Why You Should Invest in Automating Your Sales Enablement Process

Sales
December 31, 2021
Why You Should Invest in Automating Your Sales Enablement Process

Sales necessitate planning and creativity. Cold outreach is no longer the only way to sell a product or service. Today, the overall efficacy of the sales process is heavily dependent on the type and quantity of resources available to sales reps. The sales management process ensures that sales reps have the right sales content, case studies, market research training, merchandise guides, and customer support tips at the correct time to help them meet their quotas.

All of these resources, and more, are included in sales enablement to close deals more efficiently and effectively.

Through comprehensive sales and marketing, sales implementation is changing how sales reps can gain customer satisfaction and increase sales revenue. Having a robust sales enablement process in place ensures that your sales team is well-prepared before trying to make their next cold call.

 

What exactly is sales enablement?

The process of providing the relevant information, documentary evidence, and assets about the product or service that your sales reps are pitching to clients is known as sales enablement. The data, tools, and sales game plans enable the sales process.

According to sales statistics, up to 42 per cent of sales reps believe they lack the necessary tools and information before pitching their products.

Sales enablement improves sales reps' knowledge of the brand, allowing them to sell more effectively and authentically. When your team has a complete understanding of the buyer's journey and a solid understanding of what they're going to sell, they're more likely to answer questions and discuss effectively with potential customers, resulting in higher satisfaction levels.

 

How does the sales enablement process help to increase win rates?

It's simple – wouldn't you feel much more confident in your role if you knew and understood what it entails? The same is true for sales representatives. Before selling products and services, they must be aware of the prospect's need, USP, and features. This is where having a solid sales enablement process in place with the right tools will come in handy.

Sales enablement tools improve almost every aspect of the sales process. These are some examples:

  • Offering comprehensive sales training and content
  • The internal knowledge base has grown.
  • Improved customer service
  • Enhance your sales productivity and onboarding experience.
  • Increased chances of meeting sales targets, such as win rates

Here are the top three ways that sales enablement helps sales reps sell more effectively:

 

1. Sales content and training are linked.

 

Sales managers have found a happy medium in how they prepare and guide new salespeople to sell faster and sell more. However, there is a fundamental misalignment between the material of the onboarding training programme and the way to sell to the modern customer. Most sales executives believe they lack the necessary sales management content to pitch after training. Often, businesses can achieve success by reviewing and replacing obsolete content with research papers and sales strategies that have proven to be effective in the past. The sales enablement procedure can provide a comprehensive and complete range in various formats such as product catalogues, buyer guidance, user personalities, and business case analysis.

 

2. Re-establishes a focus on the customer journey

 

A sales job requires persuasion and self-assurance. However, only when the sales rep believes in what they're selling can these skills become inherent selling traits. When the customer's journey coincides with the salesperson's, the most effective selling occurs. A sales enablement system promotes this alignment by providing sellers with information on:

  • Purchasing and making decisions
  • Buyer personas to target
  • The customer's fundamental beliefs and characteristics
  • Customer requirements and available market solutions
  • Communication methods and the sales process's limitations

 

3. Through a feedback mechanism, marketing and sales are brought together.

"Marketing and sales are lamp posts apart," we've all heard a thousand times. No, it does not. Sales and marketing share common goals such as increasing the customer base, expanding the business ROI and carving out a niche. Sales enablement contributes to developing a feedback loop between both two critical departments by aligning these 2 tasks based on goals, roles, and systems. This results in a more cohesive sales process and more opportunities for transparent and open channels of communication.

 

Automation is becoming more prevalent in sales enablement processes.

While the digital era has resulted in the semi-to-complete automation of most organisational processes and workflows, core business operations such as sales and market enablement remain uncharted territory in terms of automation. However, this is rapidly changing.

Automating sales activities and enabling sales is critical for business growth and trying to meet sales targets. It not only reduces the time and effort required to make a sale, but it also helps to improve individual and team performance.

 

What exactly is sales automation?

The use of software, digitised tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and marketing automation engines to optimise the routine labour of the sales funnel is referred to as sales automated processes.

Almost a third of all product sales are automated, according to McKinsey. Sales reps can use sales automation to streamline all of their activities, from email scheduling to order governance. This saves countless hours for increased productivity and ensures higher returns by automating manual administrative tasks.

 

The advantages of automating the sales enablement process for a company

CRM software, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotic process automation (RPA) for generating leads and trying to engage leads are just a few examples of software that can help automate and handle day-to-day sales tasks.

 

1. Better lead analysis

Wouldn't it be great if all of your potential customers became actual customers? You can accomplish this by automating your lead registration process. Interested customers can be segmented into distinct criteria by using various filters, bridging the gap among what they are having to look for and how much you can offer them. This is accomplished through selling analytics, which is typically performed by the sales operations team, in order to capture user profiles and their overall sentiment toward your product.

