Successful onboarding means new recruits stay with us and develop their skills more quickly! Do you want to effectively integrate your new sales reps employees? Do you want them to feel confident and [...]
The Sales Enablement application, also known as a sales support tool, has become an indispensable element for all companies looking to align their Sales & Marketing teams in time [...]
In France, only 43% of companies consider their Marketing and Sales departments to be aligned (CMIT 2022 study). This figure is slightly higher than in 2021. The relationship [...]
B2B sales continue to evolve, offering new opportunities to companies that know how to adapt. Attracting and retaining sales reps customers, adapting to increasingly complex sales, [...]
Sales Enablement is a growing discipline. While the function is fully embodied in the U.S. and U.K., it is beginning to catch up and gain momentum [...]
Marketing departments, regardless of strategy, continue to face rapidly changing B2B buying behaviors, with more empowered and informed buyers, and competition [...]
A look back at the memorable ActionCO 2022 Awards ceremony The winners were announced last night! The evening spotlighted the best sales initiatives of the year.
The Marketing Day was back for a 9th edition with the theme "desire, a driving force for marketing". A day rich in testimonies where more than 40 speakers gathered to [...]
When we talk about Sales Enablement, we tend to highlight mainly the benefits related to the sales force. What about the marketing side? How does it [...]
Successfully aligning sales and marketing is a key step for those wishing to improve their sales performance. While good intentions are there, the reality on the ground is often [...]
The digital transformation has profoundly changed companies. It has been accompanied by the creation of digital tools that have revolutionized communication, collaboration, sharing and content management. [...]
Digital transformation has had a profound effect on businesses. It has been accompanied by the creation of digital tools that have revolutionized communication, collaboration, sharing and content management. Flashback from the 2000s to today, from the birth of the Drive to the advent of Sales Enablement.
The emergence of Drive to facilitate the classification and management of your content
The Drive emerged in the 2000s to support the need for collaborative tools for businesses. The proliferation of clouds and drives has enabled companies to create document databases, facilitating content classification, information retrieval and resource organization. This consolidation of essential data and metadata in a single space makes it easier to make information available throughout the company.
On the one hand, documents can be indexed and classified by name or content. This makes them easy to identify and find. On the other hand, drives automatically prioritize documents. This makes it possible to quickly find the most recently modified document. On Google Drive, for example, you can find a "suggestion" section. You can view a selection of documents by date opened and date modified. Indexing remains the responsibility of the company: it can state its preference for classification by date, by user, by similar keywords...
As far as search is concerned, the drives offer a range of different functions. Face à large volumes, employees can be easily discouraged. Thanks to filtering options, document management systems (ERP, Dropbox, One drive, Google drive...) quickly direct users to the content they are looking for.
While some systems are based on the hierarchy of files by date or name, other more efficient systems rely on metadata. This makes document management easier. No need to store files in a specific folder designed manually. The document manager structures all content according to metadata and makes it accessible more quickly. In the case of Google Drive, the labels are metadata that you personally define. It helps users organize, search and apply rules to items in Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Qhat are the limits of a Drive for the salesperson? ?
Although many companies consider drives to be an invaluable aid to document classification and management, they have three major limitations when it comes to improving sales & marketing alignment.
- The first limitation concerns information. Sales staff have difficulty finding information, and have to go out and look for it. Consultation is therefore at his initiative. - The second limitation of the Drive is linked to the risk of multiple versions of the same content. This problem is linked to the fact that each user can modify the content. As a result, you can quickly find yourself in the same folder with different versions of the same content. - The third limitation is more material. The drive must be connected. We're talking about online use. This means they can't access it where they want, when they want. This is where Sales Enablement comes in!
From Sales Enablement to Mobile Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement is a strategy for aligning sales and marketing teams, with the aim of increasing sales performance. Sales Enablement facilitates salespeople's work by bringing together all the data and information they need in a single medium. A small revolution in recent years, this professional tool plays a crucial role in sales and communication strategy, as it accompanies the rise of new technological tools. Indeed, the emergence of smartphones, tablets and applications has opened up new horizons for companies, and more particularly for sales reps. The result is Mobile Sales Enablement, a set of techniques and approaches designed to optimize the work of sales reps through the use of mobile devices.
