In today's business world, sales enablement must be a part of every organization's strategy to ensure success. For the uninitiated, sales enablement is a program to train reps in certain key skills and tactics so they can perform at a higher level.

Sales Enablement Training Programs prepare reps for digital transformation. Businesses need their salespeople well-versed in new technologies so they can capitalize on this disruption.

Sales reps have lived through the wave of internet adoption, but now that customers are demanding digital transformation, it is up to your training program to help them learn how to use technology effectively. You can also make use of the sales enablement content, to begin with.

Consider these examples:

• Mobile devices have gone from being difficult-to-use tools to being easy-to-use tools.
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way customers buy, and sales reps need to know how to sell effectively in this landscape.
• Did you miss that key point? Maybe your rep didn't - but her customer did, and she lost a closed deal because of it. Your training program can help your reps learn when they should push for more information and when they should shut up so their prospects feel comfortable sharing what's on their mind.

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Why is Sales Enablement Training Important?

There are many reasons why sales enablement is important for companies:

1. A healthy pipeline means higher revenue for companies: If salespeople aren't equipped with the right knowledge, tools, and tactics, they will flood the pipeline with low-quality leads that aren't truly sales-ready. This means less revenue for your company.
2. Sales enablement helps you engage at every stage of the customer journey: Your reps need to know how their role fits into the entire customer journey and what marketing's expectations are for each phase. By clearly defining how marketing and sales should work together, you can make sure both teams are working together to provide a positive experience for customers while closing more deals.  
3. Improved training helps create better business outcomes: A study by Aberdeen Group found that companies who invested in enterprise selling (the combination of sales and marketing) saw higher revenue growth (166%) than their peers who didn't adopt enterprise selling - and those companies with enterprise selling had better revenue growth than ones without it.

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How Do You Launch a Sales Enablement Training Program?

Your training won't always stick the first time. And that's okay!  A lot of factors go into determining whether your coaching efforts are successful or not - including how often you follow up with reps, if they're open to change in the first place, and whether they understand what is expected of them once they leave your training session.

Whether you're thinking about introducing sales enablement into your culture or you've just launched, these six steps will help put your program on the right track:  

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1. Establish a sales enablement vision

From Zalando's red team, which gets new employees up to speed with materials about how it operates as an organization, to LinkedIn Learning, which offers online courses on topics like marketing fundamentals, there are tons of examples out there of organizations rocking sales enablement training.

So how do you create a vision that will work for your organization? According to experts, the first step is to define what sales enablement means, and it goes beyond just training.

It's about aligning Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, IT, Operations - anyone who touches or could interact with customers should be involved in these training. Sales Enablement also requires clear communication of key messages across the entire company (and no typos).

Once your team is on board with defining what sales enablement is and why it's important to everyone at the company, you can start laying out your ground rules.

That includes establishing basic terminology that all employees should use when discussing products and services; creating a framework for identifying leads so reps know which ones to pass on and which ones to prioritize, and helping everyone understand how marketing fits into the customer journey.

Your enablement of sales training shouldn't be scattered across different departments and each member of the team shouldn't have their own idea of what it means to be successful, so take time, in the beginning, to figure out what success looks like for your organization.

How do companies with high-performance reps compare to others? What are some business outcomes that are important to measure? Once you can answer these questions, you can create a roadmap for your program focused on achieving these goals.

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2. Create a lead qualification framework

This training should help reps know when to be pushy and when to back off, so they qualify leads more efficiently than before - but how do they determine if someone is truly sales-ready? Defining who your ideal customer is should be the first step in creating this lead qualification framework.

This will allow you to identify what other qualities make up an ideal customer without having too many moving parts that could result in inaccurate results.

Now that you have your vision in place, it's time to define who your ideal prospect is that means collecting all of the information you can about potential customers - including their location, budget, what they've bought from you before (if any), industry challenges they're facing, competitors they use, etc. - and adding it to your enablement training materials so reps are armed with everything they need to qualify an opportunity.

Once someone on your team has defined who qualifies as a sales-ready prospect it's time to figure out what makes them qualified. Decide what your company needs to do or say in order for a lead to move further down the sales funnel, such as:

• Are they looking for specific features and capabilities?
• Do they understand how to use your product?
• Are you talking about their industry challenges?

The more detailed and granular the information is, the better - getting reps on the same page will help eliminate confusion and improve overall performance.

‍For example, a proper overview of which benefits are important to prospects within an industry will enable your reps to recognize if a prospect has already talked about those during a meeting (and thus be able to skip that discussion). This strengthens trust between you and the customer by ensuring that users know exactly what they're getting into.

a. Understand characteristics of great customers

Don't just look at one or two attributes; dig deeper by understanding which characteristics are most important to your business's success.

‍For example, if your ideal customer spends $5,000 or more annually on your product and has a website that ranks in the top three positions for keywords related to their industry, these are the kinds of insights you'll need.

b. Measure how closely each prospect fits these characteristics

Once you've defined who your ideal customer is by identifying what matters most to your business's success, you can start measuring how closely prospects align with this description. You can go deep into specific measurements or simple yes/no questions.

c. Align marketing & sales together

Once both teams understand what it takes to qualify leads at each stage of the sales cycle - and share similar expectations - they'll be able to communicate more effectively about when leads are sales-ready. This alignment also means sales reps are more likely, to tell the truth about whether a lead is low-quality just because it's not sales-ready.  

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3. Run experiments & track progress

Once you've created your framework, you should start running small experiments to test how your team can better qualify leads. You may be surprised at the results of changing even one thing on your journey to sales enablement - so don't underestimate the power of experimenting with different tactics and seeing what works best for your organization.

