Introduction
Every kind of business could benefit from sales enablement, especially financial services organizations. However, both of these terms, “sales enablement” and “financial services” are very broad. So, let’s take a closer look into what different parts of sales enablement can help different parts within financial services. With these considerations in mind, you’ll be able to help your finserv team become more efficient, effective and on the way to smashing goals.
Why Sales Enablement is Necessary for a Financial Services Firm
For starters, let’s look into why the idea of sales enablement fits within the financial services industry. Sales enablement is all about the tools given to your team to help them sell better. As you can imagine, this is very helpful no matter what industry. However, in the “finserv” industry where financial services professionals are often booked with meetings or have other high-value tasks or considerations, like security concerns, sales enablement helps take a load off their shoulders so they can focus on closing more deals.
A huge part of this industry is building relationships. Whether you’re a relationship manager, financial advisor, insurance seller, or something else, relationships are what can make or break a salesperson in the financial services industry. These relationships don’t develop overnight. In order to generate sales and create these bonds, sellers need a way to keep consistent contact with their prospects and customers. The key is to maximize the efficiency of these redundant touchpoints through automation to help sellers focus on their high-value tasks.
Sales Enablement Strategies
To begin to utilize sales enablement to its fullest extent, we suggest starting by outlining your strategies and processes first. Below are a few suggestions for things to consider when strategizing how sales enablement is going to help your team.
Establish Goals and KPIs
A big part of your sales enablement strategy will be what goals your team wants to accomplish and what KPIs you’re going to track to get there. By creating goals, it’ll be easier to use sales engagement to track your results and see what tweaks in different areas can be made to help you grow your business at the rate and scale you want. Different sales enablement tools will help you track the best KPIs and data to help get you there and show insight into what’s working and what’s not, but we’ll touch on that later.
An example KPI that may resonate with people in the financial services industry could be conversation recency. By tracking when and how often sellers reach out to a prospect or client, it’s easier to track the health of that relationship. For example, if a prospect hasn’t been reached out to in a few months, you may want to know this so you can reach out and keep working towards building a relationship.
Prioritize the Customer
Now that you know where you want your business to be, you have to decide who is going to help you get there. Knowing the right customer to sell to is a big part for any seller, let alone one in financial services. So, knowing the best demographics, psychographics, geographics, and so on that you sell to will help immensely in the processes of creating your sales enablement strategy. Another part of this ideal customer persona would include common pain points.
For example, if you’re selling credit cards to small businesses, they will have different wants and needs than if you’re selling credit cards to a large business. Knowing your customer in and out will help you in the sales enablement process.
Create Great Sales Collateral
Another part of a great sales enablement strategy is having great sales collateral. Knowing your customer and the target audience you want to go after, it’s time to create content based around this. Yes, you could let your marketing and creative teams run wild and see what amazing things they come up with. But, is this truly going to move the needle? You want to ensure that your sales collateral is hitting home with your target audience. If it’s not, then don’t use it, it's as simple as that. Some examples of collateral that you could use include product overview sheets, case studies and data sheets, just to name a few.
Sales Enablement Processes
Next, it’s important to think about how you will go about leveraging sales enablement within your organization. Part of the sales enablement process is finding the right customer personas and creating content that reaches them effectively, so that part’s already done. Other parts include leveraging different technologies to help sellers reach their targets. Let’s touch on some of these technologies now.
Sales Enablement Technologies
No sales enablement strategy is complete without a range of sales enablement tools. While it would be amazing if there was one tool that did every perfectly, that’s simply not the case. So, give yourself the best chance to succeed by leveraging the best tools in their respective space. Here’s some of our picks for what you should consider when building out your sales enablement tech stack.
Tools for Content
Marketing isn’t the only group with lots of content and material to keep track of. These two tools help keep your sales enablement materials in order and so much more.
Seismic
Seismic is a sales and marketing enablement software that aligns your marketing and sales teams in delivering the most compelling stories throughout your buyers’ journeys. With Seismic’s insightful metrics that tell sellers when and how prospects are engaging with their content, you can improve the buyer experience resulting in faster deal cycles, higher win rates, and more efficient and effective content management. For example, use Seismic to track how your latest newsletter about new mutual funds is doing.
Highspot
Similar to Seismic, Highspot’s sales enablement platform makes it easy for reps to locate content all in a single platform. It sports an intuitive UI, powerful search, and curated browsing experiences. With flexible ways to organize resources and keep them up to date and compliant, your reps always have access to the latest versions. Never lose an important piece of content about the latest interest rates or your insurance offerings. It’s also versatile, supporting more than 80 integrations and over 40 content types so you can bring together decks, videos, and more.
Email Coaching Tools
Emailing effectiveness is a big part of sales enablement, so check out our choice for the tool that will take your efforts to the next level.
Lavender
Get real time AI-driven coaching on your emails or research your prospects. Lavender shows social data, calendar events, personality profiles, and more on your recipient so you can create messaging that engages them. It also tailors and personalizes your email messages using powerful AI that generates personalized intro sentences for you. A great example of this could be wholesalers wanting to perfect new email templates about upcoming financial products they’re looking to distribute to advisors.
Data Providers
Gathering data that truly helps move the needle is essential for sales teams, so check out one that will help give your team the boost they’re looking for.
SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a global provider of high-quality data intelligence solutions, empowering revenue teams to accelerate growth. You can generate target account lists that match your exact ideal customer profile by filtering through millions of technographic, firmographic, and over 9,000 buyer intent data topics. With 95% accurate and human-verified data, sales reps spend less time searching for the correct contact information and more time on their selling tasks. You can also automatically update your prospect records through data enrichment, ensuring that only verified quality records are being reached through selling efforts. This could be great for banks looking to find contacts at small businesses in their city that are over a certain annual revenue, for example.
Sales Engagement Platforms
Sales engagement platforms can help your sellers connect with the right people at the right time.
Salesvue
Salesvue is a Salesforce-native sales engagement platform that helps you bring synergy to the whole team. Because you and your data never leave Salesforce, sales and marketing teams have easy access to share and manage all customer and prospect data. With Salesvue, you get real-time insights into how your sales team is performing, what is being discussed in each call, and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Data analysis even shows you objection patterns, so you can manage the marketing message and the sales conversation better.
Example Cadences
Another great aspect of Salesvue and other sales engagement platforms is the ability to create cadences. Cadences are a great way to bring many elements of sales enablement together. You can upload contacts from your target audience into a cadence, then create repeatable and scalable touchpoints like emails or phone calls, oftentimes highlighting sales collateral. These can then be used in reporting, since every seller is using the same cadence to gain insight into what’s working and what’s not working. Here’s some sales enablement examples of how these cadences could be used for different members of the financial services industry.
Financial Advisors
Financial advisors often have many different types of touchpoints with clients. While they do meet with people daily, there’s also an aspect of monthly or even quarterly touchpoints. So, without technology, it could be easy for them to forget meetings set months in advance or what email to send and when. But, with a quarterly touchpoint cadence, they can be prompted to send emails to the right client at the right time.
Relationship Managers
Similarly to financial advisors, relationship managers often have many different timeframes going on with their clients. Cadences can help them stay on top of their daily tasks, while also planning for the future so they never miss important opportunities or meetings.
Conclusion
The financial services industry needs sales enablement. By not considering sales enablement in their day-to-day efforts and long-term goal setting, managers and executives are letting their seller’s productivity and resources go to waste. Sales enablement can help take financial services teams to the next level by providing them the strategy, structure and content they need to help reach prospects and customers as effectively as possible.
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