In this blog, Devin Jones, Account Director at Huble Digital discusses the tools that can be used for sales enablement. These are of importance as sales people need to be equipped with the appropriate resources to be able to sell more effectively.
First off, what is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is made up of the processes, content and technology that empowers a sales team to sell efficiently and at a higher velocity. It is a repeatable series of steps — tweaked and improved upon in each cycle — that provide sales personnel with the resources they need to win more business.
The common thread between these resources is that they all work together, helping your salespeople sell your products or services to customers more effectively.
But working together is just the start. To truly empower your sales team, you need the right tools and strategies.
Who benefits from sales enablement tools?
Any company looking to grow its customer base through sales should have Inbound-focused sales enablement practices in place.
Having a clear idea of why, when and how your sales team sells products and services to prospects helps to convert the right leads at the right time. It also ensures a higher probability of those prospects becoming customers.
To achieve this, marketing and sales must work together to create a strategy that retains and maintains the interest of potential customers. That said, what tools can help in the process?
Using HubSpot to transform your end-to-end sales process
Using powerful software like HubSpot’s Sales Hub Enterprise arms your sales team with easy-to-use tools to assist them with sales enablement. By linking to HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Service Hub, Sales Hub Enterprise gives your sales team a greater chance of converting marketing leads to customers and helps your CRM team manage relationships going forward.
With Sales Hub Enterprise, connecting with prospects has never been easier. The platform gives you access to templates, sequences, tasks, email scheduling, canned snippets, documents, and more, to maximise the efficiency of your team's outreach.
Also, features like standardised reporting and lead analysis, sales content optimisation, automatic lead rotation, automated email sequences, sales enablement software and website visit notifications give salespeople on-the-fly data about prospects so they can close them quicker.
Align sales and marketing goals with an interactive lead goal calculator
While marketing bread-and-butter strategies like blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and other forms of content excel at building awareness and generating leads, they rarely close deals on their own. For that, you need a driven sales team equipped with lead-generating content.
But what types of content should you be creating for your sales team? And how can you make sure they use it? Let’s delve deeper.
Content for lead generation
If your content is generating leads, wouldn’t you want your sales reps to know as much about that content as possible? Wouldn’t you want them to know what kinds of leads the content is generating, including the topic of the content and its likely audience?
Of course! Having this knowledge will give your sales reps more context and help them to nurture leads and close sales more frequently.
For this reason, you should always share your content with your sales team. The easiest way to give them access to this content would be to create a library that contains all of the latest collateral. Once they have access, they can share that content via email or LinkedIn to reach potential prospects.
Here are a few examples of content that helps your sales team to generate leads:
1) Question-based content
One of the best ways to create blog content is to listen to the questions your customers ask.
And the easiest way to find out what questions are being asked is to ask your sales reps.
These blogs work incredibly well because they immediately address the concerns of existing customers and potential prospects. Your salespeople can readily share these assets via social media or email and get in front of the right people.
2) Gated content
Likewise, when marketing and sales don’t communicate, there’s a good chance the primary mechanism for lead generation (whitepapers and eBooks) will miss the mark. By regularly consulting with your sales team, you can help ensure that this doesn’t happen.
Focus on creating gated content that provides insights that cannot be found elsewhere or tackle a specific problem your prospects and/or customers have in incredible detail.
3) Case studies
Salespeople love to have good references to share with prospects, so make sure to refresh your case study library regularly.
Content for internal sales support
Sales teams are often underprepared when it comes to garnering the interest of a potential customer. To mitigate this, it’s worth investing time in the following:
1) Sales scripts
There’s nothing worse than a salesperson who reads a script line-by-line to a prospect. That said, you do want your sales team to hit the right conversation points during a sales call. Creating sales scripts that are similar to ‘talking points’ will go a long way towards making your reps sound more like humans and less like parrots.
2) Product sheets
This is another asset that’s useful for both the sales rep and the prospect — the product sheet.
This piece of content should answer at least some of the following questions:
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Who is the product for?
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What does it do?
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How does it help?
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How much does it cost?
Having a readily available sheet that lists your brand’s core products and services is essential for any initial meeting with a prospect.
3) Competitor comparisons
Sales reps should be aware of what the competition is offering and how their brand can differentiate itself. It’s important to understand why your company is the best and summarise this information in an easy-to-view format. With this kind of collateral, your sales team will increase their conversion odds significantly.
Content for sales conversions
As noted, not all sales content is meant to stay in-house. Here are some examples of content that should be delivered by the sales team itself:
1) Emails
Apart from the company newsletter, a marketing department will want to equip its sales team with templates for several different occasions.
There should be follow-up emails, outreach emails, check-in emails, and more. Ideally, a canned email should exist for every type of customer or prospect interaction.
2) One-pagers
This form of sales collateral is a fast and easy way for prospects to view what services the brand provides and whether or not the brand's product can solve their pain point.
3) Presentations
Customer slide decks should always be a joint production. When marketing does it all, the content can miss the mark in terms of what drives conversions. When sales do it all, the decks often lack context and consistency. While marketing should take the lead in generating this content, they must do so with heavy input from sales.
4) Social messages
Although social media isn’t immediately thought of as a sales tool, sales reps need to interact with prospects via social media, so be sure to provide them with some suggested tweets and LinkedIn messages.
The fact is that in today’s world, social selling has become an integral part of the modern sales process. Providing your sales reps with tools to reach out, monitor conversations and target potential prospects or partiers via social media is crucial.
Where to focus your resources and energy
Ultimately, the content produced by your marketing department must serve the business. The best way to ensure this happens is by focusing more of your energy on creating content that’s geared towards the sales department.
The HubSpot CRM automates the nagging tasks that distract sales reps from selling. It is the ultimate customer relationship building tool, allowing reps to get an up-to-the-minute view of their entire sales funnel on a clean, visual interface.
Why should you work with Huble Digital?
Huble Digital is the premier, go-to digital consultancy for all your sales, CRM and Inbound Marketing needs.
We solve sales problems by building robust, end-to-end processes using the latest technologies. We can revise your sales lead management, pipelines, architecture and more to maximise your productivity and efficiency.
But that’s not all. We can also deploy tools to help you get a better understanding of your overall activities — from what’s working to what’s not. From there, we can identify areas of opportunity, as well as siloes and bottlenecks, to develop a sales enablement strategy that empowers your reps with what they need to get leads over the line.
If you want to find out more about how we can help you to transform your sales processes, check out our sales services. Not only do we solve problems through building an optimal sales process with sales, CRM and pipeline management architecture and maximise productivity with the latest sales technology implemented to support your sales processes, but we can also unleash tools to improve efficiency, transparency and reporting on sales activities.
Through the evaluation of existing sales processes and technology to identify areas of opportunity, siloes and bottlenecks, Huble can assist in the planning and roll out of a sales enablement strategy that empowers sales with the right tools, data, and content to consistently get leads over the line.
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