Feb 20238 min read

Improve Sales Readiness By Aligning Your Sales Teams

Improving sales readiness by aligning your sales team is essential for taking your sales to the next level.

A sales team that is on the same page is a well-oiled machine, working together to achieve common goals and drive success. Aligning your sales team creates clarity and focus, resulting in a more motivated, engaged, and productive team.

When it comes to training and shaping your sales team for success, sales leaders must take the necessary steps to ensure sales readiness within their sales teams. Trends are ever-evolving. The market is constantly changing, and so do your buyers.

Are they prepared for every potential question, scenario, or objection their prospects might pose?

What is Sales Readiness?

Sales readiness refers to the state of your sales team’s ability to engage effectively with potential customers, build trust, and close deals. This includes being equipped with the right tools, resources, processes, and training to execute the sales process.

Illustration of a man waving a start flag representing sales team ready to sell

The ultimate goal of sales readiness is to ensure that sales representatives have the knowledge and skills they need to inform buyers, understand their needs, and effectively communicate the value of your product or service.

4 Common Reasons for Misaligned Sales Teams

Aligning teams to improve sales readiness involves creating a shared understanding of goals, processes, and expectations among all members of the team. However, delivering an unprecedented customer experience every time requires an incredibly high level of consistency. If your teams aren’t aligned, you won’t consistently provide the expected level of service and buyer experience.

Here are four common reasons for misaligned sales teams.

1. Misaligned management, marketing, and sales teams

When your management, marketing, and sales teams cannot maintain effective communication, they become disorganized and misaligned, which can, ultimately, lead to a significant drop in your sales.

Sales and marketing collaboration is essential because both are key to closing deals. Potential customers often know about your website and offerings before speaking to sales, typically finding you through online searches or recommendations. Marketing's job is to create these initial connections, and once a customer shows interest, sales take over to seal the deal.

– Sales Communications, The #1 HubSpot CRM Platform Solutions Partner

Just as you need to communicate clear values to your buyers to get them on board, you need to do the same for all your teams involved. Communicating a unified strategy is a great starting point for establishing leadership and direction. This will foster collaboration and alignment between teams.

2. Lack of training

Training is essential to building an effective sales team. But it takes a little bit more than 4-8 weeks of training period to make a successful sales team. Restricting your team’s training to only a short period of time limits your team’s ability to unlock new skills and methodologies.

Illustration of a sales person staring to emptiness because he lacks of proper sales training

Ongoing sales training sessions not only refresh your salespeople’s memory but can help you refine your sales strategy. This also instills a strong sense of alliance between your sellers, encouraging them to exchange ideas and tactics and learn from each other. In order to help your teams become successful sellers, you must train them continuously with practical exercises like sales simulations or role-playing exercises.

3. Lack of communication between marketing and sales

Things become even more complicated when keeping your sales teams up-to-date with eventual changes that may occur when creating, sharing, and presenting different content.

The most common issues include sharing outdated content and providing buyers with irrelevant information.

The most common issues include sharing outdated content and providing buyers with irrelevant information. That typically happens when the content you use is scattered across different systems. When you need content, you need to pull it from different sources, scattered around the web, or across ineffective apps and platforms. On top of that, you need to use another platform to open and distribute these files.

Image representing misalignment between sales and marketing

You can’t expect your team to operate at peak performance if these distractions take up too much of their time.

4. Lack of the right tools and resources

When sales teams do not have access to the right tools and sales resources, they may struggle to efficiently manage leads, track their progress through the sales process, or engage with prospects in a meaningful way. This can lead to longer sales cycles, lower close rates, and decreased customer satisfaction.

Sales teams without the proper resources may not have access to the information and training they need to effectively communicate the value of a company's products or services, which can negatively impact sales.

In addition, sales teams without the proper resources may not have access to the information and training they need to effectively communicate the value of a company's products or services, which can negatively impact sales.

Digital sales tools help you by providing your sales team with access to the information and sales resources they need to engage with prospects and close deals effectively. This can include tools such as CRM systems, sales enablement platforms, and marketing automation tools.

