Sales enablement, though a singular concept, requires a lot of different moving parts that run simultaneously. By elevating each individually, you’ll see overall improvement in skill building and sales success.

Elements of great sales enablement

The below are absolutely essential for a successful sales enablement motion.

Onboarding and training

At the heart of sales enablement is knowledge. The more information you can pass along to sellers, the more prepared and confident they’ll feel going into conversations with prospects. Learning begins on a rep’s first day with onboarding, and continues throughout their tenure with ongoing micro-learning opportunities. Making sales enablement learning a year-round activity both reinforces foundational knowledge and keeps salespeople updated on any changes in product or process.

Role-playing

A rep is acing all of the quizzes and has achieved multiple skill certifications — great! But is this show of knowledge making any sort of change in their ability to engage buyers? It’s difficult for a manager to know when he or she is unable to join every single sales call or meeting. Role-playing is a helpful tool to help reps practice and improve real-world selling behaviors while allowing sales leaders to get a firsthand look at how learning is applied and provide feedback.

Content

Blog posts, ebooks, videos, and other content are useful resources for reps to hand out in a buyer meeting, send via email, and follow-up with after a phone call. Sellers don’t just need access to this content; they also need to know when and how to use it to engage potential customers at different stages in the buying journey. It’s important for sales and marketing to work together to craft content pieces that speak to various challenges so reps can engage different buyers more personally.

Coaching

Even if a sales rep has inherent sales abilities, it’s a coach that refines those abilities to drive success. Between training and role-playing, regular one-on-one sales coaching is what takes a sales team from okay to excellent. In these sessions, reps can discuss both wins and challenges and work alongside their managers to come up with solutions. Managers should use insights from training and role-playing exercises to identify where the seller is thriving and where they can improve, then give the most meaningful guidance for how to move forward.

Analytics

It’s important to close the loop on all these sales enablement efforts. This means tracking certain KPIs over time to gauge whether sales enablement training, coaching, and other approaches are helping to improve seller performance. Evaluating both individual and team performance metrics, as well as how they correlate to revenue, you can diagnose any issues or gaps within your enablement program. And when you’re able to locate where the problems are, you can make changes, like creating additional training materials around a certain topic or assigning role-plays to reps with specified selling scenarios.

Are you ready to take the next step in your own sales enablement strategy? Set up time for a Mindtickle demo to learn how sales onboarding, role-playing, content, coaching, and analytics come together in one platform.