How to Overcome Your 5 Biggest Sales Enablement Challenges in 2019 [Infographic]

Want to know how to make sure your sales organization has the best resources at its fingertips to succeed?

How is this information being delivered? Is it effective and efficient? Why is this important?

As time has progressed, sales enablement has become an important function for the success of sales organizations.

For those of you not familiar with it, according to an article written by Topo, “Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.”

In other words, helping sales sell better.

Companies want to not only sell more but sell more effectively but getting started with this is easier said than done.

A great infographic provided by Brainshark helps break down what sales enablement is and how to overcome common challenges in implementing it successfully. 

1. Formalizing The Function

In order to take a formal approach to sales enablement, one must first identify the vision of your sales organization. The vision should identify areas such as:

1. Goals

2. Process

3. Systems

4. Technology

5. Content

Once these areas have been identified, a strategic plan is then put in place to get teams to reach that vision.

According to CSO Insights, “60% of enablement teams are in a dangerous place, meeting only some of their expectations; achieving average results. There is only one way out: investing in a strategic and formal approach to sales enablement.” 

2 & 3. Onboarding and Coaching

Effective onboarding is the top goal of sales enablement.

You want to decrease the time to ramp up and effective training of new salespeople to enable them to start selling faster. Sales coaching and effective onboarding have shown an 11% increase in win rate and a 9% increase in hitting quota.

The stats shared in the infographic shows that effective onboarding can speed up productivity time by 18% and poor onboarding can increase turnover by 80%.

Formalized sales coaching is a must have enablement service that can lead to higher win rates and other sales metrics. 

4. Content

Having content as a resource for your team is in the Top 5 enablement tools that are essential to any successful sales process.

However,  it’s not just about having “any” content, but rather, having the right content that helps create an informed and outstanding customer experience. Content for salespeople needs to be effective as possible along the customer journey.

Identify the content needed and sought after in each stage of the buyer's journey and create a content strategy around that. Content that is not created for a targeted audience or doesn’t answer their questions will be ineffective.

Content strategy also drives performance: “Having a content strategy drives performance: organizations with a content strategy achieved win rates of 55.5%, which is a difference of 12.2 percentage points compared to those without a content strategy (43.3%).” - CSO Insights 

5. Measuring ROI

What does measuring ROI mean for your sales organization and which areas should be the focus?

A successful sales organization should measure the progress and the impact of their sales initiatives. In the infographic, it shares the three key areas to measure:

1. Leading/Lagging Indicators

2. Enablement ROI

3. Milestones and Productivity Metrics

Have you heard the term, “Time kills all deals”?

Measuring the time spent in the sales cycle can show you where deals can get stalled or what areas need improvement. It can also show if a deal is moving quicker. This data, in turn, is shared with your sales team to help convey best practices, develop sales skills, and helps them to leverage information.

Measuring ROI is the foundation for how you create and optimize your sales process.

With sales enablement on the rise and being adopted by more sales organizations, it’s important to the growth of your organization.

Identifying your challenges and using some of the tips below to help overcome them may just be the key to the success of your sales enablement strategy.

Check out the infographic below!