations are often confused. After all, they both support the sales team. So what’s the difference between these two roles?
Sales enablement helps revenue teams engage successfully with customers while orchestrating a prospect-centric mindset across the entire organization. Enablement provides sellers with the tools, resources, systems, and training needed to improve their skills and performance.
Sales operations focuses on activities that a sales team needs to perform effectively on a day-to-day basis, including growth forecasts, sales incentives, compensation plans, and revenue strategies.
Operations tends to focus on the technical and analytical motions that drive revenue. Enablement focuses on equipping sellers to accelerate the buyer journey.
Learn why Clari is the preferred sales enablement tool for driving predictable revenue.
What sales enablement is not
People don’t always agree on what sales enablement is, which can lead to misconceptions. Sales enablement isn’t:
- A templated solution that works for every business
- A magic solution for revenue problems
- A training program
- IT for sales
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for sales enablement—the objectives and functions will evolve as the company grows and matures.
Sales enablement is an iterative process. First, it identifies problems that could be hindering the sales team’s ability to achieve goals. Then, it designs solutions for testing. The aim is to drive continuous incremental change.
Another myth about enablement is that it’s all about training. Enablement does uplevel sellers’ skills, but its focus is to create a smooth, consistent customer experience that makes selling easier.
Finally, enablement isn’t a sales technology team. It reviews, researches, and recommends improvements to the sales stack, but it isn’t IT for sales.
Sales enablement goals
Enablement has three primary objectives:
- Decrease time to revenue
- Increase sales productivity
- Create long-term customers
Every sales enablement activity or focus furthers one of these objectives. It does so by targeting specific areas for improvement and developing processes, programs, and platforms that boost results.
Here are five areas that sales enablement improves.
Align sellers’ motions to the buyer journey. A common mistake in sales is to create a sales process without considering the ideal customer. Sellers struggle to keep prospects engaged when the sales process isn’t aligned with the buyer’s journey.
One of the first enablement priorities is to define the buyer journey and ensure sellers are supporting the prospect throughout that journey. This creates a unified experience that builds trust, making it easier to move prospects through the pipeline quickly.
Influence increased revenue. Sales isn’t the only department that impacts revenue. Every customer-facing role can solidify long-term customer relationships. Enablement strives to create a consistent experience that engages prospects across the entire customer journey, from first touch to closed-won.
Improve sellers’ performance. Enablement develops a culture of learning, where sellers can identify weaknesses, improve core competencies, and advance sales skills. Through training, development, and resources, enablement removes obstacles and helps sellers hit or exceed their numbers.
Build brand loyalty among customers. Enablement aims to create a unified message and voice in every customer interaction. It also focuses on improving the handoffs from marketing to sales and from sales to customer success. This reduces dissonance and ensures customers are satisfied long-term.
Build scalable, repeatable practices. Enablement constantly tests new ways to drive incremental improvements and shorten time to revenue. When a new approach proves successful, enablement systematizes it to ensure it’s scalable and repeatable.
Sales enablement roles
Sales enablement may be run by one person or a team, depending on the organization’s size and needs. These five roles must be covered, no matter how many people you have on your team:
Sales enablement leader - Orchestrates enablement cross-functionally, sets priorities, and directs the program. The title may be vice president, senior director, or director.
Program manager - Identifies sellers’ skills gaps, captures and disseminates best practices, and communicates with sales leaders to ensure the program is fulfilling the sales team’s needs.
Trainer - An expert in building and facilitating training programs. This role oversees program production, creates learning materials, and leads training sessions.
Instructional designer - Designs and updates sales curriculum for onboarding, skill development, and reinforcement. Implements a variety of learning modalities, including visual, auditory, text, simulations, role playing, and gamification.
Coordinator - Supports the rest of the team by taking care of logistics, analysis, and analytics, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
In many organizations, all of these roles are performed by one or two sales enablement practitioners. But as a company grows, the program needs to grow with it. The team can support a larger sales team and run bigger, more complex programs by hiring specialists who can take on each of these roles.
Skills needed to succeed in sales enablement
Sales enablement professionals require a broad range of skills.
Sales. The best sales enablement practitioners know sales: the challenges, the skills required to succeed, and strategies for improving results. They’ve been a salesperson or have worked closely with a sales team. They’re able to diagnose problems and create and implement scalable systems and programs.
