A Definitive Guide To Sales Enablement & 6 Best Practices For Implementation
Master sales enablement with this definitive guide featuring six best practices for boosting your team's efficiency and closing more deals.
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Sales enablement sounds straightforward enough. But when you start to plan and implement a sales enablement strategy, it can feel overwhelming. What does it involve? What does it mean for your business? Who is responsible for sales enablement? What are the practical steps to take to improve sales enablement at your organization? Sales intelligence tools can help you answer these questions and get sales enablement on track at your organization. This article will help you understand sales enablement and how to get started with improving it at your organization.
One way to improve sales enablement at your organization is to use tools like Aomni’s sales intelligence software. This powerful tool helps answer the key questions to sales enablement and allows you to uncover actionable insights to get sales enablement on track at your organization.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement ensures that sales reps are equipped with the latest information about products and services, which helps them match the right solutions to their customers’ needs. This approach provides access to:
- Training
- Playbooks
- Market reports
- Competitive analysis
- Customer insights
This information helps sales teams to be more productive, effective, and impactful in their work.
Why is Sales Enablement Important?
Sales enablement is an essential tool for aligning sales and marketing departments. Through this, marketing teams create content that salespeople use to communicate information about their products and services to their customers. This way, marketing teams produce marketing materials aligned with the customer’s needs, which helps sales teams deliver better and more effective sales pitches.
How Can Technology Help With Sales Enablement?
With technological advancements, sales enablement has become more accessible and efficient. Tools like:
- CRMs
- Sales automation software
Specialized sales enablement platforms empower sales reps to work effectively. These tools provide insights and analytics that reps can use to improve their sales strategy continuously.
What Sales Enablement Isn’t?
While sales enablement definitions may vary depending on specific roles and organizations, it’s crucial to understand that sales enablement is not the same as sales operations or sales training.
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Why is Sales Enablement Important?
Sales is a complex and challenging process. Reps often start each deal with more questions than answers:
- Who are the key stakeholders?
- What strategy will work best?
- How do they guide the conversation toward a solution that matters?
Without the proper guidance, navigating these challenges can feel like shooting in the dark, and missed opportunities can quickly translate to lost revenue.
This is where sales enablement comes into play. It's not just about providing tools or information; it's about empowering your sales team with the resources they need to move prospects smoothly through the sales pipeline, including:
- Education
- Insights
- Strategies
With it, even the best salespeople can close deals efficiently.
The Sales Environment Has Changed—And So Have Buyer Expectations
One key challenge is that sellers are now expected to be experts. According to a June 2022 Salesforce survey, 74% of sellers noted that their roles are becoming more consultative, requiring a deeper understanding of:
- Products
- Market
They’re no longer just selling a product but guiding clients through complex decisions, making product expertise and market knowledge essential for success.
The rise of virtual selling has added another layer of difficulty. The same Salesforce survey found that 58% of sellers find selling virtually more challenging than in-person, yet only 29% have received adequate training on being effective in remote environments. The digital shift requires new skills, and with enablement, sellers may be able to engage prospects as effectively online as they would face-to-face.
Sales Enablement Helps Teams Adapt to Uncertainty and Change
There's even less room for error in today's uncertain economic climate. Sales teams are being asked to do more with less. It’s not just about growth anymore; it's about maximizing effectiveness. Every interaction counts, and enablement provides the resources to help sellers sharpen their approach, streamline processes, and close deals faster.
Effective sales enablement isn’t just a "nice to have." The Harvard Business Review noted, "Enablement in leading organizations is tasked with true capability building—not simply relegated to onboarding and training." It’s about building long-term sales competence, ensuring that teams are always equipped to excel in a rapidly evolving market. With a solid enablement strategy, your sales team is better prepared to navigate challenges and meet the demands of today’s buyers, leading to more closed deals and sustained revenue growth.
