All in This Together: Aligning Benefits of Sales Enablement with Reps’ Real-Time Goals

Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of equipping sales teams with the content, guidance, and training they need to effectively engage buyers. Sales enablement analytics provide marketing and sales teams with data-driven insights to optimize revenue.

With sales enablement, sales and marketing teams can constantly develop and improve their strategies because enablement equips teams with effective messaging and provides real-time visibility into customer engagement. According to Learn G2, “organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals.” This benefit partly arises from having the right content readily available at the right time to keep buyers engaged. When reps need content to achieve their goals, sales enablement collects content all in one place so it is readily available to use for the right buyer. With sales enablement, the marketing department gains a direct channel to the sales team so marketers know what content is effective for their team, sales, and the customer.

Furthermore, when sales enablement is aligned to goals for rep performance, there is a 63% likelihood that they will exceed executive expectations. Employing sales enablement to guide rep

behaviors toward success has a significant impact on future sales outcomes and team confidence. Sales enablement often leads to alignment between the sales and marketing departments as they are more in tune with each other’s visions, plans, and outputs. The resulting sales and marketing alignment can contribute to a 67% increase in closed deals.

Thanks to these impressive advantages, sales enablement continues to prove itself as a powerful tool to drive revenue and alignment within sales and marketing teams.

1. Define sales enablement and identify what sellers need

When beginning the process of alignment with the help of sales enablement, leaders should consider what sales enablement will mean within their specific team. Getting input from sellers is a vital part of the alignment process so that you know the needs of the sales team from the start. To begin this process of identifying sellers’ needs and mapping out how to address them, consider the following questions:

1. What tools do sellers think are necessary to streamline the sales process?
2. What skills, information, and data do sellers need to help them optimize their sales approach?
3. What are sellers currently doing that they feel is working well with prospects?
4. How is the product positioned in comparison with biggest competitors, and what content can marketers create to help sellers compete?

Answering these questions step by step will better position the alignment journey by directly tackling the current tools and techniques of sellers to understand what needs improvement.

2. Organize content

Without a sales enablement strategy, sellers often must comb through content scattered across different repositories and can struggle to find the right content for the right customer. Organizing content is a vital step in the alignment process because it means that sales reps know exactly what

content they need at the right time. In turn, marketers can trust that sellers have easy access to the brand-compliant content that they have worked hard to create.

Training content can likewise benefit from improved organization. Cultivating a store of educational content that teams across departments can access is an excellent step toward alignment and provides a scalable way to distribute important tips to improve reps’ productivity. In addition, various teams can more easily collaborate once they know where to find what they need and what to review to better understand their counterparts’ strategies.

3. Train teams across departments

To ensure that alignment is a smooth process, marketing and sales teams should be trained with sales enablement tools and techniques so that they are better prepared during the transition to enablement-guided collaboration. Fostering interdepartmental knowledge connects teams by making them aware of each other’s strategies and goals. Alignment affects teams across

departments, so preemptively nurturing this connection through tools and content will smoothly ease them into the habit of supporting one another.

Standardizing certain tools and processes provides a degree of unity across departments. For example, creating report templates for both marketing and sales teams will instill a deeper awareness of the buyer’s journey for each group. Regular meetings so that marketing and sales can discuss outcomes also aids in fostering communication. Through this approach to coaching, departments can better understand how their processes are intertwined and can jointly work toward similar goals.

Furthermore, data fuels collaboration and smoothes the path to alignment by allowing teams to collaboratively set KPIs and goals. Data can occupy a shared training space that is easily accessible to all team members and can allow both marketing and sales to pinpoint the most effective customer engagement channels.

4. Build sales enablement into daily functions for alignment

Integrating sales enablement tactics into teams’ daily processes aids alignment by standardizing the training and tools they use, thus opening channels to collaboration and providing a shared guide to how to engage with customers. As every team’s daily functions differ, plans to incorporate sales enablement may look slightly different, but the results will be similar as each team will be more connected.

To foster sales and marketing alignment through maintained SE practices, the following steps provide a general guide on approaching the task for the benefit of reps.

Think ahead

To plan for the future, teams across departments need to consider how customers will see the company after they purchase a product or service. Marketing and sales can work together to build loyalty to their company through outreach in various channels, like social media posts, to remain connected to customers.

Planning for the future is important to understand the long-term benefits of alignment, but expect changes to that plan due to factors out of the company’s control. With the proper training and tools, teams can adapt to any such changes and continue to prioritize the needs of customers.

Identify what resources are needed to continue this enablement-inspired approach

To ease the transition to collaboration for the sake of alignment, it is important to holistically evaluate what resources the marketing and sales teams will need to improve reps’ productivity and maintain a high quality of delivered work. The resources best suited to the team can be adapted for future onboarding use to ease new team members into the existing dynamic.

Hold teams accountable

To continue to maintain alignment between teams, set expectations that reps will learn how to use

enablement tools and techniques to continue this trend of interdepartmental connection and collaboration. Hold teams accountable to this commitment of alignment through regular data-based performance reviews with an understanding of how productivity has improved due to sales enablement practices.

Aligning the benefits of sales enablement with reps’ real-time goals is an essential route to embark upon for any sales and marketing teams that want to improve their performance and better engage prospects. By responding to reps’ needs and equipping them with the tools they need to do their jobs better, marketers and sellers alike can spend more time actively pursuing and achieving their goals — and driving business for the company.

Carissa Villagomez is a content strategist for Highspot, the sales enablement platform that increases the performance of sales teams by bridging the gap between strategy and execution.