Strategy. Sales enablement practitioners must be able to develop and test strategies for achieving short-term and long-term outcomes. They must be experts in sales methodologies, metrics, team structure, and revenue generation.
Listening. Enablement is largely responsible for change management. Practitioners must work with sales leadership and other stakeholders to identify the issues related to revenue generation and sales performance. They then set goals and create systems, platforms, and resources to achieve those goals.
That all starts with listening. The enablement practitioner needs to be able to ask the right questions and listen carefully to identify root issues that are hindering peak performance.
Emotional intelligence. Enablement works cross-functionally with marketing, product marketing, product management, sales operations, human resources, and customer success to remove silos and work collaboratively. The goal: to remove friction and keep everyone focused on the customer.
Training and development. Enablement is responsible for onboarding and training new sellers while reinforcing skills of experienced sellers. They need to understand learning modalities, training development, and teaching.
Sales enablement strategy
Success depends on a strategy that aligns the sales team and optimizes outcomes. Here’s a basic blueprint for developing your sales enablement strategy.
Step 1: Establish purpose
Enablement exists to drive business growth. But implementation begins with a plan. New enablement programs need to build a business case and charter to guide their efforts. Established programs need to continually update the charter to reflect their current priorities.
Build a business case
A business case explains why sales enablement is needed. It clarifies the roles and responsibilities of sales enablement — what it will and won’t do. And it provides a statement of work: goals, deliverables, key performance indicators, and success metrics.
The business case establishes the program’s value and secures leadership’s buy-in. Once the program has been approved, the next step is to create the charter.
Craft the charter
A sales enablement charter is a living document describing the program’s strategy and execution plan. In this document, the manager sets goals for the program and milestones for achieving them. This ensures enablement is a strategic, scalable discipline that makes a measurable impact on revenue.
The charter should include these key pieces of information:
- Mission statement
- Key responsibilities
- Stakeholders
- Key deliverables
- Outcomes and metrics
- Budget
- Leading and lagging indicators
Step 2: Refocus on the customer
Enablement aims to shift the organization’s focus to the customer rather than product features and benefits. To do this, it refines and routinely updates the ideal customer profile and buyer journey.
This ensures everyone understands how to talk to prospects, what they’re looking for, and the information they need to become loyal customers.
Create the ideal customer profile (ICP)
To create a seamless customer experience, it may be necessary to reset the ideal customer profile. Most sales teams know who their ICP is, but they may not have current details. Enablement reviews and refreshes the ICP twice a year.
Map the customer journey and touchpoints
The modern buyer is smart and informed. They don’t want to adapt to your ideal sales process. They want to move at their pace, getting the information and support they need, when and how they need it.
Enablement achieves this by aligning the sales process to the customer journey, creating unified messaging, engagement, and processes for every customer-facing role in the organization. The goal is to ensure a smooth customer experience, no matter who they’re talking to or why.
When the organization focuses on customer experience and needs, prospects may not need to talk to a salesperson until they’re near the bottom of the funnel. The website will provide the information and answers they need in the early stages of exploring options.
When they do talk to a salesperson, they’re closer to the bottom of the funnel. They’ll likely have specific questions. They may want a salesperson to help them navigate the marketplace and choose the best product for their needs.
Enablement teaches sellers to partner with prospects wherever they are in the customer journey. In this way, they’re able to build trust and shorten the selling cycle.
Step 3: Develop programs
Every sales enablement program is unique, but most develop these five programs to support the sales team.
Talent acquisition
Retaining sales talent was difficult before the pandemic. It’s even harder now. The average salesperson tenure is 1.8 years, according to the 2021 Sales Development Report by Bridge Group.
With high turnover rates, sales teams are always recruiting. Enablement helps by developing an ideal seller profile, including experience levels and skills assessment.
Onboarding
Once hired, engagement onboards new sellers to help them achieve competency as quickly as possible. This process orients sellers to the company culture and benefits, and makes them feel that they can have a long, successful tenure at your organization.
Onboarding isn’t a one-size-fits-all program, however. A good onboarding program provides different levels of training to match the salesperson’s experience level.
This helps experienced sellers become productive quickly, while giving new sellers the core training they need to ramp.
Training and reinforcement
Even established sellers need training. Enablement provides challenges and training that develop sellers’ core competencies, build better habits, and improve their performance.
Sales leadership coaching
Enablement also supports front-line managers and sales leadership to ensure they can hit their goals and drive more revenue.
