3 Uncommon Ways to Improve Your Sales Enablement

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Last week, I discussed how important digital orchestration is for digital transformation. One of the key areas of B2B marketing that is directly impacted by orchestration is sales enablement. Today, I share 3 relatively uncommon ways to improve your sales enablement.

Want to see your business case to invest in sales enablement improvement? We’ve developed the Sales Enablement Optimizer to see just that. Let me know your thoughts on the calculator in the Buzz community.

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3 Uncommon Ways to Improve Your Sales Enablement

As B2B marketing leaders we have a tendency to undervalue Sales Enablement since it isn’t one of the most glamorous parts of marketing. Yet, if done right, sales enablement is one of the most impactful parts of B2B marketing that can drive pipeline, revenue acceleration, and ultimately incremental revenue.

To deliver sales enablement effectively, however, is challenging to say the least. So in this article, I discuss a few simple ways to improve your sales enablement to drive business outcomes.

Way #1: Unconventional Intelligence

An overlooked component of sales enablement is sales intelligence management. That is the practice of empowering your brand’s sales team with insights to improve their ability to drive deal flow and closes. While providing the sales team with current news, industry knowledge and executive changes at prospects / customers creates value — it’s tactical. Still beneficial, but tactical.

But there is a large layer of intelligence that can be gleaned from your own go to market systems that can greatly improve your sales team’s ability to sell. Programs like content consumption intelligence, firmographic “innovation” indices and social listening intelligence, competitive insights, and so on. Using these unconventional approaches to better understand a prospect or prospect’s firm can not only empower your sales team to sell better, but also provide your firm a competitive advantage in the sales and marketing process.

Way #2: Sales Enablement as a Service

Typically, most B2B marketers I talk with believe sales enablement is strictly empowering the sales team with collateral for the sales process. While that is part of it, it is only the tip of the iceberg. Sales Enablement really encompasses all the ways that marketing can support sales at scale. Whether it’s intelligence as seen above, or providing the tools and content for social selling, or supporting sales at events, B2B marketers enable sales in many ways.

But one of the missed opportunities I see with sales enablement is delivering sales enablement “as a service”. This is especially true for large B2B brands that have large sales forces. Burning your marketing teams’s time on “building decks” isn’t a good use of their time. But creating systems that empower the sales team to be self-sufficient can create compounding business value for the organization long term. And free up your marketing team to focus on more strategic opportunities.

Way #3: Competitive Intelligence

On the consulting side of my life, when I walk into large B2B marketing organizations, more often than not, one of the biggest gaps in the marketing efforts I see is a lack of a competitive intelligence program. From a sales enablement perspective, it isn’t simply knowing what your competition is doing in the market, using benchmark reports to see how your firm stacks up to your competitive set, etc. But empowering the sales team with tools and guidance to use this intelligence in the day to day process of selling.

As an example, last year a project I worked on was to help a new ad sales organization get launched. The market the client was in was highly competitive. Intelligence about the competition was instrumental in helping drive success in the sales process. Understanding what your competition is up to is key to help a member of the sales team position your firm and manage a prospect’s objections. But more importantly, sellers need to be trained on what the insight is and how to use it. So the real lesson here is not just have competitive intelligence, but spend the time and effort to train the team on how to use comp-intel effectively in their day to day.

What are your thoughts on ways to improve sales enablement? Let me know your thoughts on the calculator and this article in the Buzz community.

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