What Are Sales Enablement Frameworks?

What Are Sales Enablement Frameworks?

Sales enablement is considered a bridge between sales and marketing, but in reality, it is much more than that -  it aims to build a framework to ensure sales and marketing align with revenue goals. 

But how do you build a successful sales enablement framework for your business?

One of the most important factors to achieve this is the communication feedback loop between Sales, Operations and Marketing. Without a solid communication strategy, the whole process is doomed to fail. That is why it is vital to understand how each part intervenes in this process.

In this article, we'll show you the different people, processes, and technologies required to build a successful sales enablement framework for your business.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is a strategy that:

  • Identifies inefficient marketing and sales techniques.
  • Provides your sales personnel with the specialised expertise required.
  • Determines when and where your customers are most likely to make a purchase.
  • Enables interaction with a bigger audience.
  • Utilises data-driven strategies to continually improve sales performance.

Sales enablement focuses on your frontline sellers, but its effective implementation is an enterprise-wide endeavour. Employees in every department must realise that closing deals is the ultimate aim; this enables them to provide the appropriate information to your Sales staff.

In contrast, your Sales team must report back to Upper Management, Marketing, and Product Development on areas where the pitch is lacking. The primary purpose of sales enablement is to eliminate these obstacles, as they do not exist in the most productive organisations.

Why Is Sales Enablement Important?

The sale of your products will ensure your company's longevity. It permits the financing of improvements, expansions, and new projects. Doesn’t that sound simple?

You will then realise how important it is to educate your sales team with the right information to properly complete their job – without overextending them.

It Offers A Leadership - Driven Structure

Every aspect of your business, from development to website design, must facilitate the success of your frontline sellers.

It Helps Streamline Your Company's Operations

Communication is key to every business's success. This is a two-way street; management must communicate the organisation's goals effectively. It must provide attainable goals and the information required to accomplish them.

Similarly, your staff must be able to identify and report issues. There should never be an instance where a perplexed employee fails to report an issue.

Communication in both directions is required to streamline your operations. Sales enablement approaches allow your staff to voice problems. It illustrates to Management what information employees need to know and how to present it.

It Makes Your Sales Team's Life Easier

Information overload at the point of sale will hamper sales. This group must have a technique for choosing the most important information to share. This needs data collection, analysis, and presentation in an easily consumable way.

Provide your front-line staff with the required information. Demonstrate how this information will aid them in attaining and surpassing their objectives. It will facilitate their job and increase their appreciation of it.

It Allows You To Share Expertise

Almost all good marketing strategies are data-driven. You must regularly obtain information from your Sales team and all locations where clients may find you. This data may be organised and analysed to identify sales process faults and evaluate potential remedies.

It also facilitates the identification of effective business strategies and their enterprise-wide implementation. Similar to gold mining, troubleshooting involves an awareness of both opportunities and problems.

It Increases Profitability

The end goal of sales enablement is to improve your profitability. It requires no major investment, only cautious management.

Improving reporting procedures is a low-cost undertaking. Data analysis is crucial to the budget of every modern organisation; with sales enablement, you just choose superior data for analysis. Providing your Sales team with the information necessary to qualify and close leads is what provides a high return on investment.

Great companies do not depend on a great product. They can demonstrate every benefit of the product to consumers and persuade them to buy. This is the fundamental tenet of sales enablement.

What Are Sales Enablement Frameworks?

Each company's sales enablement tactics will be tailored to its objectives. When developing their own sales enablement programs, businesses must consider the following:

People

Teams and external organisations were required to support the strategy. Sales enablement is most effective when it is informed by members of cross-functional teams. Each squad contains skills and abilities that complement those of the others. Several examples include:

  • Human Resources/Personnel Groups

The first point of contact for a new Sales or Marketing employee is Human Resources (HR). From application screening and recruitment through onboarding and training, HR plays an essential role in ensuring that new hires have a great onboarding experience.

In businesses with low levels of maturity, HR may be responsible for the ongoing training and development of Sales and Marketing employees. Organisations with a maturity level between moderate and high, may provide training expertise or recommend training technology platforms to support sales enablement activities.

  • Sales/sales operations people

Sales teams and, in organisations with a medium to a high degree of maturity, Sales Operations teams define objectives for all parties engaged in sales enablement.

These teams are ultimately responsible for analysing the performance of sales training and enablement and managing processes to reduce impediments, fill knowledge gaps, and help Sales teams become productive.

  • Marketing

Regardless of the level of company maturity, Marketing teams play a crucial role in sales enablement.

In addition to playing a crucial part in the lead generation process, marketers work closely with Sales teams and attend customer events to have a thorough understanding of the numerous buyers the sales team will face during the buyer journey. Then, they create material that answers important difficulties or questions at various travel stages.

  • External agencies

Frequently, firms outsource the production of sales enablement content to specialised third parties such as Growthly Group.

This allows marketing to watch over lead generation and other operations that generate income. In addition, it provides an expert's perspective on designing and testing customer personas, content mapping, buyer journeys, and sales enablement.

To find out how Growthly Group’s MarSales™ solutions can help your business scale, check out our MarSales™ Product Guide.

Processes

The methods required to combine sales and marketing teams, assign responsibilities, and define targets for monitoring the efficacy of the plan.

Sales enablement guidelines are critical to ensuring roles and responsibilities are clear — especially when sales enablement covers several teams. 

Modern sales are driven by data. But if you lack the knowledge and resources to translate information into useful insights, an abundance of data can be detrimental.

Frequently, Sales teams have a general understanding of which reports are relevant to their business, but they lack the technical knowledge or time to develop and maintain these reports.

This gap may be bridged by professionals in sales enablement who design technology that translates data into a valuable tool for Sales teams. They can create standard reports to help salespeople and management obtain global and granular insights on their progress.

Reports may include:

  • Activities documented by sales personnel
  • Analysis of success/failure
  • Leads generated (who created/influenced them)

Technology

Technologies that facilitate procedures, automate repetitive operations and free up time for high-value sales enablement activities are critical for modern businesses.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, when Sales teams were forced to abandon traditional in-person sales channels and go online, technology has played an ever-increasing role in sales. Among the necessary technologies:

  • CRM

Sales enablement is giving your sellers the support, resources, and technology they need to identify and sell to the correct clients. The majority of organisations do this using their customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The CRM you choose should be robust, user-friendly, and expandable to support your company's development and the maturity of your sales enablement methods.

  • Sales outreach

Contacting new prospects and leads is perhaps the most time-consuming and crucial component of the sales cycle. 

In companies with a medium to a high degree of maturity, sales enablement teams provide salespeople with content such as email templates and marketing materials that they can customise and schedule using these technologies.

In addition, they help sales employees in the execution of their account-based marketing duties.

  • Sales enablement technology

Low- to medium-maturity companies commonly use intranets or file-sharing platforms to organise sales enablement materials, but high-maturity companies equip sales personnel with specialised sales enablement tools.

Final Thoughts

A sales enablement framework can aid in the development of a business case for the necessary resources to build a sales enablement culture.

This is crucial, as once-off training is often unsuccessful. Although 95% of organisations engage in sales training, only 9% see substantial results.

Sales enablement is not a solitary activity. It must be utilised regularly and collaboratively, with the aid of senior teams, for maximum results. Even though enablement has an indirect effect on revenue, businesses with established enablement procedures have better performance indicators than those without enablement practices.