You know the old saying, “There are many paths you can take to get to the top of a mountain?” As businesses progress through their unique processes, talent, disciplines, and diligence, they can achieve their revenue goals, yes—but how efficiently? Sales enablement tools provide your sales team and business to take the path of least resistance to conquer your unique mountain.
Sales and marketing teams are tasked with staying ahead of the ever-evolving consumer buying behavior to meet customers where they are, with the right message, cadence, etc. In 2022, if your business is still operating in silos, sales teams using excel sheets as a CRM tool, or sending emails manually to massive client lists—you are behind the curve.
If your business experiences inconsistent and incomplete data, sub-par renewal rates, missed revenue opportunities, slow quote turnaround, and clunky processes, here are a few insights into how sales enablement can help.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement provides your business’s sales team with the resources to streamline sales processes, make reps more efficient, and, ultimately, close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to sell your product or service to customers effectively.
“Sales enablement is the glue that sticks a functional sales org together.” – James Shippen, Global Head of Sales Enablement | Domino UK
Improve Data Management to Achieve More Insights
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform, like Salesforce.com, should be a no-brainer for every organization. These CRM platforms enable you to consolidate your operational and customer data in one central location. It also makes it easy to standardize your data, establish business rules for data governance, and generate exception reports to improve data quality compliance.
Utilizing sales and marketing engagement tools, like Outreach, enables your organization to use velocity reporting and segmentation analysis. These reports provide insights into the effectiveness of your reps at every stage of your customer journey experience.
Leveraging this data informs where individual reps need to spend the most time, which content is working and not, and where managers need to train individual representatives. It also helps sales and marketing leaders understand the type of training and content that is most effective for their teams to close deals more effectively and efficiently.
Quicker Quote Turnaround
Sales enablement tools are critical to helping standardize and streamline quote processes. We rarely see businesses with the capabilities to turn around standard direct or indirect (i.e., partners, VAR, Distributors) quotes within five days. A slow, inconsistent quote process and poor quote management quickly lead to late renewals, missed opportunities, and, ultimately, a significant loss of revenue potential.
We provided quoting support for several modalities for a Medical Device Healthcare Provider to improve quote consistency and accuracy for their equipment. The result was a 15% improvement in on-time renewal rates and an 8% improvement in win rates across all 14 modalities. Below, we highlighted a couple of ways you can help improve your quote-to-cash/contract renewal process.
- Proactive Quoting: Quote all expiring renewals business 90 days before expiration. One metric to measure the success of proactive quoting is measuring the days in advance (120-90-60-30 days).
- Reactive Quoting: Generating a quote revision based on sales rep or channel partner request. One metric to measure the success of reactive quoting is the turnaround time of these quote requests.
- Best practice: Standard quote revisions should be sent out within 48 hours.
- Quote Quality Management: Monitoring quote accuracy through audit and compliant resolutions. Improving knowledge management, training, and processes is key to overall quote accuracy.
Enable Your Sales Team to Focus on…Selling
On average, 50% of a sales rep’s time is wasted on administrative activities, like account research, quoting, and data entry. Using sales enablement tools enables your teams to automate redundant processes, and centralize knowledge banks and news feeds. Utilizing a “technology cockpit” empowers reps to be more efficient and effective by centralizing key applications on a single screen.
Using great technologies like SoftPhone enables better call activity management, increases rep efficiency and speed, and provides deep business insights into customer contact history.
Ultimately, the sales team will spend more time selling, with more intelligence at their fingertips, enabling them to have a higher percentage of sales conversions, driving increased revenue for your business and better support for your organization’s big-picture goals.
Enhance New Hire Training and Comprehensive Coaching
Sure, you can hire the best talent in the industry, but your organization’s training program lays the foundation for every high-performing sales engine. In 2022, blended virtual training has become an integral part of new hire training. It starts with content development and building out materials for instructor lead training (ILT) and E-learning that covers your business’s products, processes, and systems.
We suggest developing a centralized knowledge repository with change management capabilities to ensure your training stays up to date with all product development and process updates. Also, implement a weekly or monthly newsletter to ensure corporate, process, and product messaging are in sync across your entire organization.
According to a recent survey, 84% of all sales training is lost after 90 days. This is majorly due to the lack of information retention among sales personnel.
As important as the initial onboarding and training programs are, just as essential is how you continue to keep your teams sharp with on-demand training programs. We implemented informal sessions and small group training for an industry-leading Open-Sourced Software Company for their sales and renewal teams to stay updated with product changes, competitor intelligence, company messaging changes, market strategies, and sales tactics. We also lead role-plays and post-call coaching to reinforce sales messaging and provide suggestions for improvement.
Skyrocket Your Sales Results with Sales Enablement
Concentrix offers all the sales enablement tools and services discussed above to help businesses provide consistency to their communications, improve quoting processes, clean up and manage data better, and streamline your customer journey experience. Whether you’re looking to simplify a few internal processes or completely revamp your approach to how your teams train and sell, Concentrix’s sales enablement services can help you summit your perspective mountain and look for higher peaks in the coming years.
Speak to an expert today to learn more about how sales enablement services can help your organization.
