Sales enablement is the strategic, continuing process of providing sales and marketing teams with the content, direction, and training that they need to effectively engage customers. Salespeople must understand how to use the materials that the company supplies to them as part of the sales enablement process.
To achieve this, training and development must be a significant component of most programs. The most effective sales enablement programs combine traditional training programs with the use of appropriate cutting-edge technologies such as collaboration platforms to ensure the best results.
In this article, we’ll highlight five elements that will break your success.
Mistake #1 - Ignoring Your Sales Team
The first on the list of our sales enablement mistakes is a failure to understand that the sales force consists of people who work at the front end. They meet the customers face-to-face and they hear or sense what the customers are feeling. They are an amazing source of customer feedback, and it is foolish not to take full advantage of this. Ensure that their opinions are fed back to policymakers, and considered seriously, so this experience can be incorporated into the strategy.
Sales staff will also have strong opinions on the materials and tools that the company provides to assist them. The company may well be providing ineffective tools at a considerable cost when listening to the sales force could result in better solutions.
Improving feedback and communication with all sales staff can produce incredibly effective solutions that assist the company reaches its goals. Additionally, identify a vocal and successful salesperson to serve as a champion for the sales team and provide that champion with unfettered access to management.
Mistake #2 - Failing to Understand That Sales Enablement is Ongoing
Providing ongoing sales support remains a priority for all sales team members. It is essential to consistently provide sales reps with new and relevant tools, as well as preserve those assets in a centralized content repository.
Reevaluate Plans Throughout the Year
The company should be constantly reevaluating its sales enablement strategy to see whether there is a need to make changes in terms of technology, training, or education. The company should make use of its sales champion and advisory committee to keep track of the strategy's progress and success over time.
Mistake #3 - Focusing on What You Already Know
Should the sales crew be underperforming, the company will receive complaints from a variety of sources. Investment in expensive tools or six-month programs of data analysis will not provide new insight not already available through experience.
Instead of spending a sales budget on confirming what you already know, think about investing a portion of your budget and effort in sales enablement consulting instead. Experiential consultants will be able to identify patterns and trends that can assist you in getting to the core of your sales enablement challenges and solving them.
Previous experience dealing with other companies, along with their ability to ask the appropriate questions to the right individuals, may result in a variety of good outcomes, including the following:
- This will assist you in getting to the heart of your sales performance challenges as fast as possible.
- Assisting in developing and implementing an effective improvement strategy.
- Contribute to the involvement of important stakeholders in the project.
Mistake #4 - Failure to Consider User Interface Issues When Introducing New Software
One key tenet of sales enablement is that it benefits all salespeople whether you have a sales organization of one or 1,000. Therefore, you need to make sure that anything you supply to salesmen is easy to utilize. When planning for usability, make sure resources are easy to discover and straightforward to apply.
A common mistake is to imagine sales enablement issues will be resolved with software that is not fully understood by end-users. This can result in valuable time being spent focusing on the software instead of utilizing it to achieve benefits.
Any new technology you introduce should be simple to use, and its benefits to the end-user should be immediately apparent. Sales teams are made up of busy individuals who are frequently under the strain of meeting a quarterly deadline. So something as simple as having problems entering the system on the first try may be quite off-putting.
Given the opportunity, busy salespeople will choose to maintain the status quo and do what they have always done, rather than invest time trying to fathom new software systems. If user interfaces are confusing and seem inappropriate, sales staff will just not use the new tool unless it is made compulsory.
Mistake #5 - Inappropriate Sales Content
Customers want and need information about products or services so that they can make the correct purchase decisions. Sales content plays a critical part in the sales process. Providing sales teams with a comprehensive and appropriate library of sales-related data is critical to success. Data that can be accessed at each point of the sales process and supports sales staff at each point of contact with the customer.
Sales staff will be aware of what needs the customers have, and their advice should be sought by management when making information libraries available.
Libraries of sales data should be optimized so that finding the appropriate information can be achieved simply and without delving through multiple levels.
Substantial amounts of time can be saved by providing sales staff a unified platform of sales-related content. The unified platform will also make it easy to identify where gaps in the provision of sales and marketing information exist.
By incorporating a unified platform of data into sales enablement technology, the needs of sales and marketing staff can be more in tune.
Conclusion
Introducing sales enablement technology often has initial hurdles to overcome. Avoiding sales enablement mistakes in the implementation of new systems by preparing in advance and understanding what the hurdles represent, will make the whole process much smoother.
The Right Tools For Sales With Vectera
Do you also want to conduct professional virtual sales meetings, be able to rely on the technology, and stay in touch with your coworkers? Then our sales enablement software is for you. Feel free to contact us to discuss the possibilities for your organization!