Achieving scalable growth is the kind of thing most of us business owners dream of.
We want a formula... we want to be able to objectively determine our next move, and do so with confidence... it's not a difficult thing to understand.
What is difficult to understand is how to actually accomplish it. After all, most of your growth to date has been accomplished through gut instinct and hustle... which is impossible to repeat as you grow and delegate.
So, many of you are toying around with Sales Enablement (what's that?), a concept rooted in objectivity, because it puts data in the driver's seat, not hunches.
These 5 sales enablement best practices will get you off on the right foot for controlling positive sales outcomes:
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is all about providing tools and support to improve outcomes on the sales floor. Results are measurable, and planning is rooted in objectivity.
It's not about coaching. It's not about providing the new shiny object every time a new shiny object makes its way to the market.
There are two parts to Sales Enablement:
- Supportive technologies and processes that enhance, not encumber
- Optimizing collateral and processes based on cold, hard data
To learn more, check out this article: What is Sales Enablement? or visit our Sales Enablement Services page.
1. Deploy a Modern CRM
There's no point in any of these exercises unless you have a modern technology stack that objectively measures activities that can be objectively attribute efforts to outcomes. Period.
And "Modern" is the key. Your CRM can't just be a data warehouse. It needs to be an active participant in your sales process. Salesforce, out of the box, is not a modern CRM. Neither are 99% of the products on the market today. Many of them can be modernized, but if we're talking about out of the box options, I'd say that Hubspot Sales Pro is the only one that really gets it.
Not sure if yours is modern? If it is, it will do the following:
- Automate data entry - ANYTHING connected to email and your calendar
- Automate scheduling
- Automate email nurturing
- Elevate sales insights when and where they are needed most
- Don't make sales dig through multiple platforms
- Marketing actions (website visits, etc) should be visible
- Alert sales of buying signals LIVE
- Provide quick access to measurable email templates
- Provide quick access to measurable sales collateral
- Leverage ai and machine learning
- Constantly update to incorporate the latest sales trends, such as video
Start building your Sales Enablement Strategy today with this free guide:
2. Create Measurable Email Templates
Outside of calling, emails are your salespeople's most leveraged form of communication. But there are so many unknowns when it comes to helping your salespeople succeed via email, such as:
- How do you tell what emails are effective?
- How do you improve the performance of their emails?
- When is the best time to send an email?
You can answer all of these questions and enable better sales outcomes by creating email templates in your Modern CRM, then measuring results and optimizing based on objective data.
Here's a small example of the kind of data you can glean:
You can see how often they're being sent as well as open, reply, and click rates. With this kind of data, you can improve outcomes through A/B testing.
Your salespeople send the same emails day in and day out. Leverage email templates to create messaging cohesiveness along with hackable success.
3. Upload Measurable Sales Collateral
Email isn't the only collateral that you can put into template form. In fact, anything you put into digital form can be measured.
In Hubspot Sales Pro, we have a tool called "Documents." This allows us to upload anything from flyers to sales presentations. Doing so gives our salespeople a distinct advantage.
- Sales gets live notifications every time somebody opens the collateral
- Sales can see a history of who opened it, when, and how long
Take a look at some of the amazing insights sales AND marketing has access to thanks to this incredible tool:
This is a composite of two screenshots showing the same document... On the top you see basic dashboard type information. Under you'll see which specific visitors have viewed it (censored to protect our clients' anonymity). In the middle you'll see a list of times it was opened by a specific individual, and to the right you'll see information based on a single visit.
Based on this kind of data, your marketing team can see where the bottlenecks exist for future iterations. And your salespeople can see how engaged or not engaged a prospect is.
4. Different Scheduling Links for Different Events
One of the best ways to kill a deal fast in its tracks is to make scheduling a meeting a painful and tedious process. Thus, the advent of programs such as Calendarly.
But as a sales enabler, this just checks one of the boxes (automation)... it still leaves room for understanding the impact of these tools.
Over the years, I have learned through personal experience how important it is to provide different links for different purposes.
See below for a matrix of different links based on different purposes:
By giving your salespeople MORE options, you give their prospects FEWER options, which tends to improve overall performance.
You also gain all sorts of valuable insights based on how these links are being used, and which better serve the sale.
For example, the 15-minute tire kicker has a strong showing, but not as strong as the 30-minute introduction.
Additionally, with the right technology, they can link multiple calendars to accommodate inside and outside sales teams.
5. Execute an SLA between Sales & Marketing
Putting together a Service Level Agreement between sales and marketing may seem more like a way to resolve alignment issues, but it also provides sales with a clear roadmap to success.
A properly executed SLA will tell them exactly what's expected when an inbound lead comes in or how to respond to specific buying signals.
6. Test, Measure, Analyze, Report, Repeat
At the end of the day, scaling is all about achieving performance goals through repetition. So, it's important to hold sales accountable to the plan you bestow upon them, and to ensure marketing continues to support sales with objective improvements in the collateral they provide.
You can accomplish this by setting benchmarks, and testing different changes. It's important to keep changes incremental, and only focus on one metric at a time.
With emails, start with your open rates. This comes from improving subject lines and timing. The other two metrics depend greatly on your goals of the email.
CONCLUSION:
By deploying these 6 sales enablement best practices, you should have no problem growing your business with confidence. In fact, many of your growth objectives can be reached in relatively short order by making adjustments in these areas rather than putting your eggs in the marketing basket.
CLICK HERE to learn more about our sales enablement services:
