The Sales Enablement industry has grown exponentially over the past year. More than ever, sales and marketing teams have new tools to optimize their efforts and accelerate sales cycles.
At the same time, the confusion around this term and these tools - which are still relatively new on the French market - has increased. One of the main reasons for this confusion is the lack of a single term to refer to these tools.
When we talk about tools to support sales teams, we can talk as much about a presentation tool for appointments as a CRM; we talk about "sales tools", "sales enablement tools", "sales engagement"... in short, the industry is vast, as are the ranges of tools it contains. As mentioned, the market, estimated at more than $2.6 billion US dollars by 2024, is growing rapidly.
Even the most adept Sales Enablement practitioners should always keep an eye on the market to avoid missing the latest development!
What is Sales Enablement in concrete terms?
As we have seen, the term is vast. So is the Sales Enablement community !
Generally speaking, Sales Enablement includes all the practices, tools, frameworks, etc. that make everyday work easier for marketing and sales teams.
This can be a tool that helps to better follow the different steps of the sales cycle (a CRM, for example), as well as a tool that simplifies the process of making content available to the sales team (we know this well at Sweet Show!)
The field is not framed by defined terms or boundaries. As we have seen, there are a wide variety of solutions that fall under the definition of Sales Enablement. Today, we're going to discover the 3 key areas of Sales Enablement that will help you boost your sales results and accelerate your sales cycle!
The 3 most important sectors of Sales Enablement in 2021
1. Sales Engagement
2. Sales Management
3. Sales Content Management
1. Sales Engagement
As you know, today more than ever, companies are looking for new visibility on the key KPIs of the sales cycle. They are looking for new outreach techniques to boost their email response rate, new customer journeys to exploit to increase their conversion rate, etc.
Sales Engagement tools have been designed specifically to meet these needs.
These tools make it easier and more fluid for SDRs to communicate with their prospects - always with the goal of better identifying and analyzing which techniques are most effective, and which ones to re-evaluate and optimize.
Many tools allow you to centralize your customer outreach(LaGrowthMachine, SalesLoft, Outreach.io). These solutions are ideal for the initial prospecting stage of the sales cycle. They allow you to track the engagement of your prospects with your first cold mailing steps, then track the keywords that convert the best and the sales arguments that catch the most attention.
However, after the initial prospecting stage, or after the first discovery meeting, you will often have to share content with your prospect (sales proposals, price sheets, technical sheets, floor plans, etc.). At this stage of the customer relationship, you should use tools optimized for this action, like Sweet Show.
The ability to track your prospects' engagement with the content sent to them in detail is paramount. By finding out how many times your customers have viewed your materials, as well as how much time they spent on each slide of your PowerPoint presentations, you will better understand the specific topics that are most relevant to them.
Analyze which documents are the ones that help you generate a new appointment and which presentations are the most impactful, to boost your conversion rate during sales appointments!
And above all: prioritize the contacts that show interest and make yourself available to them to provide additional answers if needed.
2. Sales Management
As we have seen, companies are constantly looking for new techniques to increase the efficiency of their sales teams. At the same time, many sales managers are looking to increase the accuracy with which they can track the forecast of their sales pipeline.
CRM is a critical tool for better understanding (and ensuring the quality of) your sales data. However, it does not help CSRs or managers understand how to best apply that data in the context of the company's sales cycle. Extracting new insights from sales data can be a time-consuming task, preventing the salesperson from doing what's most important: selling. Even more frustrating (and stressful) when faced with the pressure of reaching their quota before the end of the quarter!
But there are solutions (and fortunately!)
Innovative sales forecasting and key sales cycle KPI tracking solutions help sales leaders (managers, sales directors, etc.) track the activity of their pipeline and their teams, then make intelligent projections of future results.
A key sales management tool: Clari. It offers real-time dashboards that transform the data from your customer meetings into actionable insights for individual SDR (Sales Development Representative) and team performance more globally. It leverages artificial intelligence to develop quarterly projections of your team's sales performance, and then provides actionable insights into your various opportunities by linking with your CRM data.
For example: What is the probability of me winning this deal? Is the pipe full enough to meet this month's goals? What opportunities need to be addressed quickly to move them forward? Sales Management tools provide new insights into the sales cycle, offering a centralized monitoring dashboard for managers to best direct their teams.
3. Sales Content Management
As we saw in Sales Engagement, today's buyers expect a sales journey that is optimized and customized for them. It is therefore imperative to produce content that is relevant to them, and then offer them concrete insights on the solutions you can provide to their business challenges.
And it's a double challenge! Your sales teams will never say no to relevant content that they can use to impress their prospects and then better answer their questions and allay their fears.
The challenge
Unfortunately, the majority of sales content that is produced by the marketing team is never used - according to some studies, sometimes up to 90% of the content will never be seen by a customer, and will be lost in the company's database!
Up to 90% of content produced by marketing is never used
Sales Content Management is therefore the set of solutions that allow you to organize, find and promote the right sales content at the right time, throughout the cycle.
This allows salespeople to better leverage existing content, and then better understand the areas of improvement to be followed when creating new materials by marketing. From a Sales Enablement point of view, Sales Content Management allows you to quickly create and structure your content base in order to offer a fluid, optimized path for each customer and each step of the process, from the first contact to the final closing.
Sweet Show has been designed precisely to meet this need.
Sweet Show allows you to centralize your presentations in a single presentation and sharing tool. Thus, your presentations are always up to date with the latest information. The marketing team can take care of creating new materials, structuring offers, and making them available to the different teams - the salesperson can focus on his customer pipeline!
Or a last minute presentation to prepare? The salesperson can create customized presentation scenarios to personalize the customer journey.
With Sweet Show, your sales teams will easily be able to present a personalized pitch for each customer, and then offer customized support thanks to a concrete and quantified visibility, in real time, on the topics that each prospect finds most relevant.
Conclusion
These 3 main areas of Sales Enablement tools each offer new techniques to make the sales journey smoother and boost conversion rates.
Each type of tool has its place in an effective sales team, each serving a different need:
- Sales Engagement tools to understand your prospecting data
- Sales Management tools to monitor sales performance during customer meetings
- Sales Content Management tools to optimize the content presented during appointments and sent to clients afterwards
Sales teams that know how to extract insights from their sales data and structure their sales journeys with optimized and relevant content are the teams that win the most deals.
Sweet Show is the key tool to extract insights from your content, and create customized presentation paths to offer a personalized pitch to each customer, at each stage of the cycle.
Find out how Sweet Show can accelerate your sales cycle by signing up for a free two-month trial or request a demo!
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