The rise of the internet has changed the way that people shop. These days it’s about taking your customers on a journey that gently guides them from the moment they realise they have a problem, right through to making the purchase that will solve it.
Here’s how sales enablement can enhance the customer journey.
What is Sales Enablement strategy?
Sales enablement is the strategic approach that businesses take to convert leads into customers. It utilises information, tools and content to help sales teams sell more effectively.
At its core, it aims to provide all the tools salespeople need to engage buyers throughout the customer journey
Why do you need a Sales Enablement strategy?
- A unified sales process
Salespeople can be confident in what they’re doing and what their goals are when they’re set out in a single, established strategy. A sales strategy not only gives your team the confidence to know what they need to do, but it lays out the KPIs for measuring their performance. - A personalised customer journey
CRM and sales technology can develop a streamlined customer journey that leads customers through the buying process with personalised, relevant and engaging content. - Sales and marketing alignment
By aligning their efforts into a single, shared strategy, your sales and marketing teams can develop data-driven content that targets the right customers in the right place with the right message to generate, qualify and convert leads. - Save time on administration
Once you’ve established what technology will serve the needs of your salespeople, marketers and your customers, you’ll have an efficient and integrated technology stack that reduces the amount of follow up and unnecessary administration your teams will need to do. The right technology can get you selling more for less effort. - Better decision-making
With the right strategy guiding your way, and personalised technology to measure it, you’ll be able to access the data and insights you need to improve customer conversion and retention rate.
Take the Sales Enablement Assessment and discover if your sales system is top of the class or missing vital components.
What does successful Sales Enablement look like?
A successful sales enablement strategy takes the combined reporting, IT systems, analytics, coaching and metrics from your sales and marketing team and combines them into one, cohesive selling system.
This strategy should be tailor-fit to your target market, able to meet customer needs, answer their questions, and qualify leads all while collecting the information your sales team needs to make the sale.
At the same time the strategy needs to stay agile, utilising analytics and insights to constantly adapt to the changing market and take advantage of any opportunities to improve the customer journey.
Components of Sales Enablement
There are several components that make up a successful sales enablement strategy that drives sales performance:
Buyer personas
The most important component of selling is understanding who you’re selling to.
Buyer personas are theoretical people who represents your ideal customers; from their background and interests, right through to their hobbies and the social media channels they use.
You can segment your audience into different buyer personas to personalise your sales and marketing efforts for each section.
In order to develop buyer personas, you’ll need to do some research. Don’t be afraid to delve deep into you customers’ likes, dislikes, interests, values and hobbies. The more you know, the more you can tailor your sales and marketing campaigns to fit them.
The more personalised your campaigns, the more your customers will be able to identify with your brand.
Here’s a helpful guide for developing buyer personas.
Qualifying leads with lead scoring
Not all leads are created equal, and not all leads will convert.
You’ll find that many of your customers will have attributes that determine how likely a lead is to make a purchase. To save time wading through hundreds or thousands of enquiries, your sales team can qualify leads with lead scoring.
Lead scoring allows you ‘score’ a lead’s likeliness to make a purchase based on who they are and how they’ve interacted with your brand in the past. Not only will this help you determine how likely a person is to convert, it can help your sales team understand how sales-ready your prospect is. This allows your team to reach out with the right message at the right time to move your prospects along in their customer journey.
Determining what criteria to use to score your leads can be difficult. These four steps will help you decide what attributes you should be using to score your leads, and how many points you should assign to these attributes:
- Determine the lead-to-customer conversion rate for all of your leads. To find this number, divide the number of new customers you acquire by the number of leads you generate.
- Examine the different attributes of your customers and try to pick the those that you think make them higher-quality leads. These attributes could be anything from how they interact with your website, right through to which industry they work in.
- Compare the close-rates of customers with each attribute such as how many people became customers after filling out a survey on your website.
- Compare the close rates of each attribute with your overall close-rate. With this information you can assign points to each attribute, giving you an idea of how likely a customer with that attribute is to convert.
With each of these attributes assigned a certain number of points, you can then decide how many points a prospect has to accumulate before they can be considered a qualified lead.
Manually qualifying leads is time consuming. To make the process easier, once you’ve determined what attributes define your qualified leads, you can automate the process. Lead scoring automation uses an algorithm to predict which contacts in your database are qualified and which ones aren’t.
Sales and marketing alignment
Known as smarketing, sales and marketing alignment can help improve your lead generation and sales performance. By encouraging your teams to collaborate, you can combine their strengths and knowledge for better results.
When your sales and marketing teams work together and share data and insights with one another, they can develop seamless data-driven customer journeys that qualify leads, establish trust with your brand, and share all the information your customers need to make a purchasing decision.
Both sales and marketing have information that could improve your performance, so it’s best to encourage information-sharing and a ‘team’ mentality.
Sales enablement software
With a wealth of software at hand to help make the lives of salespeople easier, it’s almost becoming too difficult to decide what software to use. Sometimes too much technology makes even the simplest tasks unnecessarily difficult.
A lot of sales enablement software loses sight of customers and prospects, failing to establish personalised customers journeys, or integrate with the needs of your marketing team.
It’s important to ensure that the software you select provides a streamlined experience for salespeople, marketers and customers alike. Make sure that your software stack offers an integrated experience that serves the needs of your entire team.
Hubspot’s sales, marketing and service software stack integrates in real-time, allowing for data-driven sales enablement decisions.
Tracking and measuring
There are many ways to track sales enablement success but your lead-to-customer conversion rate is the most important.
Making more sales is the ultimate goal of any business, which is why determining how many leads are converting is the clearest mark of success.
To calculate your lead-to-customer conversion rate, you need to determine how many leads, and how many customers were generated within a particular time period. There are many reporting and CRM tools that can identify this number for you.
Is your sales enablement strategy working as well as it could be?
Take the Sales Enablement Assessment to grade your sales performance and find out how you could improve your sales system.
