23 Most Effective Sales Enablement Tactics That Work in 2024

In today’s world, the level of competition is high and if you work in a cutthroat industry, things are already pretty hard for you. Plus, startups are popping up left and right with new and innovative ideas. 

On top of that, the old-school approach of selling and marketing is not going to work anymore. You need to have a customer-centric sales approach that emphasizes the needs of the customer first and foremost. One of the popular examples of such an approach is consultative selling. So how can you stand out from all the competition?

This is where sales enablement comes in. It is a crucial part of the sales process which you cannot overlook anymore.

That’s why in this post, I’ll go over the 23 most effective sales enablement strategies to help you overcome the challenges you face in your sales process, increase the number of sales, and boost revenue for your business. Let’s begin!

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is a continuous process of supplying your sales team with the resources they need to be effective and successful in their roles.

The goal of sales enablement is to help the customer first rather than selling your product or service. Once you convince the customer that your offering can help them solve their problem, they will most likely be interested in it.

And you need sales enablement for that. If your sales agents are unfamiliar with customers’ pain points and your product’s features, there is a high chance that they will make some kind of mistake and you will miss out on an opportunity to convert a prospect.

Why is sales enablement important?

According to research by Aberdeen, 84% of sales agents can hit the required number of sales after their company implemented a top-class sales enablement program.

Imagine yourself in a customer’s shoes, how would you feel if you reach out to a company to ask about a product but all you get is a pre-written sales pitch from the sales rep?

Not good right? So, to ensure that the same doesn’t happen to your customers, you should have a complete understanding of the product, and your audience’s common issues before you reach out to them. This way, you will be in a position to provide legit answers.

For example, a real estate company in Texas, Aquila Commercial, clearly states the most important question that their customers might have.

This was one of the many cases where sales enablement lets you have a positive interaction with customers and guide them toward the next stage in the sales pipeline. 

So, let’s get into some of the best sales enablement strategies you can use for your company.

Effective sales enablement strategies 

By employing the correct sales enablement strategies, you can make the life of your sales team a lot easier and provide top-quality sales experience to your prospects. With that said, here are the top sales enablement strategies that work:

Determine sales enablement goals

Before you think about designing a sales enablement framework, you must have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish with it. Implementation without planning will fall short in the long run and will only provide subpar results.

In order to determine your goals, first of all, you need to take a look at your current sales process and find out the areas where your sales team is having trouble the most. For example, this could include a lack of product knowledge, poor customer interactions, communication issues between sales and marketing, or difficulty in completing the sales.

Next, you have to make sure that your goals are realistic, achievable, and relevant. In other words, you should implement SMART goals. SMART means:

• Specific: Define your goals in simple and specific terms.
• Measurable: You should be able to measure how far you are from achieving them.
• Achievable: Set realistic and achievable goals and not something too far-fetched.
• Relevant: Your goals should be related to your business and strategy.
• Time-bound: Set a timeframe to complete your objectives.

Once you follow and document all of your objectives, you will have a clear picture of what you want to achieve from your sales enablement strategies.

Conduct market research

With marketing research, I mean researching current market trends and what your competitors are doing in their sales enablement programs.

For example, artificial intelligence and machine learning are getting a lot of attention these days and many companies are using them for sales engagement. Just like how Zixflow provides an AI Wizard that lets you quickly write personalized emails based on the information you provided. 

Fill in the fields and the wizard will generate an email that you can copy or save as a template for later use.

If you are interested in learning more about the AI Wizard, then check out the following video.

Understand your customers

It is common to focus on getting as many sales as possible and sometimes overlook the needs of your customers. But down the line, this approach can be harmful if you concentrate solely on increasing the number of sales.

That’s why you should analyze who your audience is and what their problems are. Addressing these problems and building a trusting relationship will allow you to deliver a quality sales experience to your customers.

“Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.” –  Brian Tracy

Once you have successfully identified your customers’ needs and issues, you can provide this information to your sales team. This will allow them to pick a correct engagement model, personalize the outreach emails, and cater to the needs of every customer.

For example, Alaska Airlines, one of the top airlines in the USA, uses personalized messaging to keep its passengers coming back by reminding them of the air miles they have traveled and how many miles are left before they can redeem an award flight.

Hire the right people

Your sales enablement goals, customer research, or your understanding of the market might fall short if you don’t have the right sales team to handle everyday duties. After all, your sales reps are the ones interacting with customers daily. 

That’s why you have to make sure that you employ the right people for the job. Think about the knowledge and skills you are looking for in your sales reps. For example, consider your offerings and determine whether they need technical know-how to engage with the prospect or you are just searching for a rep with strong communication and problem-solving skills.