- For frontline managers: how to coach more effectively
- For sales leadership: how to improve forecasting and strategy
- For human resources: how to attract and retain top talent
Step 4: Optimize technology
Enablement is responsible for equipping sellers to work more effectively. To fulfill that mission, they design a tech stack that allows sellers to focus on selling, not manual tasks that could be automated.
Here are some of the top sales tools, organized by category.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The CRM contains customer data and organizes the customer experience. It helps sellers manage and track leads, engage prospects, and successfully hand off new customers to customer success.
Because the CRM stores prospect data, contact information, and behavior, it can help sellers improve engagement and shorten the sales process.
Sales enablement
Sales enablement platforms help enablement practitioners do their job. These tools provide functionality for content management, training portals, performance insights, and reporting.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement tools streamline seller activities and help them create meaningful conversations with prospects. By integrating multiple tools and features into one platform, they reduce distractions and make sales representatives more productive.
Coaching/management
Coaching technology helps managers hold productive one-on-one sessions. It gives them insight into seller performance and allows for customized coaching and accountability.
Sales intelligence
Sales intelligence tools track sales performance, the market, and revenue generation. The insights they provide help with strategy development, sales methodology, competitive research, and troubleshooting issues that affect revenue.
Content management
These tools generate content hubs that sales representatives can use to engage prospects. They ensure the sales team has timely, relevant recommendations and insights.
Revenue operations and intelligence
To optimize revenue operations and outcomes, sales need real-time data. These tools gather and consolidate analytics from across the organization, giving revenue leaders the insights needed to make smart, strategic decisions.
Sales enablement metrics
Performance metrics help enablement practitioners justify their business case and gain continued support for their programs.
You need to track two sets of metrics. The first tracks the effectiveness of your programs:
- Communications deployed
- eLearning statistics
- Percentage of completed enablement requests
- Content usage statistics
But these don’t reveal how effective your program is at achieving the goals defined in your charter. For that, you need to track core sales metrics that show the ROI of the enablement program.
Win rate:
Win rate reflects the percentage of leads that become a closed-won deal. This metric needs to be tracked on a regular basis: monthly, quarterly, and annually.
You can track win rates for each sales stage or the entire pipeline. For example, tracking Discovery Call to Closed-Won gives you insight into the effectiveness of your sales process. Tracking wins at each sales stage tells you where sales are stalling, making it easier to discover weaknesses in lead generation, marketing, or seller behavior.
To calculate win rates, divide the number of closed deals by the number of leads, opportunities, or meetings.
Time-to-close
This measures the sales cycle length: How long does it take for an opportunity to close? Why?
Understanding the time it takes to close a deal helps you know how and where to tweak the sales cycle. You may choose to adjust exit criteria for different stages. You may need to train sellers on better pipeline management.
Keep in mind, time-to-close can be impacted by the deal’s complexity. Smaller deals generally close faster than large deals.
Average deal size
How much revenue, on average, do your deals provide? This metric helps you understand where your profits reside and how you could refine your offer, pricing, and ideal customer profile.
Enablement can impact this metric by training sellers to manage larger deals and become more comfortable offering add-ons and upsells.
New pipeline created
The more opportunities sellers have, the more deals they’ll close. So you need to track the number of opportunities entering the pipeline, the quality of those opportunities, and how they’re distributed among the sales team.
This metric uncovers new ways enablement can help sellers. Perhaps sellers need help managing multiple opportunities. They may need time management training or reminders to disqualify prospects early.
Number of closed deals
This is the number of signed contracts or payments made. It needs to be tracked at both the seller and team levels to understand how effective the sales process is.
Evaluate:
- Who the top performers are and what they’re doing differently
- Where deals are stalling out and why
- Training opportunities that could help sellers close more deals
Summary
Sales enablement unites your organization to support sales and drive revenue. It systematizes the sales process, developing one source of truth that puts everyone on the same page.
Sales enablement is a relatively new role within sales, but it’s already proven its value. In 2019, 61.3% of organizations had a sales enablement program, and those leveraging sales enablement reported above-average win rates.
Modern sales is as much a science as it is an art, but it takes coordinated effort to stay abreast of today’s best practices. Sales enablement formalizes sales, its methodology, and outcomes.
And bottom-line, it yields higher profits. With ROI like that, why not formalize sales enablement? Learn more about how Clari enables teams to reach peak performance and growth.