The right sales tools help sales teams stay organized and collaborate, which will lead to a more streamlined and efficient sales process.

How To Align Your Sales Teams with Sales Enablement

Aligning your sales team is an important step toward sales success. It involves creating a shared sales enablement plan, sales enablement goals and objectives, as well as establishing clear roles, responsibilities, and processes for each member of the team.

Illustration of a sales enablement concept

Here are 5 actionable tips you can use to align your sales team and create a high-performing sales powerhouse.

1. Centralize and streamline your sales process

Sales enablement tools like Showell allow you to have one central point where all the relevant product or service information is gathered, organized, and easily distributed across your teams and buyers. This will help ensure that all sellers follow a consistent and effective sales process, leading to better alignment and teamwork.

Sales Enablement helps salespeople find the right content at the right time, whether they need it for learning, preparing, presenting, or sharing with a buyer.

Showell helps you to keep relevant information regularly updated while removing irrelevant and outdated sales content. As a sales enablement tool, Showell allows your business organization to centralize your sales content on a user-friendly sales app that your large, remote, and in-house sales teams can instantly access and use, both online and offline. This helps your sellers to find the right content at the right time, whether they need it for learning, preparing, presenting, or sharing with a buyer.

2. Improve communication with digital tools

Sales enablement tools help you to facilitate communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success. By having a robust internal communication process and tools set up, you align your efforts with other teams to achieve common goals.

Sales enablement’s main feature is Sales Content Management. It can act as your cross-functional teams’ single source of truth without having to worry about updates and changes getting lost in communication. Knowledge sharing is much more convenient, and everyone can easily access up-to-date information easily.

3. Provide ongoing training sessions and materials

So, sales enablement and training? Absolutely! Leverage sales enablement capabilities by providing ongoing training using interactive, engaging, and up-to-date content.

Illustration of a person managing sales training materials

Schedule regular training sessions with your team to assess sales tactics, sales materials, buyer objections, and best practices. This way, you and your team are always on your A game- always on top of market trends, the latest sales techniques, and ever-changing buyer needs.

Plus, you’re promoting a culture of continuous learning and improvement within your teams.

4. Offer analytics tools for real-time data and insights

Sales Content Analytics is a powerful feature for aligning your sales teams. Your sales teams get a collective understanding of your buyers’ behavior, allowing them to adjust their sales tactics accordingly.

By providing your team with real-time data and insights, they are also able to see opportunities to improve sales content to make it more relevant to buyers. You provide your salespeople with an advantage to see what happens behind the scenes. As a result of their analytics, they gain a better understanding of their buyers' needs based on how they consume or engage with your content.

Read more about the data, analytics, and insights:

5. Enable personalization at scale

Personalization improves buyer experience and sales enablement allows you to do that at scale. With sales enablement, you can help sales reps personalize their sales approach while still following a consistent, company-wide process.

With Digital Sales Room, each of your buyers can have their own digital environment with personalized content specific to their needs without you having to sacrifice your brand.

Discover 2023: List Of Top Sales Presentation Templates You Need →

How to Get Team Alignment Started?

So you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to align your sales teams. Where do you start?

Whether it’s to upgrade your sales platform, streamline your sales processes, or simply want to see where sales enablement can fit into your strategy and play a role in aligning your teams, it’s easy (and free) to start!

If you’re looking for an intuitive tool that is highly rated and quick to implement, Showell is an award-winning sales enablement tool. It’s the easiest to use on the market and is loved by sales and marketing professionals worldwide.

Aligning sales teams with sales enablement is a strategic move that can lead to significant improvements in sales performance and results. With sales enablement, you are fostering a culture of collaboration, clear communication, and shared goals. Sales teams are better equipped to work together towards a common objective.

You improve your team’s sales readiness by giving them the right tools, resources, and training they need to succeed. The end result is a powerhouse of a sales team that is better equipped to close deals, reach targets, and drive success for the organization!

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