Reporting

The best way to gather insights from business data is to agree on a set of reports that matter to your business. Reporting needs vary from company to company, and we find these are some of the most common reports:

  • Sales tasks & activities
  • Proposals written/demos provided
  • Deals won and lost
  • Leads generated / worked

Reporting can take a lot of time while sucking the life out of your sales force; nothing kills a fresh, hot lead like having to fill out a lenghty spreadsheet about them. A sales enablement strategy will include technology that generates these reports for you, filling-in the blanks on those fresh new leads using information readily available online.

Email

Conversations

Workflows

How sales enablement improves E-mail efficiency:

E-mail is still the most commonly used method of B2B communication. Your sales people can spend as much as 39% of their day writing E-mails. Personalization is important; you'll want your leads and customers to feel unique, not part of some mailing list.

E-mail Templates:

E-mail templating is one way sales enablement can improve the efficiency of your team.  There are several types of common E-mails your team sends out everyday which could be templated using sales enablement technology. Here is a short list of examples:

  • New lead introduction
  • Meeting request
  • Missed appointment follow up
  • Voicemail follow up

E-mail Sequences:

Another way technology can improve sales efficiency is through E-mail sequences: this is a series of E-mails sent to a prospect at preset intervals. These sequences are designed to qualify your leads before your sales team engages them. A sequence can also be used as part of a nurturing campaign, or as a follow-up to a downloaded piece of content. 

 

Using conversations to qualify leads and close deals:

We live in an on-demand world. Customers are now less willing to wait for answers to their questions. They want to gather information on their time and on their terms. This is where conversations and sales enablement meet.

Live Chat and Messaging

Including live chat on your website is a perfect example of using technology to align your sales and marketing efforts. Your website is the responsibility of your marketing team, acting as a "24/7 sales person" who never stops working for you.

Sometimes, your visitors will have questions your website can't answer. Adding live chat or instant messaging to your site will allow your sales team to take over those conversations and close the deal.

Chatbots 

Qualifying website visitors and generating new leads forms an important part of your sales enablement strategy. Incorporating chatbots into your website will help separate the tire kickers from those ready to talk to sales. Your sales team will close deals at a higher velocity once you provide them with hot ready-to-buy leads. 

Incorporating workflows into your sales process:

Any sales process is going to have specific tasks or steps that must occur in order to move the prospect along to the next stage in their buyer's journey. Using technology, some of these tasks can be automated or documented in a workflow.

Workflows

Think of a workflow as a road map that eventually ends with closing a deal. Sometimes, you'll need to send notes and reminders to other team members to keep them informed about the prospect and their progress. Workflows help you organize those tasks to ensure no opportunity falls through the cracks.

SALES WORKFLOWAutomation

Automation occurs once your prospect takes an action which triggers an event. These are If/Then statements built into your process. For example: if your prospect takes ____ action, then your team should do ____ in response. 

Sales enablement uses technology to build those statements and execute them when triggered. 

Content Strategy:

Marketers are not the only content creators on your team. Quite often Sales produces more content than Marketing.

Unfortunately, every minute a sales rep spends creating content is also a minute when they are not selling. Why is your sales team creating content? When sales and marketing teams have different goals, they'll usually create different (and potentially inconsistent) forms of content in an effort to achieve those goals.

Examples of sales content include:

  • Customer case studies
  • Whitepapers and ebooks
  • Product demo decks
  • Pricing and discount information
  • Competitive intelligence briefs

Aligning both your sales and marketing teams with a common goal will enable them to collaborate on consistent content designed with focus and a defined, targeted message.

Quoting to close with sales enablement:

The final, and most important, step in your sales enablement strategy comes when it is time to close the deal. Unfortunately, we find this is also the step where sales teams drop the ball most often. What happens after you send the quote to your prospect is just as important as everything that came before. 

Templating:

Just like E-mail, the quoting process is often repetitive. Most quotes include standard information that is universal among all your quotes. Using a standardized template for these elements will improve efficiency when it comes to creating quotes. 

Software platforms like Proposify, Pandadoc and other proposal writing platforms enable your sales team to generate high quality proposals — a powerful tool in your sales enablement strategy.

Follow-Up Sequence:

Another area where automation and E-mail sequences can help your sales team is by implementing a Quote Follow-Up Sequence.  Whether you write a series of E-mails to follow-up with your prospect, or if you create follow-up tasks in your CRM, your sales team will know exactly what to do next in order to close the deal successfully.