Business has changed. Distributed work environments, increasingly educated buyers, a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders, and tougher competitive pressures—not to mention the pandemic—have created unique challenges for today’s go-to-market organizations.

Research reveals the obstacles many companies face: 84% of buyers want sellers who are fluent in their industry, business, and products (Forrester), yet 60-70% of sales content is never used (SiriusDecisions). Even worse, salespeople only dedicate 1% of their work week to learning (Deloitte).

As selling has gotten more challenging, sales enablement has gotten more important. These days, equipping sellers to stay competitive requires a technology solution. You need a platform that activates sellers with learning, content, and collaboration in the flow of work.

Evaluating Sales Enablement Solutions

A sales enablement solution is fast becoming a critical component of any organization’s technology stack. Not only does the right platform improve alignment between marketing and sales, it has an enormous impact on operational efficiency, sales productivity, and most importantly—revenue.

Learn more about sales enablement technology: Gartner Market Guide for Sales Enablement Platforms

Organizations can achieve these results by improving ease of content creation, access, and analytics. Easy access to the right knowledge at the moment of need empowers your sellers. When they understand the purpose of each asset—and how and when to use it—your sales content gains context. This ensures maximum use by sellers of each asset you produce and guarantees that reps are able to convey value at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Relying on traditional sales content management for sales enablement will not produce measurable changes in behavior and results. Organizations need to infuse learning, content, and collaboration into the flow of work at every stage of the sales content lifecycle.

Amplifying the Impact of Sales Content

Robust and secure sales enablement solutions drive growth by helping sellers connect with internal colleagues and external prospects in compelling and insightful ways. These tools deliver ROI, increase productivity, and align sales and marketing teams as they gain new insights into best operational practices, creating a data-driven connection with prospects.

The right sales enablement solutions offer:

• Greater content effectiveness and adoption among sales
• Higher content engagement and shorter sales cycles
• Faster new hire ramp with more productive sales interactions
• Greater visibility into content delivery and impact
• Better sales and marketing team alignment

Sales enablement is ultimately about increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales teams, to make them even better at what they already do. It’s an ongoing process of learning and optimizing for managers, sales, and even customer success teams that carry a quota and are responsible for upsells or renewals.

Top 8 Uses Cases for Sales and Marketing Enablement

Holistic sales enablement solutions ultimately drive results so that large, mid-sized, and small organizations can meet revenue goals, increase effectiveness, and do more with less, all while meeting regulatory requirements. But sales can’t do it alone. It’s essential to align with your marketing team to create, manage, and deploy high-quality sales content.

Productive sales conversations aren’t possible without having an end-to-end enablement strategy that is fueled by the best sales content. If you’re evaluating sales—and marketing—enablement solutions, make sure they allow you to accomplish these eight critical use cases.

1. Smart Content Creation

Marketing is able to easily capture and incorporate field feedback and experiences into content creation.

2. Content Launch

Marketing can deliver engaging content with critical context surrounding intended use and refine messaging as important changes occur.

3. Content Management

Organizations can administer, manage, distribute, and personalize sales collateral, playbooks, and field-generated agile content at scale.

4. Content Activation

Enablement teams can activate content with relevant learning using AI-powered recommendations to ensure sellers have the right tools at the right time.

5. Field-captured Content

Sellers can capture and share best practices, competitive insights, and success stories compliantly with one touch from any device.

6. Sales Content Coaching

Managers can coach distributed teams on the latest content using video role play, objection-handling simulations, and point-in-time discussions.

7. Engagement Experiences

Sellers can provide engaging and personalized prospect experiences with interactive content and collaborative deal rooms.

8. Content Analytics

Teams can correlate content with success and monitor content usage in actual selling scenarios to learn which pieces are working.

Maximizing Prospect Engagement

It’s not just about enablement though; it’s about engagement. The best sales enablement platforms not only deliver relevant sales materials that support sellers wherever they are, they also provide an engaging sales experience for prospects. To stay competitive, you must ensure that sellers can personalize messaging and deliver your company’s value proposition to meet prospect needs.

Make sure your sales enablement solution offers these engagement capabilities:

• Train and onboard with dynamic just-in-time content that allows sellers to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it.
• Communicate with marketing and sales teams on every device, location, and time zone.
• Create more effective content using rep feedback and field experiences
• Distribute and activate content with just-in-time learning and coaching
• Deploy AI-powered content recommendations on any device
• Maximize prospect engagement with interactive virtual experiences
• Analyze, measure and monitor content usage in real selling situations
• Provide scalable content administration, ensuring sellers are equipped with the most relevant and up-to-date content and tools.

Don’t let traditional sales enablement approaches slow you down. With a modern solution, your sellers will be able to tap into sales content in new ways, delivering prospect-focused material, and winning deals in a scalable and repeatable fashion.

Learn More

To learn how to accelerate your results with modern sales enablement, download our eBook: Demystifying Sales Enablement: How to Plan for the Next Normal.