What Is Sales Enablement? How Important Is It?

Sales enablement has evolved into a critical initiative for any organization that wants to improve its sales performance and drive revenue growth. By investing in sales enablement, organizations can empower their sales teams to be more successful and achieve their goals.

While sales enablement technology is proven to increase revenue by 66%, thought:

93% of companies have yet to implement a sales enablement platform.

Mediafly

This is often due to the myths that sales enablement is expensive, complex to deploy, and has low adoption rates. Before diving into the benefits of a sales enablement platform and what it does, let’s first dive into what sales enablement is and why it’s important. 

What Is Sales Enablement? 

Sales enablement is a strategic approach focused on providing sales teams with the resources they need to engage with prospects and customers effectively throughout the sales cycle. It encompasses a range of activities, content, tools, and training aimed at empowering sales representatives to have more informed and productive interactions.  

Key Elements of Sales Enablement Include:

• Content: Providing sales reps with relevant and up-to-date content such as presentations, brochures, case studies, blog posts, and videos to share with prospects and customers.  
• Training: Equipping sales reps with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively sell products or services, including product knowledge, sales techniques, and communication skills.  
• Coaching: Providing ongoing guidance and feedback to sales reps to help them improve their performance and develop their skills.  
• Tools: Providing sales reps access to tools that can help them streamline their workflow and improve their productivity, such as CRM systems, sales intelligence platforms, and content management systems.  

So what does that actually mean? 

If you think of your salesforce in the context of a bell curve, imagine moving your average sellers from the bottom of the bell curve to the top with your top performers. Sales enablement aims to move your average sellers from the bottom to the top to get them to start selling like top performers. Your new or average sellers may lack the knowledge or charisma to execute the value-based sales presentations your top performers do with every buyer.

Having the right sales enablement technology in place allows your new and average sellers to see what’s working with top sellers to help elevate their sales success. At Mediafly, we call this evolution of a sales organization Evolved Selling™.

Why Do You Need Sales Enablement?

Simply put, buyers have changed.

Up to 70% of the information B2B buyers see is self-discovered online, not given to them by a sales rep.

6Connex

When a buyer connects with a seller, expectations are high. They don’t want to hear a pitch about the product’s features and functions. Instead, they seek out personalized and engaging buying experiences, allowing them to understand what unique challenges your product or service solves and how it will help them achieve their financial goals. 

With this change in buyer behavior, sellers need to go beyond a stagnant PowerPoint presentation. Instead, they need the technology to pivot on the spot, providing real-time information to build trust with their buyer and ultimately close the deal. Sales enablement technology does just that.

Sales enablement solutions are the top technology investment for boosting sales productivity. Report data shows that 59% of companies that surpassed revenue targets – and 72% that exceed them by 25% or more – have a defined sales enablement function. 

Forbes

What Should A Sales Enablement Platform Do?

While there are many capabilities in a sales enablement platform, we at Mediafly, believe a sales enablement platform should provide sellers with the following:

• The ability to quickly find relevant, up-to-date content, including videos, interactive tools, and slides for use in conversations with buyers 
• The ability to easily pivot in sales conversation to meet the buyer’s exact needs, creating a personalized and unique experience for the buyer 
• Interactive tools, including ROI, TCO, and value-selling calculators, and product configurators, capturing input from the buyer to help guide sales discussions
• The ability to pull real-time data from various sources, helping address the buyer’s unique challenges
• Data and analytics on how content is performing, buyer-specific data-driven insights to move deals forward and insights into how content is being leveraged by sales and consumed by prospects
• Integration with CRM to help effortlessly craft meeting follow-up messaging and reference materials used in previous meetings 

These capabilities set buyers at any level up for success. Unfortunately, sales enablement technology is often perceived as expensive, complicated, and risky. But it doesn’t have to be. All sales teams or sales organizations are on their own sales enablement journey.

With no one journey alike, organizations must take the time to work with their sales enablement provider to create a platform that is uniquely specific to their organization’s needs. 

Recently, Mediafly acquired iPresent to help provide sales enablement for all. Through this acquisition, we can deliver the most comprehensive and agile sales enablement solution to businesses of any size, removing the enterprise-level cost and implementation hurdles many companies feel intimidated by when purchasing sales enablement technology. 

If you’re debating purchasing sales enablement technology but are concerned about implementation, time commitment, etc., take smaller steps toward your goal. Always remember this is a journey. By incorporating sales enablement technology, you can stop watching your average sellers struggle to meet their goals and, in turn, watch your entire sales team prosper.