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4. Continue training through new products or services

Do you have new products or services that require reps to learn about an entirely new set of rules and strategies? If so, this is a perfect time to train them on these new products. Sales enablement training can improve a rep's understanding of the new product by running through the details, benefits, and use cases with them in person.  

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5. Empower your team to coach each other

One way to ensure that training sticks are to teach reps how to be coaches themselves - giving them enough information that they can help teammates when they face challenges in the future. Once you've launched the training for reps, make sure everyone is on the same page by teaching them how to be effective coaches themselves.

If they know all of the information inside and out (just like you do), it will be easier for them to answer questions when colleagues come to them with challenges or questions about their product. 

It's important that everyone knows what boilerplate verbiage should be used when talking about your company/product/service so there are no misunderstandings between teammates or customers/prospects along the way - which leads us to Step 6.

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6. Start holding regular “Smarketing” meetings

Your training won't always stick the first time.  And that's okay!  A lot of factors go into determining whether your coaching efforts are successful or not - including how often you follow up with reps, if they're open to change in the first place, and whether they understand what is expected of them once they leave your training session.

So start holding regular “Smarketing” meetings where marketing and sales collaborate on who their ideal customer is in order to determine what makes prospects sales-ready so they can easily qualify leads in real-time.

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7. Make sure everyone is on the same page

It's important for everyone (both business and non-business users) to know what boilerplate verbiage reps should use when talking about your product or service so there are no misunderstandings between team members or customers/prospects along the way. When everyone understands their role it's easier, to be honest about whether a lead is sales-ready - or not.

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8. Start conducting regular market research

When people ask me for insight about their business - even when it's just something random like “do you think we should launch a product for dogs?” - I always give them the same advice: Conduct market research before you take any big steps forward. Your sales enablement training won't always stick the first time. 

And that's okay!  A lot of factors go into determining whether your coaching efforts are successful or not - including how often you follow up with reps.

If they're open to change in the first place, and whether they understand what is expected of them once they leave your training session. So start conducting regular market research where marketing and sales collaborate on who their ideal customer is in order to determine what makes prospects sales-ready so they can easily qualify leads in real-time.

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9. Create a content strategy

In order to make sure you're reaching the right audience with the right messages, you need to create a sales enablement content strategy.  You can't just send your reps on their way to create whatever they want on their own - every single piece of messaging needs to be on-brand and on-message.  This might sound like overkill, but it's important if you want to successfully drive revenue.  When reps are empowered with high-quality materials, they will do better work, which means higher sales for everyone!

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10. Educate Sales Reps

No matter how much marketing or product management does for sales enablement teams, ultimately the success of these programs comes down to one thing: empowering reps with great information.  There's a reason they're called sales enablement teams - they exist to support the success of the entire organization.  And unless you empower your reps with effective messaging and tools, you won't get anywhere.

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11. Define your objectives

No matter what kind of business you're in, chances are that your sales enablement program exists in some capacity to drive revenue.  You can't just go in blind and start building anything - you need to set clear objectives for what you're trying to accomplish within this program, including the number of users, types of content they'll be using (videos vs. webinars vs. ebooks), etc.  This is where having a solid plan will make or break your entire initiative, so take the time upfront to do it right!

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12. Pick an executive sponsor

Let's be real - if there isn't someone above you who's pushing for these kinds of changes, then nothing will happen at all.  With that said, it has to be the right person with the right objective.  If you're an executive at a company that's already doing well and simply trying to keep up with the competition, chances are that sales enablement isn't going to be your priority (and neither will most of the other points we've listed here).  However, if you're with a growing or new company and you know that sales enablement is what your organization needs in order to scale, then definitely make sure someone like this is looking for ways to support these initiatives.

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13. Invest in technology

When it comes to sales enablement programs, technology plays an enormous role - after all, weapons like Salesforce CRM and HubSpot CRM can help your reps out at every stage of their journey.  If your organization is using these kinds of programs already, absolutely take advantage of features like Salesforce training to build out your content library.  However, if you're still on the fence about investing in any kind of system for sales enablement, definitely consider it - chances are that your team will have more success with this type of program if they're not stuck emailing files back and forth!

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14. Ensure ongoing support

Especially in larger organizations where there's a lot going on at once, it's important that your sales enablement initiative gets ongoing support from senior management.  This can go a long way towards making sure people actually use these products and services - without ongoing investment and strategic guidance, things fall through the cracks very quickly.  Make sure you're communicating regularly with other leaders and holding weekly meetings to discuss progress, challenges, and future goals!

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Looking for Guidance?

To learn more about how to get started, check out these tools and apps that will help you on your journey of sales enablement:

• Quercus Learning - Begin the training of your company with real-time, interactive learning technology.
• Nintex Workflow – A tool that allows you to automate customer journeys based on specific actions they take (i.e., watching a video).  This creates consistency across the organization so users always know what to do next in each stage of the sales funnel.  
• Marketo Predictive Intelligence – An AI-based lead scoring system that provides accurate scores at scale without requiring manual input. This helps you identify potential customers earlier in the sales cycle so that reps can spend their most valuable time on qualified leads.
• Salesmate – An app for iOS and Android that helps you track the effectiveness of your training, identify who needs extra support, and see whether your strategy is working.  It even lets you send automated messages to users based on actions they take or status in the sales cycle.

To conclude, such trainings on sales enablement helps sales reps to become a better version of themselves. This in turn leads to better outcomes, increased revenue, and great customer satisfaction.