Revolutionize Your B2B Sales with Aomni's AI-Powered Intelligence
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
AI-Powered Sales Enablement for Better Results
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to the following:
- Larger deal closures
- Increased promotion opportunities
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to:
- Elevate their performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Try Aomni Today
Our platform transforms the way B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction:
- Fully prepared
- Strategically positioned for success
Our platform transforms how B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction fully prepared and strategically positioned for success.
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
What’s the Difference Between Sales Operations and Enablement?
Sales operations are your boots-on-the-ground team that’s closely aligned with the daily activities of the sales team. They administer an organization’s CRM and help with lead routing so sellers receive leads that fit their territory or solution. The better sales operations perform their duties, the more efficient and productive the sales team will be. Sales operations often work behind the scenes to ensure everything runs smoothly so sales reps can focus on what they do best: selling.
Streamlining Sales Cycles with Effective Enablement
Sales enablement strategically aligns people and technology behind a common goal: sales success. It helps organizations streamline sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with better, more relevant sales content and equipping sales teams with the tools they need to be more informed and productive sellers.
When appropriately executed, sales enablement has a measured impact on:
- Time spent selling
- Win rates
- Deal size
Enablement vs. Sales Training
While sales enablement and training empower and equip sellers with the skills and resources they need to perform, they must be used in various ways. Sales training teaches skills, information, and strategies that will help them close deals. This takes form in onboarding and ongoing sales training, and it’s just one small piece of the larger enablement landscape.
How Does Sales Enablement Benefit Organizations?
Alignment: Sales Enablement Connects Your Teams
Sales enablement creates alignment between sales and other departments, such as:
- Marketing
- Customer success
This process helps sales reps understand the following:
- How each team contributes to the sale
- What their goals are
- How to leverage them to close deals
For example, suppose a sales rep learns that a prospect uses a particular tool to manage their business. In that case, they can bring in the product development team to see if they can integrate their solution with the prospect's already-used ones. This will help the seller:
- Personalize the conversation
- Demonstrate how their offering can ease the prospect’s pain points
Sales enablement also provides prospects a more cohesive buying experience by creating better team communication and collaboration.
Consistency: Sales Enablement Creates a Standardized Approach
Sales enablement creates consistency in sales processes by helping sellers learn the ins and outs of products and services. This includes understanding the features and benefits of:
- Solutions
- Company’s unique selling proposition (USP)
Sales enablement doesn’t stop at presenting this information to sales reps. Instead, it provides the resources and tools they need to develop personalized pitches that reflect this foundational knowledge. By diversifying their approach, sales reps can:
- Better connect with buyers
- Create more meaningful conversations
Efficiency: Sales Enablement Makes Your Team More Productive
The payoff of sales enablement is that sellers can use their time more wisely and productively. With everything they need to know about the product in front of them, they can focus their energy on developing the types of relationships that close deals. Add sales enablement software with real-time success metrics, and sellers can more easily tie their training to their daily work.
Sales Enablement Creates Stronger Sales Data
Many of the tools geared toward selling B2B products specialize in data:
- Collecting it
- Organizing it
- Activating it for the sales team
Insights around buyer preferences, pain points, and personas help sellers reach prospects with a more tailored approach.
Sales Enablement Increases Deal Velocity
With better data and tools at their disposal, sales reps tend to have quicker access to what they need, and as a result, are more “sales ready” leading to more fruitful conversations, a smoother buying process, and a better win rate.
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What Are the Elements of a Sales Enablement Strategy?
Data-Driven Reporting and Analysis: Transforming Sales Data Into Actionable Insights
Managing information efficiently is essential to increase productivity in today's data-centric sales environment. Sales enablement professionals develop systems to streamline data usage, turning it into a strategic asset.
There are several ways to ensure data is leveraged effectively:
Standardizing Reports
Sales leaders should define which reports are essential for tracking sales performance, such as:
- Logged activities
- Product demos
- Deals won and lost
- Leads generated
Standardized reports help surface critical insights to improve decision-making.
Sales Process Audits
When discrepancies in sales performance arise, an audit can identify weak points in the sales process. For example, a high volume of product demos with a low conversion rate suggests issues with the demo strategy.
