What is Sales Enablement Marketing? A Simple Guide to Growing Smarter

Growing has its pains. Sales enablement eases them. 

We know how difficult business growth can be. It’s why we work with clients of all sizes to identify and implement strategies to grow smarter. The goal is to make business growth as painless as possible! After all, you have a business to run and customers to please while you’re working to get to the next level. That’s why we wrote this blog. We’ll guide you through some simple steps you can take right now to grow your business smarter, close more deals, and get that full eight hours of sleep a night that you’ve been missing. 

In this blog you will:

• Discover why team morale is vital to successful sales and collaboration
• Gain a high-level overview of sales content optimization 
• Review how automation and technology close leads and streamline processes

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is all about providing your sales and marketing teams with the resources they need to work together and close more deals.

Your marketing team needs to provide your sales team with the assets and leads they need to close deals. But what your sales team needs to understand is that the information needs to flow both ways! Sales efforts can and should inform ongoing marketing strategies and communication. This is the heart of sales enablement. For even more info on sales enablement, read our blog post, How to Align Sales and Marketing: Why Sales Enablement Drives Revenue and Delights Your Customers.

Sales Enablement is a Team Effort

Morale is just as important as a rock-solid sales pitch. Your team must be on the same page, have clear expectations of their roles, and trust their coworkers. Part of the sales enablement puzzle is assigning meaningful accountability and ownership to every step of the process. Sure, sales enablement is primarily owned by your sales team. No surprise there. But sales enablement doesn’t start and stop with sales. It’s a collaborative, company-wide effort from top to bottom. 

Some businesses may only have a single employee responsible for sales enablement implementation. Others, depending on scale and size, may have an entire sales enablement department committed to teamwork and optimization. 

The typical sales enablement team handles a wide range of responsibilities, including but not limited to: 

• Client and team onboarding
• Training curriculum development and implementation
• Continuous improvement, reporting, and optimization 
• Internal and external sales communications 
• Coordination of sales communication between internal departments
• Measuring and reporting of sales enablement practices 

A productive, healthy sales enablement team exists to support customers, not your business. The goal of any successful engagement is to coordinate marketing, sales and service to attract, engage, and delight. Happy customers mean happy bosses. Happy bosses? Happy teams. Everyone wins.

Sales enablement streamlines this process for your team. No guesswork, no friction. Just a replicable, data-driven strategy that scales as you grow. 

Here is a pro tip for building the best sales enablement team: develop a supportive, process-led environment for your team. This means providing guidance, training, and mentorship opportunities for your staff. Develop a robust onboarding process for new hires. Make them feel supported, involved, engaged, and challenged to grow. Listen, understand, build.

Optimize Your Existing Sales Content

Marketing, sales, and fulfillment teams should not be siloed. Your sales team should be communicating with your content creators, producing and optimizing content that closes leads and delights your audience for the entirety of the customer journey. You’d be surprised: at some companies, sales teams develop just as much, if not more, content than marketing. 

That sounds counterintuitive, right? But stick with me here. 

Optimizing your sales content for marketing is the answer to most content creation problems. This process saves you time and keeps your sales team focused on selling what succeeds.

Organize sales content in a robust content library

Develop and execute a content audit to bolster your sales enablement strategy. You already have high-quality sales content on your website. It’s time for it to shine. Instead of sitting on your website hoping customers will see it, centralize your existing sales content in one content library that anyone on your team can access and share at any stage of the sales process.

A content library is simpler than it sounds. You probably use one every day. At Sauce, we leverage HubSpot’s CRM and Google Suite to sell, communicate, and complete work every single day.

Not sure what types of content can be optimized for your sales strategy? We’ve got you covered:

• Case studies: communicate the success you’ve achieved for your previous clients. REMEMBER: Less is more. Stick to the basics—Identify client need, address the problem, present the solution, and back all of it up with data. Case studies are one of the most effective options to build trust and develop a working relationship.
  
  
• Whitepapers and ebooks: long-form content is perfect for SEO and lead generation. It’s even better to illustrate value to a prospect in the middle of the sales funnel.
  
  
• Product demos: See before you buy. Or, in some cases, try before you buy. Sometimes all your lead needs is a guide to help them through a sale.

Automate essential tasks with capable software solutions

Marketing is hard. Selling seems impossible sometimes. Don’t try either with your hands tied behind your back. 

Sales and marketing veterans know the legwork and manual labor that went into traditional sales. But now, times are changing! Essential services that once were tedious can now be automated. Work once mundane is now streamlined. 

Automation and technology turn your tired, slow sales team into conversion machines. Here are three examples of how that happens:

1. Automated email sequencing

Sales teams are the LeBron James of sending emails. But even LeBron needed a little help to win. Your sales team needs some too. That’s where email sequencing comes in. If a lead hasn’t responded to sales communication in a few days, an automatic email sequence kicks in and keeps that lead warm and engaged. You can use personalization tokens, custom design tools, and contact information to tailor any email sequence to that specific lead. Pretty nifty, huh?

2. Direct live messaging on your website

Say your ideal prospect is comparing your offering with a competitor’s. The products are almost identical and the prospect is deciding who will solve their problem. Just as they're about to leave your site, a chat window pops up with the offer to chat with a real human to answer any and all questions. The prospect decides to respond and ultimately sets up a call with your sales team to discuss your product further.

And it’s all thanks to direct live messaging. 

Engage prospects and close deals in real-time with an effective, functional chat feature. This isn’t a chatbot. This is a human connection. That’s powerful stuff. A direct live message feature on your site tells your visitors that they matter. Live chat is effective because it gives you the opportunity to show your prospects that you understand their pain and you’re available to guide them toward the solution that best solves their problem.

3. Use sales enablement software

Automation can be intimidating. But believe us when we say it’s easier than it seems. A fast, simple way to implement and execute effective action is to invest in sales enablement software.

This is your content library and then some. Sales enablement software empowers your team to centralize and manage everything they need in one place. Create and collaborate with ease. Communicate with clarity. Build trust and grow as a team. That’s what sales enablement software does for hundreds of thousands of teams around the world. And it’ll do the same for you. 

At Sauce Agency, we leverage HubSpot’s powerful CRM as our primary sales enablement software. Our sales pipeline and creative team run entirely through HubSpot, connecting everything we need when we need it. 

Interested in learning more about HubSpot and how sales enablement streamlines your sales process? Let's talk! And in the meantime, start identifying and eliminating friction fires in your organization—download the free tool below!