9 Ways to Enable Your Sales Team

Today’s customers are different. How? You might wonder. Well, customer 2.0, as Forbes called them in their article, seems to have easier access to information nowadays. In fact, clients who reach out to a company already have 60% knowledge about them through technological research.

These newer customers want companies to care about them and provide helpful information faster. They want to know why they must choose your product over countless others and what value you bring them.

So, then how do you sell your product to these new-age prospects who are wiser, choosier, value-driven, and skeptical at the same time?

The first and most crucial step is to transform and empower the first line of contact your customers come across, aka, your sales team. To sell to more customers, your sales team needs to have knowledge of whom to sell to, how to sell, what use cases your product solves, and more. Providing this knowledge is termed as ‘enabling’. To define it more precisely, sales enablement equips your sales team with the necessary information to close more deals.

Why do you need to enable your sales team?

Enabling your sales team brings many benefits, like:

1. Keeping consistency– 60% of sales reps struggle to organize and consistently reach out to people. Enabling your team ensures that they are consistently equipped with the ABCs of pitching in different scenarios. This also helps organize the process by making sure important points are not missed in the sales pitch.  
   
   
2. Saving time – Sales reps spend a lot of time researching each prospect before pitching to them. But how useful is all that research if they have no time to use it? By enabling your sales reps, you can ensure that they spend time on the actual selling part of the business rather than wasting it on researching their prospects.

• Improving conversion rates – Companies that empower their sales team have been found to have a 32% increase in sales quota and a 23% higher lead conversion. This means that your team’s cold-calling efforts are more likely to succeed.

Now that you know what sales enablement is and why we need it, here are some ways to enable your sales reps:

The long-term solutions –

1. Use a CRM

CRMs are a great way to enable your sales team. customer relationship management software can help you sell better by collecting information about your competitors, customers, etc. How does a CRM collect all this information, you might wonder? The software records all interactions with your business and customer. Then it uses that data to analyze and provide you with various reports. You can buy one of the off-the-shelf solutions suitable for your business or, if none of them fit, build your own CRM from scratch.

Not only do they provide all relevant data, but they also automate business processes, saving time for salespeople to learn to sell better. CRMs can also address each lead by their name in email and message campaigns, empowering your sales team with the power of personalization. This keeps customers happier and, thus, more likely to respond to your team’s emails.

• Chatbots

Having a medium where you can collect customer queries while they are browsing your website is like hitting the jackpot. Sales reps can learn many things customers want about your product when going through your website, like their names, email addresses, product interests, browsing time, and visiting frequency. These points can be addressed when pitching your product or in subsequent calls.

Chatbots can also collect feedback so that the sales reps can learn from it and use it to strengthen their sales pitches. Implementing a chatbot helps your sales team while improving your customer’s lifetime value, which is a major win-win.

Furthermore, you can also have a ‘live chat’ option in chatbots, to have human-to-human conversations via text. These interactions can be recorded and used to train younger reps.

• Create a community for your sales folks

What is an effective way to learn? It’s by interacting with different people from different domains and different experience levels. You might get a unique perspective or tip to improve your sales efficiency by interacting with these people. Furthermore, interacting in communities is a great way to learn a lot of stuff in a short amount of time.

Many salespeople in your team have a lot of experience dealing with prospects day in and day out. But they don’t have the time or means to express their solutions to the problems. These more experienced reps can post answers to problems in the community chat in their free time, ensuring knowledge is distributed. Passing on these experiences can show how salespeople should handle certain scenarios.

Some immediate fixes –

If you need to educate your team fast, here are some methods:

1. Case studies and customer testimonials – Customer testimonials are an excellent way to find out what feature of your product gives clients the most value. They also highlight how effectively you solved their problem.

Case studies prove that your company is credible and your product works with detailed analysis and reports. These resources are a great way to back your reps’ pitches and are a handy tool for salespeople.

• Scripts

By scripts, we don’t mean dialogue scripts that tell people what to say. Instead, scripts contain vital questions and points you must include while talking to a lead, almost like a guide of must-cover topics. But these templates extend far beyond just pitching to a prospect. You can create scripts for cold calls, email conversations, chats, etc.

These resources ensure that salespeople don’t go off-track and create their own templates that might be less effective.

• Decks

Sales decks are a really great way to standardize a pitch. A sales deck provides essential information about your product that should not be missed while allowing your salespeople to add other points they want. A deck is also a great way to establish a proper structure for the pitch.

Sales decks usually contain examples and a complete overview of the product you are pitching.

They can provide visual impact to your clients, which is an effective way of reminding your prospects about your product.  

• Battlecards

Battlecards are real-life savers for specific questions and, if done right, can boost your cold-calling conversions by leaps and bounds. They are mainly used as a competitive intelligence-gathering tool.

Battlecards come in different formats, such as:

1. Why do we win
2. Why do we lose
3. Quick dismisses
4. Landmines to lay
5. Product battle cards
6. Product overview battle cards

Battlecards contain information for specific scenarios. They help train salespeople to respond to specific questions and how to carry a conversation forward.  Unlike decks, where you need to search through multiple slides to access information, these cards have everything you need on one page.

• Videos and newsletters

Videos are one of the best ways to get a message to your salespeople. Short videos can be made to help train salespeople and keep them engaged. Since videos contain audio and visual cues, it is an effective training method. You can also implement them in your mentoring software to create engaging and interactive mentoring experiences.

Although, one shortcoming of videos is that they are time-consuming to watch, and you can’t expect your team to watch videos constantly. Moreover, making videos requires a lot of effort.

A more accessible alternative to this is newsletters. You can quickly share all new product updates and essential business changes with your salespeople so they can incorporate that information into their pitches.

• Product sheet

Working with your product team to gain more information about your products can help salespeople understand the key features better. Also, this product sheet can be constantly updated, ensuring reps are also updated.

Product sheets boost credibility and back claims. They are also significant assets to attach in emails and chats to give customers an overview of the features.

These are some of the tools that’ll help your sales team sell effectively and immediately. It is important to note that you need to set aside some time so that your team can learn, digest, and remember the information you provide to them. And how do you do that? By reducing other non-sales tasks, they do, like automate data entry and moving information from one stage to another. You can do this by automating your business’ sales force. Another thing you need to understand is that you can start out simple. Have a 1:1 interaction with newcomers and veterans in your team every week, or assess your current resources, what resources you think are necessary, and what your team needs to improve selling. Sales enablement can be used to optimize everybody’s bandwidth.

We hope you found these tips useful. If you want to look at more blogs on more sales and marketing topics, you can either browse here on Intercoolstudio or check out more of our blogs on LeadSquared!