Companies are known to invest heavily in their sales strategies. However, what sets successful companies apart is their sales enablement.
Sales enablement has garnered wide popularity among businesses for improving sales team’s performance and increasing revenue. Instead of relying on gut feeling, and historical statistics, sales enablement empowers sales professionals to think out of the box and create innovative sales tactics.
According to research by CSO Insights, companies with effective sales enabling programs see a quota achievement of 67%, compared to only 42% for businesses that admit their enablement programs do not meet expectations.
Consumers are aware of their preferences and understand the value of a product. So presenting a product with conventional sales strategies not only wastes company resources but may also repel prospective customers.
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To achieve better sales numbers, companies need to focus on delivering valuable products to customers and create an urgency that leads to conversions.
What is Data-driven Sales Enablement?
Data-driven sales enablement is a sales strategy based on the collected data. Though it sounds relatively straightforward, sales enablement strategies are not easy in practice.
Data-driven sales offer a blend of the conventional practice of aligning business needs to training and creating new and innovative methods to make sales training as targeted as possible.
Solutions like seismic and highspot are recognised as leaders in sales and marketing enablement, equipping sales representatives with knowledge, messaging, and personalised content.
In a highly competitive IT industry where companies leverage the power of continually evolving strategies, it often becomes difficult for sales reps to maintain the pace with the rapid changes. Not only do they have to meet customer needs but also fulfil their quota.
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According to a report on CIO insights, 40% of companies show that disseminated information and restricted visibility into data impairs their sales organisation. What’s more concerning is that nearly 56% of sales reps feel dissatisfied with their ability to provide useful, data-driven insights.
Everyone wins when sales reps are equipped with the right set of tools and have the insightful data needed to boost their productivity, close more leads, and make better decisions.
Organisations with the best sales enablement strategies witness 84% of their sales reps reaching their quotas.
How to Make a Successful Sales Enablement Strategy
Data is fast becoming an indispensable asset in the sales vertical.
The more the data, the more insights can be extracted from it, which, in turn, can be used to improve the sales process, better inform sales reps, and help sales managers make efficient timelines.
Here’s how data-driven sales enablement strategy helps in improving the revenue of businesses:
The Power of Data
You might have heard about kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, or even terabytes. However, in the coming years, we will be calculating data in much higher quantities – the entire digital universe is predicted to reach 44zettabytes by 2020.
The World Economic Forum says that by 2025, nearly 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally (this is the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day).
Businesses all around the world are harnessing the power of data to attain an array of goals – right from business expansion to increasing global outreach to enhancing footprint in the consumer market. Companies are continuously gathering and analysing data to create an impact.
Does data drive sales enablement and boost revenue? Data is one of the key drivers behind the sales process of an organisation. It provides useful insights which can be used to create customer behavioural patterns that can help build an effective sales strategy.
Understanding your customers is as important as creating and delivering an excellent service to them. Great customer experience is one of the biggest aspects of a successful brand. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and many others use data to peek into customer behavioural insights and draw patterns that can help in creating efficient business strategies.
The same approach can be applied in sales enablement strategies. With insights about sales metrics, sales managers can invest more time in leading their sales team with potentially useful strategies than working plainly with the numbers.
Sales reps can get a better understanding of the entire sales process, which, in turn, helps them increase their efficiency.
With access to customised reports, sales teams can identify where their weaknesses and strengths lie. This enables everyone to carefully analyse and determine what strategies have worked best for them and what more could they improve.
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Boosting Revenue
Understanding the importance of data in sales enablement strategies is one thing, but using it to increase revenue is an entirely different ballpark. You must create specific training modules for your sales reps and ensure that everyone understands how data can be translated into useful information.
Here are four steps that describe how data can be used in sales enablement strategies to boost revenue:
1. Understand Your Learning Audience
Creating the best training module in the world won’t help you if you don’t understand your trainees.
Your first target should be your sales reps who will be responsible for carrying out your sales enablement strategy. Conduct regular surveys and interviews with your sales reps to understand their learning needs.
It is often found that despite their hectic schedules, sales reps are highly keen on learning about new and innovative strategies that could help them grow and perform better. By incorporating useful feedbacks in the training module for an efficient and easy-to-learn sales enablement strategy, you can ease the learning process.
2. Define Success at Every Level
Once you have created a targeted training course, the next step is to entail a globally standardised list of skills essential to sales executive success in the field. Make sure that you include all essential skills that span across different roles such as account planning, business modelling, financial resourcing, and prospecting territory planning, etc.
Identify the skills required specific to different job roles which will provide a more in-depth, role-specific insight. With the right balance of global and role-specific skills, you should be able to create a useful training program.
Assign a target proficiency level for each skill; this will determine how much a trainee needs to work on their skill set. The easiest way to evaluate the competency level is to create a scale from 0 to 4 with Basic marked at 1, Intermediate at 2, Advanced at 3 and Expert at 4.
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3. Measure the Progress of Your Learners
Create a survey for your sales reps that will help them analyse their skills and self-assess their proficiency level across the skills you have compiled in Step 2. To mark the participants precisely, and gain in-depth knowledge about how effective the training is, you can take a third-party perspective where each participating sales executive will be assessed across the same skills by their managers.
You can identify the differences (if any) between the manager or sales executive rating and the proficiency level described in Step 2. It will enable you to determine the gaps between all the skills required to carry out a successful sales enablement strategy for each sales executive.
4. Implementing Sales Enablement Strategy
Once learning gaps are determined and analysed, personalised, highly targeted learning courses can be created for every individual participant. By executing the tasks discovered in the training module, participating sales reps will be able to perform more efficiently and implement a good sales enablement strategy.
Data is For Everyone
A data-driven sales enablement strategy is the key to increase revenue for your business while improving your sales reps’ performances. To implement a successful sales enablement strategy, make sure you collect data, analyse it, coach your team to handle and process the information while using it to increase lead generation and conversion. Powerful intelligence and analytics enable companies to improve their bottom line, exposing what is driving revenue and what isn’t.
