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When it comes to sales enablement, a rising tide lifts all boats at your company. After all, when your sales reps succeed, there’s the potential for all the employees to benefit from job security, raises, bonuses and new opportunities.
But for many marketing and sales teams, who tend to initiate the fulfilment of sales enablement needs, it’s not always easy to determine where there are holes or what sales enablement solutions can best improve efficiency and effectiveness to boost profits. Should you put your efforts in a sales rally? Implement better digital asset management? Optimize content? Invest in predictive technology to identify the most lucrative leads?
To help you identify where your sales enablement can be improved, start with some insight from industry statistics.
#1: An Average of Seven People Are Involved In Most Buying Decisions
Can your sales team answer questions from seven different personas? According to Brevet, that’s how many people are involved in the decision process in a typical firm with 100 to 150 employees.
Does your sales enablement content answer questions that may come from these seven very different roles? Survey your sales team about questions or concerns they’ve fielded from the CFO, CEO, IT head or even an administrative assistant who’s been given a budget and the power to determine what office equipment and supplies to order.
Far beyond how a product works, for example, might be questions on warranties, a money-back guarantee, financing or servicing. Help your sales team supply answers quickly with easily accessible and informative material.
#2: Sales Reps Forget More Than 80% of the Information They Were Taught Within 90 Days
The statistic, which was reported in Harvard Business Review, paints a dismal ROI for initial sales training. Understandably, a rep’s memory 90 days after learning something new at a sales rally isn’t any different, requiring a shift from a typical sales rally to something extraordinary.
Need some resources to help you make your next sales rally one for the memory books?
There’s also something called “The Kirkpatrick Model,” which can help you better understand how to incorporate sales training into your sales rally and provide follow-up reinforcement.
Hubspot offers a great sales rally guide with tips on what to do before, during and after your sales rally to help you hit your goals.
As a best practice, ensure that you sales rally includes everyone at the company—not just the sales team. Even if non-sales team members aren’t invited to attend the sales rally, include them in a brief summary of the event, provide mini-presentations or invite them to share ideas on how to improve or support sales enablement.
#3: About 80% of Sales Require Five Follow-Up Calls after the Meeting
According to Marketing Donut, that means that the 44% of salespeople who give up after just one follow-up are missing out on a lot of opportunities.
Consider investing in a sales enablement tool that can help your sales team initiate timely, multiple contacts after meeting a prospect. Some sales enablement tools, such as Ignite Technologies’ Infer, send real-time alerts to sales reps about when to contact a prospect, as well as talking points.
#4: The Most Common Complaint of Sales Teams Is That They Can’t Find Content to Send To Prospects
Inc. reported that sales reps spend an average of 440 hours each year searching for the right content.
If your sales reps can’t connect with the content they need to answer questions, provide supplemental information or offer advantages over your competition, you could have one of four problems: the content doesn’t exist, the content isn’t accessible, the content isn’t managed well (READ: searchable), or the sales reps don’t know it’s available. Either way, you’ve got some work to do.
TechTarget’s quiz on implementing digital asset management systems can get you started.
#5: According To Forbes, High-Performance Sales Organizations Are Four Times More Likely To Use Predictive Analytics
Incorporating tools that use predictive analytics—the process of determining outcomes based on data, statistical algorithms and machine learning technique—into your sales enablement may be the single biggest action you can take to increase revenue.
The technology can help determine which sales leads are worth pursuing, provide actionable steps to sales reps, help choose what messaging or content to send to prospects, and even when to send follow-up emails or make calls. Sales managers can pinpoint where time and money are being wasted when opportunities are being missed, which activities get the most conversions, and which marketing pieces or campaigns are getting the highest ROI.
Datanyze, for example, helps its clients that sell technology by monitoring the web and mobile technology choices of 35 million companies. It further alerts these clients when any of the 35 million companies have added or dropped a solution. Using predictive analytics, Datanyze can score its clients’ existing pipeline and find net-new accounts.
Take the lead to improve your sales enablement by incorporating some of the insights gleaned from these industry statistics and you’ll stay ahead of your competition.
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