Without the right tools, getting the job done efficiently can be challenging. Imagine a gardener hired to cut grass with a pair of scissors; that would be difficult, wouldn’t it? It’s safe to say that if that same gardener were to be equipped with the latest field mower that technology can offer, he would be able to cut down his work time massively, and the quality of his work would increase by tenfold. The same goes for your salespeople!
Today’s sales professionals still have to go through outdated processes that can easily be automated with the right technology. If a company wants to have a robust pipeline with continuous leads coming in, they must arm their sales and marketing teams with well-suited, modern practices and tools.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales Enablement is the strategic process of equipping your sales team with the right resources, information, knowledge, tools, and technology to help them close sales faster and significantly increase revenue. By automating administrative work and storing essential information in one easy-to-navigate platform, sales teams can leverage data-driven insights to maximize every engagement opportunity with leads. Sales Enablement improves alignment, encourages collaboration, and provides insights into making informed decisions.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing teams need to work together to increase win rates. In the perfect scenario, marketing focuses on creating content to provide sales the latest resources to help them close deals. Buyers demand a high level of knowledge from sellers; therefore, sellers need to be equipped with up-to-date information to meet these needs. A sales enablement platform will help your marketing team provide your sales team easily digestible and accessible information. This sales communication strategy seamlessly works because data from each team is shared across cross-functional initiatives.
Content Management
If your marketing team is working hard at creating content to help your sales team, but they aren’t storing it in an accessible platform, then the vast majority of that content is probably going unused. One of the principles of sales enablement is the proper storage and management of content to provide a better experience for your sales and marketing teams. A central hub wherein both teams’ activities converge will make your sales process smoother because your sellers will know where that fitting piece of content is to send to a buyer.
Data Insights and Analytics
Figuring out the return on investment of your marketing team’s efforts is hard when you don’t have the technical system to support them. Without a robust flow of information being traded from marketing and sales, it’s almost impossible to determine what marketing effort helped deals move forward. Sales enablement removes this barrier by providing content engagement analytics to both teams. Providing them a system that shows a comprehensive view of your marketing initiatives will help your teams focus on what your buyers are after.
Sales enablement technology offers insights into marketing engagement and its effect on sales performance. By supplying your sales team with data and information, they can effortlessly build credibility and trust with prospects to foster long-term engagements and relationships.
Here are some more benefits of sales enablement:
- Secures and stores your customer databases and information.
- Helps your sales team manage and monitor all prospect and customer interactions.
- Automates administrative tasks so your teams can focus on nurturing leads.
- Organizes all the data you have on your prospects, leads, and customers.
- Tracks all communication so you know where qualified leads are in the pipeline.
- Sends reminders to contact prospects who have engaged with your business.
- Automatically follows up with leads, prospects, and first-time or returning buyers.
- Provides a single repository of information for your sales team
- Provides a source of essential data to create reports such as revenue projections.
Incorporating sales enablement tools will provide more opportunities for your sales team to focus on what matters: your customers. But, sales enablement is useless without a sales CRM.
Sales enablement tools are only effective through their combination with a sales CRM.
What is Sales CRM?
Customer Relationship Management platforms or CRMs are software tools that enable a business’ revenue-generating teams to manage and improve relationships with leads, prospects, and customers. But, CRM has a variety of uses depending on specific departments. For example, a support team can use a CRM software to manage customer tickets to ensure issues are resolved quickly and efficiently. A marketing team can use it to analyze content engagement and guide future efforts, and a sales team uses it to monitor and streamline pipeline management.
Some individuals might think that sales CRM tools will complicate their sales process. However, if set up and managed properly, sales CRM actually simplifies it.
Simplify Your Sales Operations with a Sales CRM Tool
Besides digesting information from your marketing team and figuring how to use it in your sales process, your salespeople are also busy multitasking cold calls, outreach engagements, and deal management, while your managers are busy monitoring sales performance. Without one platform to show task progress, your salespeople and managers resort to having drawn-out conversations. Are daily hour-long meetings necessary to ensure your team is on the same page? They shouldn’t be!
Sales CRM’s can be integrated with existing tools and communications channels to make it easy to manage all tasks and data in a single view. The sales CRM compiles data from your team and provides data analysis of their performance and progress. Providing one source of truth for your team will reduce back-and-forth communication and increase efficiency in your day-to-day operations.
On top of that, manually entering information leaves databases vulnerable to human error and follow-up. We see it every day in companies that don’t have a sales CRM in place. A salesperson enters a lead’s contact information in a spreadsheet (possibly inaccurately), and then it gets forgotten because there is no automation feature to help them follow up on it.
A sales CRM tool automatically records any action a salesperson does, such as sending an email, talking to a prospect via live chat, and initiating a call. Once an interaction ends, that salesperson can set the sales CRM to remind them to follow up on that prospect. Simple, fast, and effective.
As your business expands, manually tracking prospect and lead engagement will prove almost impossible with outdated spreadsheets and random sticky notes on your desk. These practices are time-consuming and unmanageable, and they leave too much room for deals to get lost. Manual data entry, tracking, and reporting are exhausting for you, your teams, and your customers! Get on the effortless train of sales enablement and sales CRM, so your teams can have a smooth ride to sales success. Want to learn more about how you can start optimizing your sales process? Reach out to us. We’d love to help modernize your process and get the results you need from your sales team!
