4 Technology Driven Sales Enablement Tactics Your Business Can Deploy Today

By Ramesh Ramani, CEO, ExpertusONE Savvy B2B businesses have always counted on high-performing sales teams to supply the horsepower for their market success. The role of sales teams in corporate success has consistently been recognized as so essential that star performers have often commanded earning power to rival that of the C-suite.  Today, none of that has changed. High-performing sales teams are still a make-or-break proposition for businesses of all kinds. But what has changed is the broader digital landscape in which sales teams operate. The acceleration of the digital age has driven a proliferation of self-service channels, the appearance of increasingly empowered buyers, and emerging trends in customer relations management (CRM). The result is that effective sales force onboarding, sales team training, and enablement have become a dizzyingly complex and high-stakes affair. As the digital age enters hyperdrive, companies that fail to invest in technology-driven solutions run the risk of watching their competitors cross the finish line ahead of them. 

What is Sales Enablement?

What is the role of Sales Enablement Technology?

Sales enablement technology helps sales teams do their job better by improving productivity, sales messaging, and upskilling low-performing salespeople. Sales enablement technology includes tools for prospecting, lead nurturing, managing pipelines, and closing deals such as LMS software. The modern sales process requires salespeople to be able to quickly access information about prospects, customers, competitors, and market trends. Sales enablement software provides them with all this information in one place.

What is the current landscape of Sales Enablement?

The current landscape of sales enablement is rapidly evolving and growing, driven by the increasing use of technology and the need for organizations to be more effective in their sales processes. Here are some trends in the current landscape of sales enablement:

1. Increased focus on virtual selling: With the rise of remote work and virtual selling, sales enablement is becoming more focused on providing sales teams with the tools and resources they need to sell effectively in a virtual environment.
2. Increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning: AI and machine learning are increasingly being used in sales enablement to provide sales teams with real-time insights, personalized content, and predictive analytics.
3. Growing importance of sales enablement content: Sales enablement content is becoming more important as organizations strive to create a more consistent and effective sales process.
4. Integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems: Sales enablement is becoming more integrated with CRM systems, allowing sales teams to have a more complete view of the customer and access to the resources they need to sell more effectively.
5. Emphasis on sales coaching and development: Sales enablement is placing a greater emphasis on sales coaching and development, providing sales reps with the training and resources they need to improve their skills and performance.

Why do you need sales enablement solutions for your business?

Sales enablement solutions help businesses automate processes related to sales activities such as lead generation, qualification, and account management. These tools also provide real-time insights into customer behavior and performance. They are designed to increase sales productivity and efficiency, which ultimately leads to higher revenue growth. According to a recent study, organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without.

Empowered Buyers Require Empowered Salespeople

B2B buyers are more empowered than ever. The days of naive prospects are not only long gone, they’re ancient history. Today, buyers often come to the table armed to the teeth with more product knowledge (and competitor intel) than the most heavily fortified salesperson of a decade ago.  As a result, their expectations of salespeople have changed dramatically. In the past, a buyer might have regarded a salesperson as essentially a dedicated product-education specialist. But today, buyers all but demand that sales reps function as virtual sherpas for what can sometimes feel like an exercise in “choose your adventure.” Buyers want salespeople (and increasingly, entire sales teams) who can help them cut through the digital noise, who know their business needs and industry ecosystem like the back of their hand, and who can lead them to the summit of the best solution for their particular problem.   But this is easier said than done. The digital landscape includes numerous features with which sales reps must become familiar and numerous skills they must master. These include the use of CRM platforms, social media, digital research, content curation and creation, email sequence management, multi-channel outreach and analytics, and more. And as always, sales reps have to make every conversation count. However, these conversations have become increasingly non-linear and difficult to track and manage. For example, prospect touchpoints now span a dozen or more channels, and buyers have come to expect all but instant response times.  Time is money, and in sales, a competitor who gets to a prospect even a minute ahead of you can make the difference between sunk costs and closing the deal. All of this comes down to one utterly critical point. Sales teams need to be every bit as empowered as their prospects. But for sales teams to be truly empowered, they require technologically driven sales-enablement solutions.   

