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How to implement an effective Sales Enablement strategy?
The Sales Enablement application, also known as a sales support tool, has become an indispensable element for all companies seeking to align their Sales & Marketing teams in real time, deliver an appointment-based customer experience and improve their sales performance. However, the implementation of a Sales Enablement strategy cannot be improvised. It needs to address specific issues, involve different players and be sequenced in stages to be effective.
I) Which profiles should be involved in your Sales Enablement strategy?
Designing a high-performance Sales Enablement application is a real challenge. Getting 100% of sales reps on board from launch and ensuring a high usage rate over time is even more so. To succeed, you need to assemble a winning team!
- And that starts with the pilot/project manager. This person guides and coordinates the project from conception to deployment. "In two-thirds of cases, they come from the marketing department. In a third, from the sales department. Sometimes, they are sales performance managers or sales reps ", assures Stephane Renger, CEO Salesapps. Sales Enablement is very widespread in the United States and the United Kingdom, but is a fast-growing discipline in France. This is what we've noticed on LinkedIn with the appearance of a new position: the Sales Enablement Manager. The Sales Enablement Manager reports directly to the Sales & Marketing department, and is primarily responsible for managing the performance of sales teams, aligning them with corporate objectives and measuring their output.
- The second person to involve is a Business Sponsor, who promotes the tool. Often overlooked by organizations, they add value to the project to support its launch. He or she won't be involved in the operational part of the project (creation of the tree structure, graphics phase...) but will be present enough to give the right tempo, the right messages when the application is deployed. In all successful organizations, the Business Sponsor is systematically involved. This is very often a Sales or Marketing Director.
- We strongly recommend that marketing teams involve ambassadors in the first phase of the project. Depending on the size of your organization, you'll need between 2 and 5 sales reps or sales reps . The advantage of having a sales person on board when you're building your tree structure is that they have a vision that complements that of marketing, and is in tune with the reality on the ground. Thanks to their business expertise, they'll be able to identify the different sales paths in appointments.
- Other profiles come into play once the application is complete. The Content Manager, for example, is in charge of updating and highlighting marketing content. As for theadministrator, he or she will be in charge of animating the application and stimulating its use.
II) The 4 stages of an effective Sales Enablement strategy
1 - The design of the application: a work of co-construction!
To design a successful sales tool, it's important to separate the creation of the tree structure from the graphic design. Initially, focus 100% on the application's skeleton, making sure to involve the sales and marketing teams. This is what will enable you to create relevant sales paths in line with your sales approach. Whether your approach is by buyer profile, appointment type, business sector, brand or product type, all approaches are possible with Salesapps. Once the tree structure has been finalized, you can start working on the graphic design with the people involved. The key to success in this phase is co-construction! If you do this without involving any of the parties concerned, particularly sales, there's a good chance that you'll forget the points linked to the contextualization of appointments, even though these are the ones that make all the difference with customers.
As far as the application itself is concerned, it must be ergonomic and super-intuitive. But why? The key is to ensure that your application is used by customers during appointments. And for it to be used in an appointment, it has to be appealing, fluid for the salesperson, meet the challenges of the appointment and be as immersive as possible for the buyer. It must therefore be well designed. Another important point is to identify the documentary themes and key content. The aim is not to overwhelm with thousands of pieces of content, but to make available marketing content that is useful and that will hit the nail on the head.
2 - Team onboarding: how to launch successfully?
As soon as you involve Sales & Marketing teams in the design of the tool, you start off with a positive point! Indeed, by involving field teams, you guarantee the relevance of the tool deployed. Create a teaser to discover the application and encourage people to use it as soon as it's available. The aim is to create excitement as soon as it's launched, to present the functionalities, to let people discover what's at stake and what it will bring to sales reps. We're regularly asked if there's a good time or a better time to launch the application? You can do it according to your current events (seminar, product launch...) or the highlights of your business. For groups of less than 200 people, pilots are rare, with the exception of international contexts or highly autonomous Business Unit organizations. It's also at this stage of the project that the Business Sponsor needs to promote itself, the solution and the issues it addresses!
3 - Animation and monitoring of KPIs: a well-managed application will perform well!
A high-performance application needs to be alive. To bring an app to life, you need to update its content and bring it to the fore. Thanks to the app, you can showcase your content in different ways: by highlighting it with a special animation, by sending notifications to users linking them to your spaces or content (push notifications distributed on tablet, PC and phone). You can push news and stimulate feedback from the field. An application of this type is relevant if you spontaneously feed back a certain amount of information from the field. The tool enables you to do this directly from the application, if the sales rep wants to suggest new content, bring up competitive information or point out an error. It's all done through the app!
The Sales Enablement application also integrates gamification logic to stimulate use of the tool and motivate teams. At this stage of the project, you can monitor sales activity using the KPIs provided! A Sales Enablement platform enables you to measure a number of KPIs: onboarding rates, usage rates, sales paths followed, content consulted and shared, customer and prospect reading rates, re-reading rates, training participation, offer mastery levels, data fed back into your CRM.
4 - ROI evaluation: measure your value creation!
All that remains is to evaluate the ROI of your Sales Enablement strategy. They can be identified through 4 axes:
- Selling more and better: how do you do it? By freeing up time on administrative tasks, sales reps can make more appointments, which will have a positive impact on the company's revenues and margins (+5% to 15% in sales, +10% in appointments, increased cross-selling rate, upsell).
- Attractiveness and retention of sales reps. The Sales Enablement application enhances the attractiveness of your brand and projects sales reps into their future activity. It enables them to accelerate their skills development and reach their objectives more quickly. Sales reps are more autonomous when it comes to appropriating offers, and become more confident in their pitch (-60% on the time it takes to build skills, -30% on sales reps turnover).
- A data-rich CRM! The application automates visit reporting in the CRM, without the intervention of a sales rep, and simply based on the progress of the appointment and the content presented. The data is collected efficiently and reliably, to help sales and marketing managers make the right decisions! (100% CR of appointments in the CRM).
- Fully in line with your CSR policy! The application centralizes all your marketing content, making it easily accessible 100% offline. The result? Fewer emails and less paper in your company (-90% on the print budget). The application also proves to be an excellent sales support tool when it comes to accompanying sales reps to remote meetings, enabling them to limit their travel time.