Lead Qualification
Reps often waste time on leads that could be a better fit. By introducing lead scoring systems, businesses can prioritize prospects more likely to convert, using CRM tools to filter ideal leads from less qualified ones.
Maximizing the Impact of Sales Content: Getting the Most Out of Your Sales Materials
While marketing teams traditionally create content, sales teams generate valuable materials, such as customer case studies and product information. It is crucial to ensure that sales content is optimized without consuming too much selling time.
Here's how to achieve that:
Organize Content for Easy Access
Conduct a content audit to centralize:
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Pricing information
- Other sales-related materials
A well-organized content library saves time and allows reps to deliver tailored resources to prospects quickly.
Create Compelling Case Studies
Case studies provide tangible proof of your product's value. Aim to develop at least one case study for any new product within six months of its release. Studies suggest four times as many buyers prefer video content over written formats, so leveraging video case studies can further boost engagement.
Develop Email Templates
HubSpot's state of inbound sales report indicates email is the second most effective way for sales reps to connect with prospects. Standardized templates with customizable fields help reps quickly personalize outreach without sacrificing efficiency.
Leveraging Technology and Automation for Efficiency: Using Sales Tools to Boost Team Productivity
The evolution of sales technology has significantly reduced the manual burden on sales teams. Automation tools enhance productivity, allowing reps to focus on engaging with qualified prospects:
Automated Email Sequences
Automating follow-up emails can save time and ensure no leads slip through the cracks. By including personalization tokens, these emails feel customized to the recipient without requiring individual effort.
Prospecting Automation
Automated prospecting tools send pre-built emails and include links to reps’ calendars, enabling prospects to book meetings directly. This streamlines the scheduling process, allowing reps to maximize their time with ready-to-buy customers.
Live Chat and Direct Messaging
Reps can engage with potential buyers in real-time via live chat on your website. Filtering criteria ensure that only high-quality leads access this feature, optimizing rep time and increasing conversion opportunities.
Use Sales Enablement Software: Centralize and Organize Your Sales Resources
Sales enablement software lets your team manage your materials and content from a central location. Sales enablement software solutions provide you with the ability to manage your materials and resources with ease, including:
- Create
- Share
- Edit
- Manage
All of your reps can access the information here at any time, allowing your marketing team to easily collaborate with sales on the content they create and share with prospects and customers.
Here are six commonly used sales enablement software options:
1. Aomni
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Aomni empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research.
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
2. HubSpot
HubSpot's free CRM! provides your business with a complete view of your sales pipeline and access to various marketing creation tools. It connects all your sales and marketing efforts, so collaboration between cross-teams and sales enablement is easy.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk allows your reps to track every interaction with a prospect throughout the buyer's journey. This makes it easy to track which sales enablement resources and tools they use and which they could incorporate in future interactions to close deals.
4. Highspot
Highspot allows your reps to customize different guided experiences and conversations for customers so they can provide them with valuable and relevant information that suits their specific needs. The software integrates with your marketing content and information and your other sales tools to make all aspects of the sales enablement process easy.
5. Outreach
Outreach brings together your efforts across teams, allowing you to share insights and content, including:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer success
The software allows you to optimize your customer lifecycle, focus on engagement, and collaborate at scale to close deals effectively.
6. Seismic
Seismic makes it easy for your sales and marketing teams to collaborate seamlessly. This way, they can create and share various sales enablement content to effectively reach and convert more leads into customers. The software uses artificial intelligence to simplify the entire sales cycle for reps as much as possible.
Empowering Your Sales Team with the Right Tools: Understanding the Importance of Sales Enablement Resources
Providing sales teams with the appropriate resources ensures they can close deals more efficiently and effectively. Regular communication between sales and marketing teams ensures reps access to up-to-date content and technology that aligns with evolving customer needs. When teams collaborate seamlessly, your business will likely experience increased revenue, a growing customer base, and stronger brand loyalty.
