Introduction
If you are like other sales leaders and trying to help your team perform better, you might have run into a problem. You may hear of this buzzword “sales enablement”, but you’re not sure what all that encompasses, or how it all fits together. Maybe you’ve picked out a sales enablement platform, you have worked out the messaging and content you want to send out, and you have found specific measurables you want to track. In this blog post, we propose a sales enablement framework to help you see how different parts of your sales process work together.
What is a Sales Enablement Framework?
Now, what is a sales enablement framework? Put simply, it is a framework that helps show and align specific technologies and components of the sales process. It uses a sales enablement platform and breaks down how the strategy, tech stack, sales training, and so much more all work together to create the best sales processes for your team.
Without a good sales enablement framework, yes you will still have all of the elements you need, but you may not be using them to their full potential. Or, you may forget about a component that can make all the difference between closing a deal and watching a prospect go to a competitor.
What are the Components of a Sales Enablement Framework?
Here is the list of components that are crucial to include in your sales enablement framework:
Sales Strategy
The first piece is to come up with a good sales enablement strategy. Included in this would be ideas such as using all functionals of your sales enablement platform, making changes as needed, and using data to develop actionable insights. Without a good strategy, your team will be lost in its efforts and you will not be finding the full potential in your sales enablement platform.
Sales Playbooks
The next piece is also very important. Sales playbooks are what your team will follow in its sales process efforts. This includes when they will reach out to and follow up with prospects, what email templates and call scripts they will use, and more. Without good playbooks or cadences, your sellers will all be performing tasks using different processes, which is the last thing you want. That leads to lackluster updating of your CRM and therefore inaccurate or complete data.
Sales Tech Stack
Your sales tech stack is a big part of how successful your team is. If you are unfamiliar with the term “tech stack” it is just another way to say the tools that your team uses. It is very important for these tools to work together and create a frictionless tech stack as this will make your team more productive and efficient. Your tech stack should work well together and keep your team humming in harmony.
Sales Messaging
Something that sometimes goes overlooked is the messaging used when targeting prospects. Sellers sometimes think that since they have a great product or service, then people will automatically want to buy it. However, what they forget to consider is that prospects do not know much about it, or they are not familiar with the ways sellers communicate. That is why it is essential to generate consistent and targeted messaging that resonates with your target audience.
Start by creating buyer personas based on your ideal customers, and make sure the whole team understands the pain points for each buyer persona, and what solutions your product or service offers to combat each one.
Sales Training
Training new sellers on your team is often a long and sometimes painful process. However, this does not have to be the case. New additions to your team can be onboarded faster and go through sales enablement training better with the help of a great sales enablement tool. Once they are trained on how to use it, these tools are great for onboarding because everything the seller needs lives within a single space.
Content to Share
Similar to the consistent sales messaging, it is important to have good content to share. This can include eBooks, videos, PDFs, and many other items. This content is a great way to engage with your audience as it presents information in different ways than just text from an email.
It shows you are an authoritative voice on a topic that interests them, and helps them make better business decisions or even buying decisions. Once you generate this content, it is important to make it accessible to all sellers in a way that is easy for them to share it with prospects.
Accountability
One of the final pieces to remember in your sales enablement framework is not always a fun one. This piece is to enforce and make sure everyone on your team knows what their role is. While laying these ground rules can sometimes be uncomfortable or make sellers upset, they are very important in the long run.
It is essential to the functionality of the team for everyone to be on the same page about their position within their team, what they are responsible for, who is held accountable for their performance, and so on.
Measurement
The final piece is measurement. This ties into some topics covered already but essentially means that you must collect the correct data and use it to your advantage. By tracking the proper KPIs and sales analytics, you will be able to develop actionable insights. Then, you can ensure that you are always able to make continuous improvements to the sales processes. This of course will only help your team become more effective and close more deals.
Summary
By remembering to include all the above components in your sales enablement framework, you can help ensure your team will perform better. This all starts with picking the best sales enablement tool, then using the pieces above to find out the best way to use it.
We would suggest using Salesvue. Salesvue lives natively within Salesforce and makes all the elements talked about in this blog easy. For example, sharing content, developing playbooks, and measuring key metrics are all things Salevue exceeds in. Combining that with the rest of the pieces also available to generate a great sales enablement framework will help lead your team to their best year ever.
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