Judy Caroll June 7, 2021 
If you’re an enterprise tech company, you’re probably familiar with the term “sales enablement”. The job function has become increasingly crucial for many IT services companies selling to large customers. Why? It helps salespeople during the sales process by providing them with the right resources and technology to effectively sell and, in return, increase revenue.
If you don’t have sales enablement, you’re missing out on shortening the sales cycle. Canceled meetings and postponed events mean that sales teams everywhere are relying on marketing and enablement more than ever to help them hit quota targets.
Let’s break down how IT services companies can set up an effective sales enablement and lead generation program that works.
Get everyone on board
Before you go setting up a sales development program at your company, it’s best to figure out why it’s important to your team. Your sellers must truly understand the value of sales enablement and how it can help them quicken the sales process. Help them understand why unique content is necessary for EACH buyer persona at EACH stage of the funnel. As they become more active social sellers, their need for content will increase exponentially because they’ll need to continuously share new content to the prospects who are engaged.
Not only is content for selling important for your team, sales enablement offers so much more to the sales team, including onboarding materials, training videos, and ongoing coaching to help them improve in specific areas.
To earn a commitment from the executive team, you’ll need to present current gaps and challenges your team currently has, and explain how a sales enablement team plans to solve those problems, and increase revenue and productivity.
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Document your plan
A sales enablement standard operating procedure (SOP) document is going to be the foundation of your plan and is needed to have a successful outcome and will help you close the gaps between the sales team and their selling efforts.
To get started, you’ll first need to evaluate your entire sales process, as well as the experience of both individual salespeople and the team as a whole, to identify those gaps. You’ll need to look at their entire experience as a sales rep, including the onboarding process, training materials, and professional development, as well as their experience finding, connecting, and engaging with prospects. Once you have an in-depth analysis, you can plan out your sales enablement strategy on how you can specifically address these gaps to improve.
This documented plan also provides transparency within your organization, and teams across all departments will understand how the sales enablement team will be assisting the sales team and how collaboration will be more seamless.
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Cross-functional approach
Sales enablement streamlines different functions of a company’s divisions that help the sales team become more effective. It will be your responsibility to address the specific departments from which a sales rep needs assistance.
It is the sales enablement team’s responsibility to provide everything the sales rep needs to effectively close the deal, regardless of which department needs to be involved to provide it.
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Technology to scale
To scale sales enablement, you will need technology to support it. There are many technologies out there to help you structure your program. A sales enablement platform can simplify the activities of your sales team by making it easier to find content, training materials, and even gamification leaderboards if they are a part of your strategy. These technologies can also integrate with your existing tech stack to have a truly powerful program in place.
Conclusion
When some people hear the term sales enablement, they think of the job as just sales training, but it truly goes beyond that. While sales training is key to a successful team, you will need to incorporate all the other aspects discussed above to truly have an effective sales enablement program. And as with anything, sales enablement is an ongoing process for continuous improvement and is not something that is set up once and then finished. Once you get started setting up a sales enablement plan, you will truly see the benefits and how it adds even more value to your lead generation when setting up a sales enablement plan.
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