What is the Difference between Sales Enablement Vs Sales Training? The basic similarity between sales training and sales enablement is that both strengthen the sales performance of an organization that includes enhancing retention rate, increasing sales, and boosting revenue. Despite this likeliness, both of the programs are pretty different. Sales training is rather a more conventional solution than sales enablement, which is an advanced and upgraded extension of sales training. It is a more sustainable syncing solution in this current digital environment.
As a leader of an organization or a sales team, it is imperative for you to realize the basic differences between the two and which one is more valuable for your company.
What is Sales Training?
Training is an integral part of everybody’s life since childhood. Therefore, it is a pivotal point in the sales team of an organization where the sales representatives are taught about the process of selling and the skills involved in it to close more deals.
Sales training is done in two processes:
Product Sales Training:
Before stepping on to the battleground, the knights need to know every detail about their weaponries. Similarly, a salesperson needs to be well-informed and updated about the product or service he/she is going to market before the target audience. This training period comprises all the minute and technical details your salespersons should know, from the service level agreements to the technical specifications. This phase should inculcate the confidence within the sales reps to answer any kind of questions fired away by the customers. The idea is to manifest the prospect’s mind towards purchasing.
Process Sales Training:
Every company drives its business uniquely. The Process Sales Training helps the sales reps to comprehend the procedures and methods your company practices to carry out the sales progression. This includes the philosophies, principles, or official exercises that are exclusive for every firm. In this process, salespeople learn about the functioning of various sales tools that are used to strategize the interaction with prospective customers. This assures the proper management of sales in accordance with the company’s objectives and values.
Sales Training is usually conducted as a group session in a classroom manner, but some industries employ video programs to advocate on-demand e-learning.
What is Sales Enablement?
It is generally believed that sales enablement is tantamount to the concept of sales training. Sales enablement embraces a strategic method to augment the progress of the sale that impacts not only the sales team but the whole organization. What is the Difference between Sales Enablement Vs Sales Training? Enablement is different from sales training because sales training lays the foundation of your product or service in the sales reps’ minds, and doesn’t help single-handedly in promoting the revenue cycle.
Apart from training, the sales enablement platform incorporates the management of sales onboarding, content integration, performance analytics and metrics, usage of tools and technology, and the whole module of the sales management system.
Sales enablement becomes more inclusive of all the departments in the company, unlike sales training. It encourages the whole organization to inspire the sales team and enable it to close more deals and improve its overall performance. Sales enablement strategy comprises the healthy cross-functional team engagement between executive managers, sales managers, customer service, and marketing departments. When these teams come together to work in synergy, it aids in driving more sales and enhances the revenue. Therefore, the idiom- ‘it really takes a village’- appropriately suits the condition.
The sales enablement system is not merely about preparing your sales rep to sell or impress people inside your company, but it molds the sales reps to sell to contemporary customers. It helps them modify their selling methods as per the prospects’ perceptions by developing a customized form of content and having a relevant professional conversation with them. Inculcating the inbound sales methodology by practicing new sales methods also inclines the salespeople towards updated perceptions and state-of-the-art selling strategies. This further helps in a better understanding of the customer’s mind and analyzing their issues before they present those to you. This guarantees a better customer experience when you display your solution to them.
What can sales enablement do that sales training cannot?
Primarily, sales training hasn’t been created to evolve the salespeople with new skills and value addition that needs to alter per the market updates and progression. In the sales enablement programs, they are required to learn and inculcate the habit of asking the right questions and hold customer-oriented conversations to foster customer relationships in the future. To keep improving the knowledge to target the accurate prospects comes under the umbrella of sales enablement and not sales training, conventionally.
The sales training program also doesn’t advocate the performance metrics or progress tracking that aids the team leaders to calculate the steps that are leading to success or detect the loopholes to avoid the risk in overall revenue benefits. Sales enablement solutions are built to teach you to engage with multiple stakeholders and the alignment of the business objectives and the brand affinity with a better CRM system.
Which method fits as a winner for your organization?
Sales training occupies one-third of the process of the sales enablement system. To simplify, this can be considered analogous to a bucket of ice-cream (sales enablement) and a scoop of ice-cream from that bucket (sales training).
Sales enablement is a wholesome procedure that entails a more planned and up-to-date approach to boosting sales performance. As already discussed, it doesn’t merely drive sales training but also promises other benefits like tools and technology for better analysis, sales boost and inbound selling lessons for competing in the current industrial scenario, marketing and sales teams coordination to enhance customer experience, and statistical approach to augment the overall revenue.
The improved ROI benefits make the sales enablement programs more worthy to practice, though it is more complicated and requires a systematic approach to strategy. Sales enablement solutions would offer you to perceive and develop a more competitive strategy, which inculcates updated tools and technology to present your solutions as more customized and favorable for the prospective customers.