When leads are scarce, sales teams want to boost business development activity in a way that doesn't detract from overall marketing and selling.

When marketing works their creative magic and provides abundant leads to the sales department, the sales team needs to work smarter not harder.

Sales enablement is a prime focus of many businesses and there are several techniques and tools that help your sales team act efficiently on leads and close more deals. 

Sales & Marketing Alignment

It's critical for sales and marketing to work closely with one another to achieve the revenue and growth goals of the business. Marketing should be helping to create the various materials that the sales team needs to close deals.

This means that sales has to communicate what they need, so that relevant material is created in a consistent manner and valuable sales resource is not taken up creating PowerPoint decks and proposal documents.  And Sales needs to provide feedback to marketing what is working and what's not so that marketing knows how to adjust their campaigns in the future.

With poor alignment, marketing effort is wasted, and the sales team don't have exactly what they need to close deals.  

Sales Playbook

No rugby team would ever go into a game without a plan of action.  A sales playbook ensures that there is a standardised process for everyone to follow.

Your sales approach is going to be different than any other business – and your sales team needs to know this in order to deliver the unique value proposition to the leads that they visit or speak with. They need prompts, standard qualification questions, objection handling techniques and more - all tailored to your individual business.

Best Practices

Top performing sales reps know how to use internal resources, close high value orders, have a great sales playbook and consistently hit their numbers 

It makes sense to learn from these superstars, capture that knowledge and implement best practices to ensure that all sales reps have a chance to hit quota. Collaborative tools should used so reps can share what has (and hasn't) worked for them. 

Product Guides

The product guide should be part of the overall collateral that is given to a rep. It needs to be up-to-date and made a part of the playbook. This way, you are giving your rep the tools (the collateral and the words) he or she needs to close a sale. Leaving sales people to make it up as they go results in inefficiency at best, and brand damage in the worst cases.

Sales enablement is a simple but powerful concept. It's not new, but still many companies aren't making it easy for their sales people to sell.

Implementing sales enablement results in bigger, faster, better sales deals.

Learn more about sales enablement today by contacting Intellegentia today.