Regardless of the size of your company or your goals, it’s important to provide the sales reps you have with the tools, processes and technologies they need to be successful – and sales enablement efforts that are approached with this kind of mindset lead to positive revenue outcomes.
However, often we see business owners, VPs or sales managers who look at sales enablement to be a tool that helps them manage their people better, to get better insight into data. For example, dashboards and reporting that give them better insight into what’s happening with their sales teams on a daily basis. Unfortunately, this is not the right perspective to take with sales enablement.
If this sounds familiar, here is how you need to pivot your strategy for sales enablement: View it as a way to empower your sales reps – not monitor them – when they go out into the field. So whatever they’re doing on a daily basis, the goal should be to make it easier.
So, how do you do that?
Evaluate Your CRM
Today’s CRMs are, for the most part, very intensive with the amount of administrative tasks required of sales reps, in order to keep it up to date for other people. In fact, this “admin hell” of CRMs is one of the biggest complaints we see from sales reps.
If you really want to drive revenue with sales enablement, improve your CRM tool. Make it easy and as painless as possible for sales reps to use, by stripping it of all the administrative work you’re currently requiring of them. That way they can get back to selling. With technology today, most of this should be automated, anyway – for example, email documentation and notes.
Improve Content Access
Another major issue facing modern sales reps is they can’t find anything. They don’t know where documents are stored. They can’t find an asset they need to send to a client. They feel like they need to reinvent the wheel every time they talk to someone. Or, in some cases, they end up misusing content that’s been created. In this case, you want to put them in a better position to answer prospect questions.
Give them the ability to manage the content and documentation they need to send to clients – it’s one of the easiest things you can do for your sales reps. So if they’re in the system writing an email, they know should know exactly where the documents are located, as well as what they should each be used for – it’s all in the right folder, in the right place. This prevents your sales reps from creating their own processes and documents – or worse, misusing content assets – because they don’t know where things are located.
Mitigate Internal Time-wasters
How much of your sales reps’ internal time is eaten up on a daily basis. You’re pulling them into meetings. You fill their inboxes with all kinds of mundane, day-to-day “business” stuff. For example, notifications or “Hey, check out this new app we have in-use,” announcements. Ultimately, while you think this is helpful – or at the very least “just the way things are done” – your reps are left wasting time filtering through all of these messages.
Many businesses, unfortunately, fail to ask themselves, “What is the primary function of our sales reps? And what can we strip out of their schedule to make them more efficient and waste less of their time?” For instance, instead of bombarding them with emails, you could have an internal intranet, where they could passively check for announcements, as needed. Look at the day-to-day of your sales reps. What are they being inundated with that could easily be removed?
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