Comprehensive Sales Training Starts with Sales Enablement
Before getting into the sales business, the most important thing is to know about sales enablement. We all know that what sales and enablement mean separately but most of us do not know the meaning of sales enablement as a business term. Sales Enablement is a strategic process, practice, technology and set of tools that help to refine the productivity and performance of the sales team. It enhances the ability of the sales team to increase the revenue of the organization. Sales enablement improves sales engagements and fosters client relationships.
According to the Knowledge Tree, the average sales enablement budget doubled between 2014 and 2016 to $2.5 million. It has almost increased by 68% and more than 70% of organizations are planning to invest in sales technology every year.
In the fast paced world, sales team does not have enough time to create new materials, revise guidelines and look for the best practices because marketing is a task that provides all helping resources to the team to perform well and achieve their goals according to predefined targets.
Sales enablement is an emerging resource in the global business world. It helps organizations to improve their sales productivity. It does not need another business units, the whole team is responsible for sales productivity. But some organizations preferred to have separately functional department for sales enablement which initiative, plan, manage, and track the sales activity effectively.
Sales enablement team is the most demanding team of any organization. It helps to bridge the gap between departments and employees, and guide them to the path of success. Sales enablement is more about the buyer and less about the sales. It allows the sales team to connect with their target buyers and deal with the resources that the buyers need.
According to Sales Performance International, sales team training can be highly effective for the whole organization if it is properly planned with the essential sales tools. Most of the time, managers face complications to develop a highly competent sales team because it can’t retain a huge amount of information at one time.
The team works with sales and marketing to organize content and assets, revise guidelines and practices, and helps with ongoing sales and products training. Sales enablement saves valuable time and energy of the team and makes it unproblematic for salespeople to sell and buyers to buy. It leads to stronger relations between sales and marketing to boost sales effectiveness.
Comprehensive sales trainings provide sales team with the critical skills which are required to succeed in the competitive business environment. Comprehensive sales trainings with sales enablement provide skills to enhance sales, introduce improved tactics, focus on the language that stresses more on benefits than features, help to build strong relationships between buyers and sellers, teach essential tips for preparing formal and informal presentations, and assist with guidelines for follow up with clients.
Sales Enablement Tools
The first tool of sales enablement is hiring and recruiting of a sales team. This process ensures that the right people are in the team and the team is not missing any important resource for accomplishing goals and objectives. The sales team is functioning at full capacity. This activity is supervised by the sales head, HR department, and consultants who ensure that the right numbers of people are hired for the right tasks.
After hiring and recruiting, the next tool for sales enablement is coaching and training. Once the sales organization has hired the right sales team, it requires sales team training to concentrate on the improvement of sales team’s skills and knowledge which helps them to execute better sales planning to achieve target. Somehow, the outcome of this activity is the same as hiring and recruiting in order to improve the seller's’ ability to sell.
Equipping the sales team with supporting tools is the third component of sale enablement. It helps the sales team to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of sales enablement.
The last activity of sales enablement is assessment. These activities set limits to tasks of sales people and sale managers in term of how are they performing, are they skilled enough to cater for the sales department of the organization, are they meeting targets, etc. Assessment also assists the organization to measure the level of the sales teams’ performance.