Salespeople need to learn efficiently, effectively, and constantly in order to keep pace with digitally savvy buyers. Sales leaders responsible for sales enablement must leverage technology to provide consistent training and coaching that drives learning retention, seller performance, engagement, and measures business impact.  Ramesh Ramani, ExpertusONE CEO

Frictionless LMS Technology is Now Table Stakes for Sales Enablement

What has long been called sales enablement can also be accurately understood as sales team empowerment. Sales enablement is the process of providing salespeople with the training and assets they need to effectively engage prospects and buyers — in short, empowering them with the resources for fueling high performance. ExpertusONE’s Learning Management System technology makes it easy for companies to empower their sales teams with frictionless onboarding, training, and sales-enablement solutions — all delivered seamlessly through the platforms and apps sales teams are already using: Salesforce and Slack. Why is frictionless enterprise LMS software now table stakes for empowering salespeople? With the complexification of the digital landscape has come the need for a far more strategic approach to sales enablement that only advanced LMS can deliver. Case in point? According to a study by Accenture, it takes about nine months for a newly hired sales rep to become proficient. Accenture reports that “ramp-up time” poses significant dangers to companies, leaving 15% of customers and territories uncovered. And as if this wasn’t alarming enough, this figure doesn’t even take into account the opportunity costs of identifying and vetting qualified sales reps. Again, time is money, and the rapid, efficient, and effective deployment of sales enablement tactics is a significant competitive advantage.  

Deploying Technology-Driven Sales-Enablement Tactics

In addition to the time typically required for onboarding new hires, a top sales-enablement challenge involves the ability to scale training resources and learning assets across a diverse sales cohort. After all, new hires come into the organization with varying knowledge levels, degrees of digital proficiency, and differing learning styles and preferences.  What’s more, salespeople or even entire sales teams are often siloed, lacking visibility into areas of the funnel for which they’re not personally responsible. Add to this the fact that sales reps may not share the same time zone, or even country, for that matter. For all these reasons, it’s imperative that sales enablement tactics be highly scalable to suit diverse needs. Here are six of the most powerful that ExpertusONE lets you rapidly deploy. 

Using ExpertusONE LMS to Deliver Sales Enablement Solutions

1. Personalized, Self-Paced, Precision Learning

ExpertusONE delivers tightly focused and individually optimized sales enablement with personalized parameters. This ensures that the right salespeople receive the right training, at the right time, in the right way, and at the right pace. (No more “carpet bombing” salespeople with learning materials and training resources that aren’t tuned to their specific needs, preferences, territories, and so forth.) With ExpertusONE, sales enablement is deployed with the precision of a surgical strike, allowing you to deliver content that’s highly targeted, streamlined, and relevant. 

2. Micro-Learning for Meeting Real-Time Demand

Some of the most powerful learning occurs when microbursts of training or customer training resources can be easily accessed in response to real-time demand. That’s why ExpertusONE includes options to deploy skill-based training or support resources in small, easily digestible chunks. When salespeople have instant access to a system that helps them “learn on their feet,” they’re much more likely to retain information and engage prospects more effectively.   

3. Gamification and Interactive Content

An LMS can use gamification and interactive content to make sales training and development more engaging and effective. This LMS gamification feature can help to improve learning outcomes and increase the retention of key information by sales reps.

4. Analytics and Reporting for Continuous Improvement

An LMS can provide analytics and reporting capabilities to track the progress and performance of sales reps, and identify areas for improvement. LMS reporting helps sales leaders understand which training programs are having the biggest impact and where they should focus their efforts in the future.

5. Learning — Without the Learning Curve

Tackling the training for a new sales position can be challenging enough without the learning curve of struggling to navigate an entirely new platform. ExpertusONE allows you to provide training courses, performance support, sales assets, and knowledge sharing within your sales teams’ preferred devices and in the applications with which they’re already familiar. This eliminates a significant amount of “drag” in the training process, reduces cognitive load, and eases the pathway to proficiency. 

6. Easily-Updatable and Fully Searchable Digital Content Management 

Sales managers need the ease and security of knowing they can easily and quickly access, upload, or update training materials to a fully searchable platform with robust version controls. ExpertusONE incorporates the latest in AI and machine learning to deliver digital content management that’s as intuitive as it is innovative.  High-performing sales teams will continue to supply the horse-power for companies’ market success, but to complete this mission, technology-driven sales-enablement is essential. As sales enablement continues to become an increasingly strategic, complex, and high-stakes affair, companies that invest in technology-driven sales enablement solutions will remain ahead of their competition and among the first to cross the finish line.