Blog
How to implement an effective Sales Enablement strategy?
The Sales Enablement application, also known as a sales enablement tool, has become a must-have for all companies looking 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 stakeholders and be sequenced in stages to be effective.
I) WHICH PROFILES SHOULD BE INVOLVED IN YOUR SALES ENABLEMENT PROJECT?
Designing a high-performance Sales Enablement application is a real challenge. Getting 100% of sales reps users on board from launch, and ensuring a high level of usage 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 or tools managers 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 function: 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 managers. The advantage of having a sales person on board when you build 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 the administrator, he or she will be in charge of animating the application and stimulating its use.
II) THE 4 STEPS OF AN EFFECTIVE SALES ENABLEMENT STRATEGY
1 - The design of the application: a work of co-construction!
To successfully design a sales tool, it is important to dissociate the creation of the tree structure from the graphic design. Initially, focus 100% on the skeleton of the application, making sure to involve the sales and marketing teams. This is what will allow you to create relevant sales paths that are consistent with your sales approach. Whether you have an approach by buyer profile, type of appointment, sector of activity, brand or type of product, all approaches are possible with Salesapps. Once the tree structure is finalized, you can start working on the graphic design with the people involved. The success of this phase is the co-construction! If you do it without involving one of the parties, especially the sales people, there is a strong chance that you will forget the points related to the contextualization of the appointments, even though they are the ones that make the difference with customers.
As for the application itself, it must be ergonomic and super intuitive. Why? The issue is that your application is used by the customer in an appointment. And for it to be used in an appointment, it must 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 objective is not to overwhelm with thousands of contents, but to make available useful marketing contents that will hit the mark during the meeting.
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 successful application must be alive. To make an application live, you have to update its contents and put them forward. Thanks to the application, you can highlight your content in different ways: by highlighting it with a particular animation, by sending notifications to users by 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 report a certain amount of information from the field. The tool allows you to do it live from the application if the sales person wants to suggest new content, bring up competitive information or point out an error. Everything happens through the application!
The Sales Enablement application also integrates gamification logics to stimulate the use of the tool and to pull the teams upwards. At this stage of the project, you pilot the sales activity through the KPIs at your disposal! A Sales Enablement platform allows you to measure several KPIs: onboarding rate, usage rate, followed sales path, consulted and shared content, read rate of your customers and prospects, re-reading rate, participation in training, level of mastery of offers, 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, increase in the rate of cross-selling and upselling).
- Attractiveness and retention of sales reps. The Sales Enablement application reinforces the attractiveness of your brand and projects sales staff into their future activity. It enables them to accelerate their skills development and reach their objectives more quickly. They are more autonomous when it comes to getting to grips with offers, and become more confident in their pitch (-60% on the time it takes to get up to speed, -30% on the turnover of sales reps).
- A data-rich CRM! The application automates visit reporting in the CRM, without the intervention of a salesperson, and simply based on the progress of the appointment and the content presented. The data is collected efficiently and reliably, providing marketing and sales management with the information they need to make informed 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.