How To Perform Sales Enablement
Sales enablement has many moving parts and touches multiple teams within an organization. For this reason, getting buy-in from leadership and other key stakeholders is imperative before you begin. Start by aligning with executives to understand the business’s goals and current challenges. Go on a listening tour to discover your sales team's pain points. From here, focus on getting everyone on board with your sales enablement initiatives. When sales reps understand how the process can help them, they’ll be more likely to embrace the changes.
Who Owns Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement has become a crucial asset in helping organizations boost revenue. But who owns sales enablement? The honest answer depends on the organization and its specific needs. As sales enablement has become more prevalent in today’s organizations, assigning responsibilities appropriately is essential. Depending on your organization's particular needs, ownership will be slightly tailored based on:
- Resources
- Headcount
- Goals
- Priorities
Sales: The Best Approach for Improving Communication and Collaboration
A sales-owned approach is best for organizations that want to improve:
- Readiness
- Collaboration
Empowering Sales Leadership for Enhanced Success
Letting sales own the overall initiative provides the added benefit of making the department feel more responsible for ensuring success. In a sales-owned configuration, sales will set the overall tone for strategy regarding how sales and marketing can collaborate.
Sales Enablement Teams: A Neutral Third-Party
Many organizations have built specific sales enablement teams and are hiring more sales enablement specialists than in previous years. Only some organizations will have the resources to make this function, but if sales enablement is a long-term strategic play, starting with a new function can set you up for future success.
Depending on the organization's size, creating a standalone sales enablement team or manager creates a neutral third party. The sales enablement role or department:
- Sets expectations
- Owns projects
- It makes things more manageable for stakeholders
Ideal Candidates for Sales-Owned Enablement
This approach is best for organizations already running with sales enablement and wanting to continue to grow, organizations that are ready to invest in sales enablement and see it as a long-term investment, and organizations that want a neutral party to help foster sales and marketing alignment.
Marketing: The Content Creators Turned Sales Enablement Owners
By embarking on a sales enablement strategy, a marketing team commits to revamping their entire relationship with content. They acknowledge that their content needs to:
- Be easier to find
- Speak more directly to buyers’ needs
- Enable sales to create their own approved, personalized content
- Prove its ROI
Allowing marketing to own a sales enablement initiative is best suited for organizations that want to improve sales and marketing alignment and unlock new efficiency in their entire content process.
When Is the Right Time To Implement a Sales Enablement Strategy? What Are Some Best Practices?
Timing is Everything: When to Implement Sales Enablement
Sales enablement isn't just a nice-to-have. It's a critical component of your growth strategy. Some company and sales leaders would say from the beginning. Even if you don't have a dedicated department due to a lack of resources, you should still have a plan for attaining one.
Starting Sales Enablement Without a Dedicated Department
You can begin incorporating sales enablement efforts without a dedicated sales enablement department and then tie that integration to a growth plan. Some companies find that over time, the individual helping with sales implementation and enablement efforts as a side responsibility ends up devoting more and more hours to the practice.
The Importance of Investing in Sales Enablement
The insights and data-driven results speak to the value of investing in the process. You need to remain competitive, especially when so much content is available for consumption and the speed of its output keeps climbing. Being aware of and investing in sales enablement capabilities is critical to building a sustainable business.
Sales Enablement Best Practices: Setting Your Strategy Up for Success
While implementing your sales enablement strategy, combine them with the following sales enablement best practices to ensure a solid foundation for success:
Strategic Alignment
We’ll start with strategic alignment to ensure that you have clear objectives for your organization’s sales enablement efforts. First, know who is responsible for which parts of the process. Ensure your entire team is on board, from the CEO to the newest sales intern. Go-to-market alignment is the secret sauce to executing high-impact sales enablement.
Updated Sales Content
When exploring your assets, ensure all the content is accessible to the necessary stakeholders. Audit the material regularly and update it as needed and in a reasonable amount of time. Remove your old content so that no one uses it by mistake. Verify that all messaging is current on all external materials and that internal materials consistently reflect the company's culture.
