As with any business initiative, succeeding in sales enablement means crafting a solid strategy and executing on it. Much has been written on sales enablement strategy, and the field is constantly evolving as technology, buyers’ habits, and other factors change over time. That said, this checklist can serve as a blueprint for building your own sales enablement strategy, the specifics of which you can tailor to your organization's needs.
This might sound obvious, but it’s important to call out. You need to set goals for sales enablement just like you do for sales. In fact, when you set goals for enablement, it’s vital that they align with your broader business goals. At Salesforce, we use the V2MOM framework to create organizational alignment. It’s a great framework that’s easily adopted by organizations of most any type and size.
Viewing sales enablement as a holistic part of greater organizational goals helps create company-wide alignment. It also helps create a broader sense of purpose for everyone involved in creating, delivering, and taking the enablement. Ideally, enablement should help sales reps develop new skills and fuel career growth while also supporting specific product, sales, and business goals.
Sales enablement leaders should make clear what’s expected of participants in classes, self-paced learning, and other enablement activities well ahead of time. Giving sales teams ample time to plan for enablement will help them so it doesn't disrupt their regular cadence. Details around expected results should also be communicated up front so all of your salespeople know exactly what’s expected of them before, during, and after each enablement event.
Sales enablement leaders also need to embrace the role of lead scheduler, as mentioned above. This means communicating not only with their teams and salespeople, but also with product and marketing managers, regional sales leaders, and company leadership. Salespeople have plenty on their plates already without being told to chase every last assessment, certification, and 12-week course for vanity’s sake. Clear communication in this regard can help ensure that enablement activities are prioritized to fit in with the larger individual and company-wide journeys.
Time management is key to an effective enablement program. New products and initiatives often require just in time training and content to support near-term goals. Take care, however, to make sure that you’re not losing sight of long-term goals — or overwhelming your sales teams with too many schedule-disrupting enablement activities — in support of new ideas that may or may not be part of the bigger plan. The best sales enablement activities balance just-in-time learning with ongoing work in support of long range strategy.
Content creation is a huge element of successful sales enablement. This is where marketing and sales can really put their heads together for the greater good of the company. Effective content creation breaks down into these elements:
Before you make anything new, take stock of the content you already have. Conduct a content audit to gather all of your company’s materials in one place, pulling from across your website, other public-facing channels, and internal marketing and enablement repositories. From there, you can start to identify holes, overlaps, and other needs in your content strategy.
You may be surprised at how much content is already on the company website, ready to be refreshed and repurposed. Investing in a sales content management system can really pay dividends when it comes to organizing existing content and planning new content strategies. Be sure to look for a system like Highspot that’s built specifically to support enablement, and not a content management system (CMS) designed for web publishing or other uses. Enablement-specific content management systems are designed with sales activities — including alignment across sales and marketing — specifically in mind.
Content should suit its intended audience and purpose. Sales enablement involves sales teams, new prospects, and existing customers. Make sure you’ve got the right content to support each segment of your audience at every point along their respective journeys, whether it’s supporting a sales manager during online training, or sending a new lead follow-up materials after an in-person meeting.
- Case studies
- Customer stories
- Product demos
- Product slide decks
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- Pricing information
- Competitive intelligence briefs
- Videos
Amongst the many benefits of digitizing your business is how much easier it is to share content electronically as compared to dealing only in printed sheets of paper. Hosting digital content in an online repository like Highspot, that’s designed to support enablement makes it just as easy to share a document with your sales team as it is to send a copy to a customer or promote it via social media.
When your content is online and accessible to your team, it’s ready to be used and repurposed whenever you need it. For example, a collection of content created for an enablement training can remain online and accessible by sales reps after the training. A rep already familiar with the documents might later share the right ones with a prospect during a sales meeting. Your marketing team might also share some of the content as part of a buyers’ journey, or repurpose it for a blog post teased via LinkedIn. Digital content distribution not only widens your possibilities, it makes it much easier to put them into motion.
An important, but too often overlooked part of sales enablement is adapting your approach to fit all of your learners. We’re in a time of transition now, where much of the business world is in some phase of digital transformation, but not all organizations — or people — are fully digital native.
What does that mean for sales enablement? It means you need to fit your modality to your audience. Some of your sales reps — younger ones, in particular — may be fully comfortable with virtual training, self-paced learning, and navigating online content repositories to find the right content they need when they need it. Others might prefer, or just be used to, in-person learning and working with hard copies of training materials.
The trick is making it work for everyone. Particularly relevant is the question of how to make training work when in-person isn’t an option. Work to identify your team members’ learning styles and the best practices that work for everyone.
Digital technology is an important part of modern sales enablement. We’ve touched upon the power of digitizing your business — a process known as digital transformation — throughout this guide. Leveraging digital technology can make a huge, positive impact on all aspects of your enablement efforts, from content creation and distribution to virtual training sessions.
Digital transformation speaks to the broader vision of leveraging technology to reimagine the way you do business. Just as individual training and sales initiatives work best when they align with broader team and company goals, technology used to power enablement is even more powerful when it’s part of a broader infrastructure that facilitates information sharing and collaboration across the whole organization.
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Every part of the enablement blueprint laid out here rolls up into a master sales enablement plan. That plan, of course, exists within the larger company-wide strategic plan. To reiterate, sales enablement works best when it’s a cross-team effort. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, sales enablement may be a joint effort between sales, marketing, and a dedicated enablement team. Customer support, product, and operations might have some input as well. Whatever the specifics, spell out your sales enablement plan in a document that also explains how it ladders up to broader business goals. Again, something like Salesforce’s V2MOM framework can be quite effective — and efficient — in helping you spell out your plan.
Remember, a sales enablement plan is a living document that’s meant to evolve over time. Revisit the plan regularly, and update as needed to keep your enablement efforts aligned with how your business — and your customer base — is changing over time.
Even the best laid plans don’t mean much if people aren’t buying into them. Getting stakeholders — leadership connected to sales enablement, specifically — to commit to enablement plans is crucial to success. As you create your sales enablement plans, identify key stakeholders from sales and marketing, leadership and management, and anywhere else where buy-in is key. Your stakeholders will drive adoption, spread the word, and generate excitement, all of which are key to the success of enablement programs.
Last but certainly not least on our list is the team. Whether yours is a team of one wearing many hats, or a dedicated group of enablement pros working together with sales leaders, getting the right people in place to drive your agenda is key.
Here’s a pro tip regarding sales enablement: When possible, always have a salesperson or sales leader deliver your trainings and other enablement activities. Why? Other salespeople will listen more carefully to an experienced sales pro than to a “professional trainer” who might not have the same firsthand experience.
