Essential Elements to Sales Enablement with Salesforce

Sales enablement strategies focus on improving seller performance by implementing sales and marketing best practices with complementary tools and technology. Salesforce was early to the sales enablement game, and many businesses rely on it as a source of data for their selling efforts. As your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system of record, Salesforce should be the cornerstone of your sales enablement strategy, but on its own is typically insufficient. In this post, we’ll discuss sales enablement using Salesforce along with other tools. 

Is Salesforce a Sales Enablement Tool? 

Salesforce on its own is considered a CRM tool, but CRMs are one type of sales enablement tool. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the practice of managing company relationships and interactions with current and future customers. CRMs such as Salesforce prioritize the customer, allowing businesses to manage their relationships to yield optimal outcomes. They focus on customer data maintenance, speed, and increased workplace efficiency. 

While Salesforce alone focuses on customer data management, additional sales enablement tools that integrate with Salesforce can help companies retain and grow their customer base by performing other functions necessary to a successful sales enablement strategy. Salesforce-native platforms like Salesvue can increase Salesforce adoption rates in your organization using automation that updates multiple contact fields in Salesforce with a single button click.

What is a Sales Enablement Tool? 

Sales enablement tools are resources provided across departments that improve the sales team’s capacity to attract and retain customers. As such, there exist many sales enablement tools to reinforce the practice of sales enablement, creating a high-performance sales environment. Given the range of the subject, it is important to narrow in on which sales enablement tools may be essential to your organization. Often, sales enablement tools are broken out by their function and include:

• CRM (e.g. Salesforce)
• Sales Intelligence & Prospecting (e.g. SalesIntel)
  • These tools help sellers build prospect lists, verify contact information, build strategies to target key accounts, and more.
• Content Management & Analytics (e.g Seismic, Highspot) 
  • Tools like Seismic and Highspot help organizations manage all the sales and marketing content that is being created, and provide insightful usage analytics so sellers know what content resonates, and when their prospects are “hot”.
• Marketing Automation (e.g., Pardot, Marketo)
  • Marketing automation tools are great for robust email marketing and website automations that help turn website visitors or email targets into leads, passing on their information to the sales team to follow-up.
• Sales Coaching & Gamification (e.g., leveleleven)
  • To foster accountability and a competitive spirit within the organization, many companies use coaching and gamification software.
• Customer Experience & Support (e.g., Zendesk)
  • Often a forgotten part of the sales journey is what happens after the sale. Customer support tools are very important to integrate with Salesforce to ensure the entire view of the customer lives in one place.
• Sales Engagement, including emails and dialers (e.g., Salesvue)
  • Without sales engagement tools, sellers often struggle with who to call next and when. These platforms provide structure and automation to help sellers become more efficient with their days.

Organizational Roles in Sales Enablement with Salesforce

Whether sales says marketing isn’t finding enough qualified leads or marketing says sales aren’t closing enough deals, their alignment has plagued many companies. To be most effective, you need to circumvent office tensions. Sales and marketing need to work together, whether that is sharing data or content, to find more leads and close more deals. Sales enablement allows this process to become more expedient. It’s important to note, however, that sales enablement is a team effort, and each department has a role to play. 

Marketing’s Role in Sales Enablement

Marketing creates content that will appeal to prospects and customers no matter where they are in their customer journey. They must ensure relevant content is easily accessible for sales reps and for customers and prospects that are searching online for your products and services.

Customer Service’s Role in Sales Enablement

Customer Service and inside sales reps should ensure a consistent customer experience, providing before and after-sale support. They should be able to see pertinent customer related data in Salesforce that will give proper context to address customers’ concerns.

IT’s Role in Sales Enablement

IT must provide a cyber-secure environment for the organization and its customers. Additionally, they should be sure all sales enablement tools are constantly updated and working efficiently. They may also provide customer and/or employee technical support.

Operations Role in Sales Enablement

The operations department communicates to the sales team timelines and the company’s ability to deliver products and services on time and as promised.

Sales Managers’ Role in Sales Enablement

Sales managers are responsible for onboarding and training sales reps, analyzing their performance, and understanding what is working and not working. They ensure that sales reps have all the various tools needed to close more deals.  

Given that sales enablement relies on relationships and utilizing resources, your company’s skills should reflect that. Prioritizing your company relationships allows your company to strengthen itself and grow more confidently. Implementing various sales enablement resources can elevate your team’s skills above your competitors. 

What is Salesvue’s Role in Sales Enablement with Salesforce?

When Salesforce is used alone, it often has a low adoption rate among sales teams. As a result, sales departments are not unified behind a single source of truth and lack visibility into their team’s needs. It’s difficult for sales managers to identify which behaviors and content types result in the most closed deals, and onboarding is even more difficult. 

Adding Salesvue to your sales enablement stack provides the playbook for your entire sales team. Salesvue, a Salesforce native sales engagement platform, complements the existing resources of Salesforce CRM while implementing additional components to help strengthen your sales team.

Salesvue’s role in sales enablement with Salesforce is multifaceted. With Salesvue, you get:

• A highly configurable platform using Salesforce custom fields, objects, and workflows means you can sell and operate exactly the way you want.
• Measurable and repeatable sales cadences that can be set up in a matter of minutes, which means you get to first value quicker.
• Automated and bulk email options, email templates, and a one-click dialer, so your reps have the playbook for their whole day in one, easy-to-use location inside your Salesforce instance.
• Real-time data and analytics from Salesvue cadences combined with Salesforce data translate into more powerful insights to help you optimize your sales best practices.

Find out how Salesvue can play a pivotal role in your sales enablement success by requesting a demo today.