Sisense, Oracle Business Analytics, and SQL Server Reporting Services are some user analytics favourites.

This allows you to contact new prospects who are far more likely to engage with you and your service, increase your likelihood of conversion.

2. Prospecting and planning

The sales funnel does not have to be as complicated as it may appear. You can better monitor the way the customer experience keeps changing within the industry with the appropriate market intelligence tools, such as Lead 411 and ZoomInfo. This, in turn, is advantageous because it allows you to plan ahead of time, lowering the churn rate.

 

3. User retention and engagement

Any small business or enterprise's top priority is user interaction and retention. AI-powered sales chatbots are transforming how customers interact with sales and relationship managers. Chatbots seem to be everywhere, and they serve two functions at the same time: spreading joy and trying to make sales more efficient by eliminating the time and energy needed for work labour.

  • Data backup and recovery: Another important feature that allows for easy access to data across databases and management solutions is data retrieval. One of the best features of AI-powered sales chatbots is their massive storage capacity. This enables clear and accurate communication while also paving the way for cross-functional collaboration.
  • Smart task management: Sales representatives are frequently trapped in repetitive tasks such as report/proposal order to prepare, creation, and allocation among stakeholders. Through information feeding mechanisms, sales enablement automation can assist in automating these processes, including the creation of sales contracts, quotes, and agreements. Customers and sales representatives can also choose to receive regular reminders about contract expiration dates and renewals. This ensures that deadlines are met and that regular follow-ups on contract evaluations and subsequent renewals are scheduled and maintained. Sales management software can also assist in tracking more accurate sales onboarding metrics.
  • Customer service interactions that are refined: "Good morning; how can I assist you today?" I'm not sure about you, but greetings with a smile make me feel better during customer interactions. The business functions of sales bots are led by natural language processing (NLP), which ensures that they comprehend the user's changing needs, making them ideal for customer contact.
  • Real-time alerts, notifications, and assistance with data requests on product growth, market analysis, and trends are just a few of the ways to help eliminate the need for 24*7 human habitation. 24x7 support- Let's be honest: people are not constantly present. Chatbots can compensate. If your company struggles to keep up with customer inquiries and provide real-time support at various stages of the purchase process, sales enablement chatbots can help. Real-time alerts, notifications, and assistance with data requests on product growth, market analysis, and trends are just a few of the ways to help eliminate the need for 24*7 human habitation. OneHash Messaging enables salespeople to engage with consumers through the channels they prefer and easily guide them to quick answers. The AI-powered chatbot can be deployed on front lines to assist customers in quickly resolving their questions – from information - based to transactional, irrespective of the channel they're using.

4. Pricing modules have been simplified.

When it comes to product pricing and negotiation, things can quickly become complicated. Proposals and pricing findings can be controlled and automated with tools such as Prisync to simplify this complicated process. Workflows involving discounted pricing scales can also be incorporated into payment systems using RPA, ensuring that trust and transparency are retained between all parties involved, and orders are managed smoothly.

 

5. Order data capture and infrastructure management 

Order tracking is unquestionably a major pain point inside the sales funnel. To increase retention and loyalty, new product suggestions are proposed automatically after an order is placed to increase retention and loyalty. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can also be tracked to determine how much inventory is sold with each sale. After closing a customer's order, sales automation tools are ideal for businesses that are looking to cross-sell product lines across verticals. To increase retention and loyalty, new product suggestions are proposed automatically after an order is placed to increase retention and loyalty.

 

Sales enablement combined with sales automation to help you sell more effectively

When you provide your sales team members with the proper toolkits, you are directly making preparations them for achievement when engaging with clients, improving the customer experience, trying to make product pitches, and assisting customers in reaching the end of the sales funnel.

Your CRM is the engine that drives your sales management strategy. You designed coaching and training sessions to ensure that your employees understand how to use it. But, do they? The only way of finding out is to count the number of people who use the CRM. You want your sales teams to take advantage of this tool because it can help them optimise their efforts and increase productivity.

Some of the metrics you should consider to determine this include:

  • Users who have not logged in in the last month
  • Accounts established within the last month
  • Contacts added or changed in the last month

A CRM can also track whether prospects have decided to open or clicked on content shared by your sales reps. A CRM can be used to track sales management metrics such as:

  • Rates of email open and click
  • Views of videos
  • Needs to download and shares of content

Tracking this can assist you in determining which types of information perform better than others, allowing you to replicate that success.

Thus, sales implementation is critical for developing and implementing sales plans to support cross-selling, up-selling, and product activation activities.

Sales enablement mechanisation takes it a step further by integrating sales strategies with quota attainment, business objectives, and as a whole business growth. It makes use of the most sophisticated technology available to help sales teams across all boards be more effective and efficient.