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3 Reasons We're All Thankful for Sales Enablement

Nov 27th, 2019

So often, sales enablement is the unsung hero of the sales organization.

Reps earn commission on deals they win. Managers and leaders get accolades when their teams reach quota. As a support function, sales enablement doesn’t always receive the same recognition – even though it should!

At Brainshark, we know how hard sales enablement professionals work to ensure everyone has what they need to succeed, from training and content to coaching and sales tools.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we’re reflecting on just a few of the many ways sales enablement helps others shine year-round.

1. Bringing Out the Best in Everyone

Every salesperson has strengths and weaknesses. A well-run sales enablement program helps identify where sellers have room to improve, and then equips them with the learning needed to achieve Priority No. 1: hitting quota.

Say a seller is struggling to close deals. Their manager finds he or she is great at sourcing prospects and generating interest during the first appointment, only to have opportunities stall during the discovery phase.

Left to their own devices, the rep might continue making the same mistakes, or try “practicing” a new approach in front of buyers. (Never ideal.)

In situations like these, it’s often “sales enablement to the rescue” with training and coaching that helps reps with specific challenges, like asking discovery questions. Sales enablement might facilitate coaching activities such as a 1-on-1 sales role play, where the rep practices asking discovery questions with a manager or peer based on a hypothetical scenario. Enablement could also assign a video coaching activity where the manager or enablement team assesses the rep and provides feedback remotely.

If multiple reps are struggling with discovery, maybe the sales enablement team provides a refresher training course that covers pre-call planning, useful questions for uncovering buyer pain, and active listening tips that help reps formulate follow-up questions.

With sales enablement supporting them, reps are set up to satisfy buyers and drive better results.

Related content: Why Sales Coaching Matters, and How to Get Started

2. Making Everything a Little Easier

Salespeople are bombarded with new information every day: product updates, competitive intel, messaging changes, internal announcements, emails… and so much more.

Sales enablement takes all that information, filters out what sales doesn’t need to know, translates the key details into language that sellers care about (i.e. what does this mean for me?), and packages everything in a format that’s easy to consume – acting as the go-to sales communicators.

With so many groups (marketing, product, sales ops), responsible for enabling the sales organization, sales enablement’s role as “chief orchestrator” is critical. That can involve pushing a microlearning course out to reps’ mobile devices following a product update, covering any important changes. It could also mean collaborating with subject matter experts when creating assets meant to help sales close deals.

This “translation” work is especially important during sales transformations, such as M&A or a major product overhaul. Sales enablement takes the lead on these types of change management initiatives, equipping sales managers to coach their teams through the change, preparing reps to have completely different buyer conversations, and communicating clearly with all parties.

In every case, sales enablement is working behind-the-scenes to make life easier for salespeople and their managers.

Related content: Why is Sales Enablement Important? 5 Reasons and Examples

3. Providing Excellent Sales Content

We like to say that Brainshark makes content creation a piece of cake for sales enablement pros. But there’s no doubt that great sales content still takes time, thought, and effort to create. You can’t just buy it off the shelf.

Sales enablement creates so many different types of content that helps reps do their jobs better: playbooks, value messaging guidelines, product training, objection-handling guides, battle cards, microlearning… the list goes on and on. In addition, there’s hard work that goes into keeping these assets engaging, useful, and regularly updated.

The benefits of great content are obviously huge. Training assets help ensure reps are well-educated and skilled enough to impress today’s demanding buyers. Customer-facing content helps reps add value to  buyer interactions and move deals forward. In fact, companies that have a sales enablement content strategy achieve 27% better win rates than their peers, CSO Insights found.

Once again, that’s a tip of the hat businesses owe their sales enablement teams!

Related content: 4 Keys to Creating Great Sales Training Content