Podcast Summary
Sales Enablement is an important piece of any company's sales technology stack and getting started can look like a daunting task.
Companies who have implemented a Sales Enablement strategy outperform their competitors by a remarkable margin (Aberdeen Group)
In this podcast, we'll review a series of steps to get you and your team started with your journey.
Key Topics of the Podcast
Who Owns It? Build Your Team - Put the right team and leaders in charge, your team is one of the most important driving factors for your Sales Enablement strategy
Set Clear Goals & Requirements - Taking the time to analyze your company tribulations will go a long way to helping you build a sales enablement strategy that's specifically tailored to your pain points.
Defining Key Metrics - Identify metrics that help measure the success of your project and activities
Content Management & Organization - You don't know what you don't know. Gathering your content together and arranging it into categories like brochures, graphics, fact sheets, videos, etc. will help you identify where your deficiencies lie
Implement a Sales Enablement Platform - Using your Goals and User Requirements, choose a platform that fits your needs + Train your teams
Resources and Links from the Podcast
Copy of the Presentation Slide Deck
Sales Enablement BluePrint
User Specification Requirement
Sales Enablement Checklist
Klyck.io Website
What is Sales Enablement
Paul Tkach's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paultkach/
Rebecca Spary's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaspary/
Dave Karr's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekarr/
Who Owns It? Build Your Team
Put the right leader in charge
Ensure you choose some to lead your SE efforts, someone who has visibility into both sales/marketing efforts and can work towards aligning your teams
Because sales enablement is more associated with the revenue-generating side of the business, we typically see the responsibility held there (Sales or Marketing leaders)
Identify receivers & supporters
The most likely receivers are the sales team (inside sales, outside sales, and distributors) and the most likely supporters are the marketing team
Define respective roles and responsibilities for your Sales Enablement team to ensure your efforts are aligned going forward
Set Clear Goals & Requirements
Assess your current state and understand the challenges that your teams/organization are facing
Taking the time to analyze your company tribulations will go a long way to helping you build a sales enablement strategy that's specifically tailored to your pain points.
Establish simple but clear goals & objectives that you are trying to achieve, these typically pair with the challenges you are facing (Centralize content for teams to access, collect analytics on content engagement to understand utilization...etc)
Collect input from stakeholders (Users/Teams) to help understand needs
Start by deciding upon two to three reasonable goals for your sales enablement project
These can include – but aren't limited to - better sales and marketing alignment, determining sales training needs, and insight into customer engagement
Create a blueprint with action items to make sure you are meeting your goals and outcomes. Sometimes when embarking on a new project, it's easy to get caught up in the smaller details while losing sight of the bigger picture. By creating a blueprint and referring back to it often, you can keep your focus on smaller achievable objectives that will guide you towards your ultimate goal
Setting goals will also help to keep your team engaged and motivated
Establish a User Requirements Guide
Defining Your Key Metrics
Identify metrics that help measure the success of your project and activities
Choose clear KPI's that help measure your goals/objectives
Some examples of typical sales enablement metrics are: number of sales team logins to the app, number of presentations created by sales, number of content shares by sales, number of opens and engagements by prospects, number of content views by prospects, etc.
If you have your sales enablement system connected to your CRM, you can easily start to track ROI and deal influence metrics as well. This can be done by correlating prospect engagements with closed deals and revenue dollars.
Once you get clear on the results you want to achieve in each area, you can drill down to determine the activity and effectiveness measures which drive these outcomes.
Remember, revenue results are important, but you can't manage them at the start of the project. However, you can manage the activity and effectiveness of your people in order to achieve those results. Starting small and measuring leading indicators is the best way to get started.
Content Management & Organization
You don't know what you don't know. Gathering your content together and arranging it into categories like brochures, graphics, fact sheets, videos, etc. will help you identify where your deficiencies lie
Aggregate and identify the sales and marketing content you want teams to use
Develop a strong understanding of how you want to organize your content for teams to access, one of the best ways to do this is to align your content with your buyers journey
Develop the categorization for your content including a set of filters or tags (Most SE tools will include this)
Implement a Sales Enablement Platform
Using your Goals and User Requirements, choose a platform that fits your needs
Ensure that the technology/platform you choose has an understanding of your goals and can help support them (Customer Success/Support)
Get the support of the end users - Being a dictator and demanding that your sales and marketing teams start using a new tool may have adverse effects
Encouraging these teams to come to the table with their thoughts and ideas will go a long way to helping them embrace the idea of changing their process.
A sales enablement tool is designed to help, not hinder
Make sure that you have someone in the organization who is capable of leading training for those teams. You'll want to create a thorough training strategy so that teams are not only trained on how to use the sales enablement tool, but also understand the process of sales enablement in the organization
