In this article, we’re going to look at how your sales team can benefit from having a well-structured, well-planned out, well invested, well-strategized sales enablement program.
Sales Content
You end up with sales content created that moves the needle for leads, sales qualified leads (SQLs), and opportunities.
This kind of content gets customized by the buyer persona. If you add on account based marketing (ABM), you’ll customize for the intersection of the account plus the buyer persona. Well worth doing for huge enterprise accounts, but not usually worth doing for small and medium-sized (SMB) accounts that are more transactional.
Be sure to introduce a monthly review of what’s working best. Analyze and optimize your best-performing content so you can move these content assets to the front of the line.
So, for example, if you have six templates that your sales team is using, and one of those templates is by far outperforming the other five templates, chances are that should now be the first template that you use for that particular purpose.
And the underperforming templates should be retired, as you introduce new templates to test -- in much the same way that you would optimize other kinds of marketing or sales campaigns.
Test. Then take the top performer and put a lot more attention and weight on that. And move the underperformers out of the way.
You’ll also likely be preparing sales demo decks used in the later stages of the sales process. Hopefully, that is the latter stages of your sales process, and that you have a good, thorough diagnostic and the exploratory consultative process going on before you get to that demo.
And if you’re using the HubSpot Sales Hub, for example, with content creation and content optimization, you’ll implement using Templates and Documents.
Technology and Automation
Marketing teams have access to internal and external marketing automation and marketing technology expertise, as well as sales automation and sales technology expertise.
This similar skill set will often be transferable back and forth between marketing automation and sales tech.
Strategy is what matters more. So be sure marketing collaborates with sales leadership to make this happen more effectively.
If you’re using HubSpot Sales Hub, you can apply technology and automation to increase your sales effectiveness and velocity:
- Allow self-booked meetings
- Automate a series of emails (Sequence)
- Automatically create companies/accounts from new contacts
- Automatically create deals from meetings booked
- Automatically enrich companies
- Automatically rotate and assign leads
- Automatically send internal notifications
- Automatically log emails, phone calls, and web chats
- Make phone calls through the browser
Training
Break the process down into repeatable steps that can be measured and improved upon.
Set aside time for role plays and film reviews.
During the early stages of my career, we used to get together for sales call role plays and work through objections. So we spread best practices.
Develop this mindset into repeatable processes that you can use across your sales team -- which greatly helps onboard new sales reps.
Make time for content briefings where you see all the new content assets that are available -- including downloadable and streaming content, as well as upcoming webinars and available recordings.
Invest in a consultative sales process. Before you pitch, you identify the right fit leads, connect with those leads, run a good exploratory process, and advise. This is the inbound sales process that HubSpot has built out, refined, and optimized over time.
If you have HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise, use Playbooks. Otherwise, use Snippets to infuse structure your training program and process to implement among your team.
Reporting and Analysis
One of the best use cases for reporting and analysis is knowing where deals are getting stuck or stalled. In startups, you’ll want to get the product manager or technical co-founder involved. When sales reps get deals to a particular stage, and the deals are stalling out, there may be something from the product roadmap where your sales team is consistently hearing, “Yes, if you have this one feature, we’d sign up, and we have three other buddies from other companies that would sign up yesterday.
Reporting helps you tightly connect the dots between your go-to-market strategy, sales enablement, and product roadmap -- supercritical at early stages of company growth.
Look at what percentages and amounts are hanging out at various deal stages and with each sales rep.
Measure and report on the percentage of quota or goal attainment.
Run regular post-mortems on what’s working best.
With HubSpot Sales Hub, look to Reporting, Content Analytics, and the Sales Dashboard.
If you use the Accounts app for account based marketing, look at which accounts are being worked more aggressively and which are not will help you identify whether resources are being placed in the right direction to advance your overall sales plan for the year.
Be sure to use these four facets of sales enablement to help grow your Fintech startup.
Content. Technology and automation. Training. As well as Reporting and Analysis.
How is your Fintech startup using sales enablement? What’s worked best for you? Let us know in the Comments section below.
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