Over time, the tablet or hybrid PC has become an ally of choice for the salesperson. On them, you can now install an application tailored to the profile and objectives of your company. The sales act is reinvented based on these new these new digital options. A Sales Enablement application allows to enter on the tablet, all the data and sales supports contextualized in relation to the sales path. The information can be consulted online or offline, which guarantees 100% access to the uses in appointments. The whole application is designed to be more ergonomic and efficient to facilitate the sale.
The Mobile Sales Enablement app does an aggregating job of providing access to all sales, training and reporting content. And while we focus on the tablet, the smartphone is also an optimal medium. Thanks to the application's real-time synchronization, sales forces have access to the latest news from their cell phones, they receive push notifications and can synchronize their content between their different devices, all with one click.
The differences between a Drive and a Sales Enablement application
A Sales Enablement application differs from a drive in that it automatically unifies data and synchronizes them in real time on the salesperson's device. Access to content is always at hand, and designed to simplify searches and streamline meetings. Today, 90% of the content developed by marketing teams for sales reps goes unused. Instead of relying on a document base specially designed for them. sales reps spend more than 7 hours a week searching for or producing their own content. The result? Incomplete, less effective content, and a considerable waste of time. A Sales Enablement tool enables sales reps to focus on the customer, use all available content and reuse the best version of the material to engage the customer.
Amprove your sales performance with a Sales Enablement application
Sales Enablement is part of a genuine approach to optimizing your sales performance. This is not the purpose of a Drive. In fact, the purpose of a Drive is to facilitate the classification, editing and management of your documents. The particularity of a Sales Enablement application is that it has an impact on all three phases of an appointment. Upstream, it enables the preparation and personalization of face-to-face or remote meetings. During appointments, it helps to modernize the customer experience and make salespeople more effective. Finally, downstream, Sales Enablement limits "time-consuming" tasks for sales reps. They can then spend more time on value-added tasks.
In concrete terms, a Sales Enablement application allows you to respond to the following 4 issues:
1- Maximize time spent by sales reps with customers / prospects
According to SalesFunnel, 65% of sales managers feel that their sales reps spend too much time on non-sales related activities. Searching for content, creating sales presentations and hand-written reports... From now on, content prepared by marketing teams comes directly to the salesperson. A Sales Enablement application saves time thanks to its CRM connector. Information from appointments is automatically generated and fed into the CRM. As for CRMs, Salesapps connects easily with Salesforce, Hubspot and Dynamics.
2- Present the most compelling, personalized content to customers/prospects
Marketing content will no longer be shared on a Drive or sent by e-mail. It can be accessed in real time by the salesperson in his or her application. Marketing can then work on content that is better adapted to the sales force. Various formats can be used, such as storytelling, to help persuade. More visual and multimedia content can also be used to make a greater impact during appointments. By taking into account feedback from sales reps, you can continuously improve your proposed content.
3- Creating an optimal level of commitment and training
According to Allego, sales reps are unable to answer more than 40% of the questions asked by B2B buyers about the product they are selling. Training with Sales Enablement ensures that offers are better understood by sales reps. And therefore better understood by customers. The more use cases there are, the more the sales force will be exposed to all the content on a daily basis, whereas they are usually trained once a year, or consult dedicated e-learning tools once a month, or at best once a week. So your sales force training is more effective!
4- Stimulate feedback from the field and analyze data for an effective strategy
We've seen a 30% increase in the use of content by sales reps if marketing teams take their feedback into account. A situation made possible by Sales Enablement! Sales reps can send marketing departments a specific message (photo or other type of content) during or after an appointment. Added to this is the possibility of tracing content presented during appointments, and the centralization of KPI's enabling marketing & sales management to understand the information reported.
Step up a gear with a Sales Enablement application
As you can see, Sales Enablement offers a number of advantages that drive cannot match. In fact, it's an indispensable tool for any company wishing to optimize its sales performance. The figures speak for themselves: 84% of sales reps customers complete their quotas if their company has adopted a Sales Enablement program (Source: Aberdeen Group).
