When it comes to implementing sales enablement within an organization, establishing a clear blueprint for what's expected by who will ensure its success. While adopting efficiency and new tools comes intuitively to some, by defining the roles, you can divide responsibilities and protocols so that there's no room for guessing. Below we explore some of the most critical best practices, which we know create the best action plan for success.
The End User: Sales Managers and Sales Representatives
The end-user within your organization encompasses the entire sales team. Sales representatives are responsible for providing regular feedback to the marketing team who are producing sales collaterals. This helps to ensure that the content, frequency of content and structure reflect their needs, as well as covers all use cases.
It should be established from the get-go that sales representatives need to look for content within the sales enablement tool first rather than going rogue and creating their own or using outdated files. This could wreak havoc on your customers' perception of your brand.
Encourage your sales team to get into the habit of presenting and sharing files exclusively via your sales enablement tools.
This is important for sales representatives to understand! Through these channels, they can gain additional data and insights through analytical tools like Showell. By relying on old methods like email or a message through WhatsApp, they lose out on a wealth of information.
Salespeople should be encouraged to personalize content with mix and match tools to create a more meaningful and impactful presentation for clients. One size fits all doesn't work in modern sales! For sales managers, it is vital to use sales enablement tools when onboarding new sales staff. This makes for an easier transition that sets newcomers up for success. Sales managers can also use this tool to understand how teams and sales networks are performing, whilst also gaining an overview of what content is influencing customers most.
Read more about Improving Sales Readiness By Aligning Your Sales Teams →
Set Up and Admin: Marketing and Product Owners
While product owners may vary within your company, within sales enablement, it is often assigned to marketing. This is because when you drill down to the core of it, the process of selling predominantly starts with content.
For marketing product owners, they dictate what the narrative of selling is. This includes everything from what content is shared and where it is stored. They are in charge of making it accessible for all stakeholders within the sales enablement flow.
Marketing must heavily rely on data points to improve the content and ensure collaterals never remain static but are constantly being improved upon.
Product owners must implement an account structure that directly matches the sales journey to ensure success. This can include one folder for what salespeople can utilize during meetings. Within that folder, content should be organized by persona and then industry. There should also be an onboarding and training folder for shareable content and presentations, this can also be tagged by persona and industry. Each of these files should be named accordingly to reflect the topic, language, or regions so that keywords can be used to locate them quickly.
Most importantly, product owners should use sales enablement daily to distribute content efficiently, leveraging communication and notification tools to ensure everybody is on the same page and has access to the core information they need. This also includes providing sufficient templates with appropriate brand-centric designs that salespeople can utilize.
Reporting and Insight: Management
Management's role in sales enablement is to have a clear understanding of the investment in content, its engagement, and their sales force's performance. They essentially have a top-down view of all the moving parts and must ensure everything is running smoothly and are there to provide training when needed. Management and HR should make it a habit to onboard new staff within sales and marketing through tools like Showell to reduce the ramp-up rate and instill sales-readiness.
The feature that best serves the management team is the analytical tools that demonstrate whether materials are proving effective or not. With their eagle eyed view, they must also take note of brand consistency across the board and decide to shift messaging needs should the market demand it. Major pivots in how bulk analytics claim the content is working can be an initial sign of a need to change direction, depending on what is highlighted or if your product still resonates the same with the target audience and no change is seen.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. For sales, it takes a well-oiled machine to close a deal. Showell helps to unify your messaging, approach, and internal efficiencies. In the end, sales enablement's purpose is to create those alignments between sales, marketing, and management to serve the end customers better. We've seen it – the issue of dealing with silos, inconsistent onboarding, and content not being used by your team. We made a solution with these pain points in mind.
Showell is an award-winning tool made to centralize all sales collateral for ease of onboarding, present with ease and assurance that you will have nothing but updated content, data to track engagement and activity to understand your prospects better, and so much more. To see it for yourself, request a demo today.
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