Milind Katti
COO & Co-Founder, DemandFarm
Nowadays, businesses need the right tools and data to remain competitive in their respective market. This makes now the best time that you check out sales enablement software. These are solutions that provide your team with the proper tools, knowledge, processes, and functions to maximize every sales opportunity. Sales enablement is more than just about lead generation. It covers an umbrella of functions such as recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, coaching, providing resources, and evaluating the effectiveness of certain programs within the organization.
Likewise, sales teams are not the only ones who benefit from such sales enablement tools. It can also help marketing teams, human resource teams, and more. It syncs every department within your organization and ensures that their goals are aligned towards one goal, which is an increase in productivity and efficiency of sales. With that said, here’s how you can optimize your business with the right sales enablement tools in the market.
1. Synchronize source of content and data
As mentioned earlier, sales teams aren’t the only ones who get to use sales enablement tools. It can affect your whole department as well. It does so by providing a centralized source of content and data for all departments. This source of content and information is critical for engaging with potential customers and closing deals with them. Having a single source of truth for all your content can help you create a more streamlined and organized sales enablement strategy.
This helps sales reps and other teams reduce wasted time and efforts on searching for and using relevant content to use for their campaigns and operations. This centralized repository of data can also help you improve your sales account planning, especially if you integrate it with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. DemandFarm is a powerful account planning platform for integrated planning where you can connect your data with external sources for a holistic approach.
2. Personalize buyer’s journey
With your customer data organized and aligned properly across departments, this makes it easier for you to personalize your potential buyers’ journey and experience with your company. After all, not all customers need and want the same thing. You would often need to use different tactics to close a deal for each prospective customer. Through sales enablement tools, you can create a relevant and personalized sales account plan for each respective prospect.
This serves as a guide that contains all the critical information you will need to interact and close a deal with them. As more customers begin to look for genuine and dynamic interactions, relying on a scripted sequence for each sales pitch won’t be enough. You need to be in tune with your targets’ behaviors, needs, and wants instead of forcing them to fit into your own sales process. And since sales enablement aligns your sales team across all departments, they can get the needed data to learn more about their leads.
3. Streamline communication between marketing and sales team
Marketing and sales team may have different functions and tasks within an organization, but they are inevitably tied with one another. A study by LinkedIn shows that 58% of aligned sales and marketing teams have higher lead conversion rates compared to those companies with teams that have poor communication. Sales enablement software can help you with that. It does so by streamlining content for both sides. What one produces, the other can use for its operations.
These may be in the form of content, data, and reports. Likewise, it provides transparency on both sides to keep goals aligned throughout. Nowadays, this alignment between the two teams is becoming increasingly important for your business’ growth. With digital marketing blurring the line separating the two departments, these two teams must collaborate to ensure meaningful engagement with potential buyers.
4. Leverage data and analytics
Nowadays, data and analytics have become an integral part of running a business. It helps generate relevant content for their brands, make smart decisions, develop better strategies, and create meaningful relationships with their customers. According to a report by the Havas Group, 81% of brands often go extinct because they no longer create relevant content for their customers. Meanwhile, only 19% collect and utilize data for marketing and sales purposes.
This goes to show how much data can affect your business’ growth. One of the benefits of sales enablement is its ability to track and measure the performance of your sales process. You can gain insights from your interactions with your prospects and those who are engaging with your marketing content. This includes top-performing content, trends and prospect behaviors, and areas of improvement. You can use these insights to develop content and process to close deals faster and more frequently.
5. Improve customer engagement
The different types of sales enablement tools are geared towards one thing, and that is to drive up your sales productivity and revenues. It would also help in sales acceleration and sales transformation. With the right data and relevant content, you can improve interactions with target consumers and create meaningful relationships with them in the long run. Engagement is essential when it comes to closing deals.
The constant streams of communication ensure that your leads are nurtured, and your potential buyers remain interested in your company. Without that point of contact, all your marketing and sales teams’ hard work can fall apart along the way. Sales enablement gives you the necessary tools and data to keep engagement with your prospects and consumers relevant and effective. This includes videos, CRM, whitepapers, datasheets, and more.
6. Integrate with your other solutions
The beauty of technology is that you now have other tools, devices, and solutions within reach to help you manage and operate other aspects of your business. Sales enablement applications are just one of the software you can integrate within your system.
Having one software may sometimes not be enough. After all, no solution is one-size-fits-all. Sales enablement software has its limitations. Nonetheless, you can incorporate sales management software into your strategy to further enhance your sales process. If you are already using some other solutions within your organization, such as CRM, marketing automation software, lead generation software, and others, you can check out their integration compatibilities with one another. By connecting all your software, you can further streamline different aspects of your business processes.
7. Develop better training for the sales team
The data and content you get from your sales enablement tools aren’t just for lead generation, customer engagement, and strategy development. They can be used to train and coach sales teams as well. As mentioned earlier, sales enablement covers a range of functions. One of which is onboarding and training. With it, you can document effective practices and processes within your marketing and sales teams and use these as guidelines for recruits. However, nothing is ever set in stone.
As the behaviors and trends change over time, your training materials need to adapt. With the right sales enablement apps, you can capture and analyze these changes and develop better training for your sales reps.
8. Enabling a better sales process
Sales enablement is more than just a tool for sales teams to increase their productivity and efficiency. It is a holistic approach to how you can maximize your gains from each point of contact with your target market. Your sales team isn’t the only one who can gain benefits from the different sales enablement tools examples. This type of software can also have an impact on your marketing teams, HR, and other departments. And with the current conditions of the market, you will need all the tools you can get to remain competitive and relevant among your competitors.
In case you want to explore why DemandFarm is the ideal product for your organization, check out our blog on the Battle of KAM technology software where we consider multiple KAM software like Revegy, Altify, and others and pit them against DemandFarm.