Sales Enablement Roadmap
Highlight appropriate steps on the process map to ensure you start with the processes that work for your company’s strategy. With a map, you can scale efficiently as your organization grows, improve sales productivity, and increase win rates. A solid foundation guarantees that performance will increase. As your company expands, you can incorporate more complex tools and technology.
Connect Enablement and Customer Data with a CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is your fuel. It gives you visibility into your data to see how individual reps perform. Track sellers as they hit enablement milestones toward their sales quota, and see how their behaviors affect your top-line goal.
Leveraging Technology and Data for Enhanced Sales Coaching
Bring in technology that helps you better use your data. You can find solutions that use automation and AI to coach sellers based on that data. Then, train your sales reps in ways that work for their unique learning styles, giving them the information they need when needed.
Onboard Sellers in the Flow of Their Work
In traditional onboarding, training tools are disconnected from the CRM (think stand-alone content libraries). Today, the best practice is to get reps selling even as they’re onboarding and learning because speeding up ramp time will speed up revenue. When you do both in parallel, reps can check off milestones, like activities completed and meetings booked, as they move customers through the pipeline.
Train Your Reps in Bites, Not Feasts
Stop providing sellers with enormous volumes of material. They get overwhelmed. Create bite-size learning modules and serve them up at just the correct times. For example, a new rep who needs to send a quote to a customer could receive a CRM alert with easy-to-follow guidance on getting the quote out the door faster and following up.
What Are Some of The Biggest Challenges To Sales Enablement?
Marketing, sales, and other departments must be more consistent and in sync. This disconnection can result in less-than-ideal content and, consequently, decreased sales performance. Nevertheless, the pitfalls of not moving forward with a sales enablement strategy will have a higher impact.
Sellers who are not aligned, modeling top behavior, or practicing consistently can weigh down an organization’s revenue. This can be rectified with a sales enablement initiative and by using a sales enablement platform to drive the process. Without a sales enablement platform program, your sales team will suffer three common pitfalls.
A Fragmented Sales Approach
Without a sales enablement platform, your sales team might take a scattershot approach to the sales process. In the field, especially in B2B, buyers want short, accessible pitch decks and information.
Bridging the Gap Between Resources and Sales Needs
Sales teams use the tools and materials they can find but aren’t always asking for, using, or even aware of the latest organizational resources. This creates a gap between what the organization produces, what the buyer wants, and what the sales team uses. A more robust marketing and sales alignment strategy can correct this.
Inconsistencies Across Departments
It always comes back to alignment. Lack of consistency across departments results in a watered-down culture and ineffective branding. If the sales team does not consistently represent the business, how can you expect to support the buyer’s journey effectively? How can you communicate your message to the buyer in a way that results in high win rates for your company? You can’t.
The Dreaded Lack of Sales
A cohesive approach and a consistent culture can result in a prolonged sales cycle, missed sales forecasts, and unimpressive numbers. Without sales, you can’t run a successful business. That’s why you must know what you want to say to buyers and ensure everyone is aligned with that message.
The Checkbox Activity Trap
With their explosive popularity, many sales enablement platforms were created with too much of a focus on completing certifications or ticking checkboxes rather than true skills learning and training. For your sales enablement process to be successful, your teams need to engage and learn from each other consistently, preferably daily. If your sales enablement platform is not driving interaction, modeling, and pitch practice, it will not help your team.
Related Reading
Try Our Sales Intelligence Software for Free Today
Aomni is an AI agent platform specifically designed for B2B sales intelligence software, empowering enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unmatched efficiency and effectiveness.
Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for simplified sales processes
- AI-assisted Account-Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
Empowering Sales Teams to Overcome Performance Challenges
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly improve their preparation for customer conversations, leading to more oversized deal closures and increased promotion opportunities.
Enhancing Individual Sales Professional Success with Aomni
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to boost performance, close bigger deals, and fast-track career growth. Our platform transforms B2B sales teams, ensuring they are fully prepared and strategically positioned for success in every customer interaction.
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
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