More than 80% of all business solutions are sold by 8% of the world’s sales people! That’s why we’re firm advocates of HubSpot CRM and sales enablement and have seen great success by empowering our clients’ with the right processes, technology, and content. Here’s what your business can learn from sales enablement.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 2 seconds
Though a business is made up of many working parts, sales is one of the most crucial for meeting your financial objectives come year end. If your sales team doesn’t hit quota, your company will ultimately struggle to be successful. So it’s important to ensure that you have a modern selling strategy in place to give your salespeople the best chance of success at every turn.
“Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.” - HubSpot
In our sales enablement blog: Lessons learnt from a HubSpot expert, we shared some lessons we learnt from HubSpot International Channel Manager, Steen Gordon when he was in South Africa for the March 2018 Jo’burg HubSpot User Group. Now we wanted to share some of the lessons we’ve learnt, having implemented several sales enablement programmes for our own clients.
We can’t say that sales enablement is the winning solution for every company, but if you’re seeing any of the following warning signs in your company, sales enablement might just be the tonic for you:
- You’re consistently falling short of your revenue goals
- Your forecasting is off
- Your onboarding time for new salespeople is longer than average
- More than two thirds of your team’s time is spent on unproductive, repetitive, tasks that aren’t sales related
- Your sales process is not clear, efficient and consistent
- Leads aren’t getting followed up on
- A “cookie cutter” approach is used on all opportunities
- You have lots of open quotes and no decisions
- Salespeople are frustrated because they don’t have (or don’t know they have) compelling content to send to prospects to help move deals forward
- It's difficult to know where the bottlenecks are because you have limited information to go on
Why is sales enablement pivotal to business success?
There are two main reasons why sales enablement is important:
- Sales team productivity has a direct and significant impact on revenue.
- Today’s modern buyer is more informed and more demanding.
By giving your sales team a strong process and supporting elements, you’re ensuring they are as productive as possible and are more likely to close.
Here are some lessons your business will learn from a sales enablement programme:
1. Understanding the budget gap
Most companies have a gap between the portion of the budget that they are sure they can reach organically (without making any changes), and the portion that makes them very uncomfortable. This discomfort is created by their uncertainty about how, or where, or with whom they're going to attain the sales necessary to achieve their top level targets.
Sales enablement uses “Sniper-like”, rather than “spray and pray” tactics. This means that we assess your revenue goals, break down how many opportunities you will need, reverse engineer how many sales qualified leads, and how many marketing qualified leads you will need in your funnel, and eventually how many contacts you’ll need to make, both online and offline. This concentrated focus decreases cost, optimises effectiveness and drives revenue.
2. Marketing and sales actually have shared goals
We’ve talked about it a lot and it’s something that has been at the core of the inbound philosophy from the start… smarketing. Aligning your sales and marketing teams to ensure success.
But what we’re finding during our sales enablement journeys is that whilst there are distinct objectives in both teams, many of the sales and marketing goals are actually shared! And with these shared goals, it is counterproductive (and costly) to be working in silos.
3. Where to invest your time and money
Many salespeople don’t realise that they are focusing their time and energy (and ultimately money) on the wrong leads. Or are focusing on the right leads, but don’t have what they need to successfully follow through.
Sales enablement interventions like ours boost sales people’s productivity with techniques and tools they need to prospect, reach out, qualify, engage, advance and ultimately close deals.
4. Marketing can create content that isn’t just for marketing
An IDC survey found that 90 percent of marketing content and resources are never used. Frightening when you think that content is the backbone of every business’ messaging! Your marketing team probably has many golden nuggets that could assist to advance the deal.
Sales enablement allows your teams to identify the content that most effectively drives sales, vital when 95 percent of B2B deals are influenced by content. It also gives sales the chance to participate in the content creation process, which ensures content alignment with the buyer's journey. The result is that sales delivers the right message at the right time.
5. Identifying the gaps in your business
You may embark on sales enablement sure of what your “problem” is but once you start the process you might find that you suddenly see more potential or identify more gaps in the business. Once you start seeing the results of the process you will realise that you want to (and can) work towards a bigger growth plan. Your run rate should not be your indicator of future potential. Occasionally we’ve uncovered lots of untapped potential in the business. All these things help you build a stronger team and put processes in place to ensure your team performs better.
If you can relate to one or more of these lessons, you may want to consider a sales enablement program for your organisation (especially if you’re a current HubSpot CRM user). Take some time to research the sales enablement options and then contact us to help you assess your business goals and sales process, take a long hard look at your team and talk about whether you need the insights you could gather from a data-driven sales strategy.
Want some more help turning your business into a sales machine? Take a look at our ebook: How to Turn Your Entire Business into a Lead Generating Machine.
