Key takeaway
Winning and retaining customers is like building an architectural masterpiece – an achievement that requires multiple contractors, firm foundations and a watertight project plan. Your sales enablement process should recognise that.
With the best hands on the job, strong reinforcements and the right tools, you can build your sales journey from the ground up and ensure a successful, lasting infrastructure.
Communicate. Enablement is about supporting – and sales and marketing can only truly support each other through clear, consistent communication.
The sales journey is a consistent excavation of discovery. Reinforce regular calls and meetings to consistently review account needs, understand the impact sales assets or approaches are having, discuss challenges and seek solutions.
This sales and marketing alignment is critical to winning and retaining customers – and doing it in the most streamlined way.
Utilise tools and technologies throughout your sales enablement process. Knowledge is power, so using a CRM system and tools, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, can help sales and marketing teams keep in the know on account movements, better understand sales prospects and, ultimately, have more informed conversations.
There are CRM solutions to meet every budget and they provide an invaluable home for all your prospect and account data, as well as tracking pipeline movement.
Layering your CRM data with insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help decide the appropriate next move for each prospect or customer account.
sales enablement
The sales journey of any company needs to be constructed on solid foundations to win customers and build business growth. A sales enablement process gives you the tools you need to minimise any pitfalls and planning issues and create the ideal framework for success.
Sales and marketing need to agree the blueprint for the sales journey, agreeing roles and responsibilities and identifying the right tools and processes to climb each step of the sales ladder.
With the right building blocks in place, sales enablement helps your business cement the relationships needed to win and retain customer accounts.
Recognise product champions and work closely with them to assemble the proposal.
If there is a stakeholder who is particularly keen on your offering, work with them to champion your product or solution internally. They are an invaluable partner to cement the deal so don’t leave them to break down internal walls on their own.
Offer to help them develop a business case or cost‑benefit analysis, or to co‑pitch with them on‑site. Seek to understand what potential content or offer you could provide to help them get buy‑in.
Think outside the toolbox in terms of the approaches and assets you use to move prospects along the buyer journey.
Your sales journey should be stacked with opportunities to provide free value to prospects. Give prospects the opportunity to touch and feel what your product has to offer. You could provide a pre‑recorded/interactive demo, offer a free sample, a free trial, a customised needs/risk assessment – or even a site visit.
Before you implement a sales enablement process, first, you need to construct clear definitions for the sales journeys for your products, services and solutions. Any sales enablement strategy needs to be plotted against these journeys to make sure they’re the right fit for your business.
Remember: marketing teams are still part of the sales enablement team after leads have been handed over and beyond asset creation.
As the steps in the sales journeys become clear, consider whether marketing tactics can be erected to support sales efforts and build account momentum at each stage beyond lead handover.
For example, there may be a role for remarketing, account‑based advertising, or direct mail.
As well as varying personas, there are both rational and emotional thinkers at each step of the sales ladder, so ensure sales teams are equipped to achieve cut‑through with both types.
Messaging and assets which work best for rational thinkers revolve around stats, facts and hard proof. Emotional thinkers are more likely to connect with customer stories and conversations around specific needs or challenges.
Conduct workshops face‑to‑face or via video conference, bonding the sales and marketing teams to clarify the steps involved in the sales journeys, as well as the roles and responsibilities of each team.
Use these workshops to dig deep and discover what processes the sales team currently use at each buying stage and identify the key places where sales conversations falter.
Once your sales enablement process has been through the planning phase and is approved, document it and syndicate it to all relevant stakeholders.
Give everyone a chance to input, make any final amends to firm up the plan, and then ensure it is implemented and administered.
Creating processes is one thing, establishing them requires action.
Within each prospect account, there are multiple influencers and decision makers with differing levels of seniority.
Each of these personas will be motivated in different ways, depending on the impact of the purchase decision on their specific day‑to‑day. Craft your content to make sure the right type of content goes to the most relevant person. For example, technical specs may be of relevance to the day‑to‑day users of a product and their department heads, whereas the C‑suite may be more interested in overall business impact.