Scaling your business is not solely about expanding but it is also about evolving. All businesses start out small with an objective to grow bigger and better. But during this transition, a business has to inevitably face and overcome numerous challenges. For example, by the time a business achieves seamless operation, its need and objective might change to demand a different structure. This is the situation with business, you can not keep on doing what you have been doing with more money and resources. The systems and processes that drive the business are also required to evolve. This is also applicable to your sales enablement ecosystem.
Here’s how you can ensure that your sales enablement ecosystem keeps evolving with your growing business:
We can agree that sales representatives don’t spend as much time selling as they’d like, but higher sales targets would mean that the company spends more time on administration as well. This problem can be solved in two ways.
First, the structure of the sales enablement ecosystem should be such that there is a balance between sales and administrative support roles to handle the work required to achieve targets.
Second, organizations should leverage technology by adopting AI-enabled tools to automate certain processes.
Most sales representatives go through the same old onboarding process where they are given a short orientation upon hiring and then they are put in a team with an experienced seller to learn and pick up the pace. The more support these sales representatives get at the beginning, the faster they’ll get a hang of things and become confident sellers.
Nowadays, a lot of big organizations have made sales enablement training a permanent part of their onboarding process. Apart from educating the sales reps about the company’s culture, value, vision, etc., they also educate them about competitive positioning, value propositioning, and other similar stuff. Though even such companies ensure that the newly hired sellers follow an expert for a bit but the primary responsibility lies on the team lead to build them up.
These new sellers should also be provided with the right technology to aid their growth. Companies should look for sales enablement solutions that curate tribal sales knowledge and content from any source to offer sales content repositories and sales playbook templates that work.
Data is the soul of any sales enablement strategy and it helps highlight the errors in a system and allows us to take calculated corrective measures. Sales enablement tools and CRMs can provide actionable data such as who is best at what leads with the highest potential, objections, and follow-ups.
Such data also allows us to do A/B testing when there is more than one variable. Big companies try different approaches using such data and they rely solely on it while taking decisions.
There’s a lot of content readily available yet there’s more content being produced each day just to keep up. It’s reasonable to produce more new content but only if the sales representatives are actually using it to support and close sales. Aligning activities and communication of the sales and marketing team will ensure that the content that is being produced is relevant and useful for the sales reps.
Having a unified line of communication is only possible if the goals are aligned. By having effective communication between teams, the marketing team can create content and train the sales reps on how to effectively use it on each stage based on their as well as customer's requirement. This can also help you get a sense of the workload of each team or any discrepancies between departments so that you can work together in harmony and reach a common ground.
We should evaluate our sales enablement ecosystem once in a while, but for a thriving business, it’s important to keep a closer eye. The better you understand what strategy and approach work best for your business, the quicker you’ll be able to escape the storm.