Ensure that you properly screen people before you decide to add them to your sales desk. It could get somewhat problematic if you later found out that your new hire is not a good fit for this position.

Clearly define roles and duties

Sales enablement could increase the workload on your sales team on top of their daily activities. That’s why it is not enough to just hire the right people, you also have to clearly delegate duties and responsibilities from the get-go. 

Set up a solid onboarding process so that new hires can get up to date quickly without needing much assistance from you. You can also assign a mentor or a manager to a group of sales reps whose responsibility is to make sure that the agents under his/her supervision are working without a problem.

For instance, Buffer, a company that offers social media management software, uses a buddy system where a hiring manager, a role buddy, and a culture buddy are assigned to the recruit. And they have created different guides for each person so they can carry out their duties properly. This is the guide for the hiring manager.

This is for the role buddy:

And finally, the last one is for the culture buddy:

Develop a training program

You have to properly train or coach your sales team so they can better understand customers’ requirements and provide accurate information. A well-trained sales rep can efficiently handle customers’ queries, guide them across various stages of the sales cycle, and ultimately close the deal.

For this reason, Zixflow lets you add videos directly to the software so that your sales team can readily access the material and understand product features or resolve any problems they might have.

Use a learning management system

If your sales software does not offer the functionality to add training videos, then you can use a separate learning management system (LMS) for all your training material. 

An LMS is a platform designed to organize and provide educational content for your sales team. One of the biggest advantages of an LMS is that it offers a centralized online database that contains all of your training material which can be accessed by your agents whenever they want. This way, they don’t have to wait for you or their supervisor to get answers.

For example, Universal Robina Corporation, the biggest retail food supplier in the Philippines, used URLearning, an e-learning solution to increase their employees’ learning speed and make them ready to handle their tasks and responsibilities.

There are countless LMS solutions out there. So, research their features and compare their pricing to find the correct one according to your needs.

Generate training content 

Content is the lifeblood of every digital activity, and sales enablement is no exception. Every time your sales agents have a problem, the first thing they do is go through the content you have provided. But what if you have not given them any material? Then they will try to find solutions on their own, which would result in wasted time, reduced productivity, and less efficiency. 

To ensure that your sales team doesn’t waste time looking for solutions, produce relevant training content to help your sales desk and compile it into a database using content management software. 

One way of accomplishing this is to ask the subject matter experts of your company to create content for your sales team. The content should be related to your sales process and must include practical steps that your reps can follow.

AlphaSights, a knowledge on-demand company, that offers its clients business intelligence and helps them connect with industry professionals, made use of its internal subject matter experts to create training material for its team to learn the skills required for their job.

Measure the performance of your sales team

You might be thinking that after giving all the required assets to your sales team, they should be able to function properly without any problems, right? Not quite. 

Although giving them the needed resources is a great first step in implementing a sales enablement environment, you still have to see how they are using the resources you provided. That’s why you have to keep track of the performance of your sales team.

Monitoring the performance of your sales agents is a challenging task. But by defining important indicators, you can evaluate how well your sales team is operating. 

Zixflow provides you with a robust analytics dashboard that lets you track the performance of your sales team and see how well your sales enablement efforts are working. By tracking these metrics and optimizing the areas that need improvement, you can ensure that your sales team is performing its best.

Use modern sales enablement tools like Zixflow

Tools and technology have become an integral part of running a business and many industries are already using sales enablement technologies. Gone are the days when everything was done manually and every document was stored physically. 

Although these tools are necessary for streamlining your sales enablement process, using too many at a time causes more harm than good. So, just use the tools that you think will help your sales team the most.

For example, Zixflow is a modern salesOS platform that lets you handle your sales process in a much more easy and effective manner. It contains an in-built CRM which is a must for collecting, organizing, and monitoring prospects’ data. This enables your sales team to access this data readily, further increasing their efficiency. 

It also allows you to automate your sales process to an extent where you don’t even have to do most of the stuff manually, and you can focus on increasing the number of our sales.

Optimize your sales process

If you are running a business, that would most likely mean you already have a sales process in place. So start by identifying ways to improve your sales process to boost business growth. 

For example, one of the places that you optimize is how you engage with your website visitors. And for that, you can create a lead bot just like the one on the website of Zixflow. This will allow you to handle preliminary interactions with customers so that your sales team doesn't have to answer every small question that your customers might have.

On top of that, to optimize and automate your sales workflow, you can take the help of Zixflow which lets you create workflows by simply selecting various options and it will build you a workflow in seconds.

Set up sales cadence

If you don’t know, sales cadence is a set of sequences or an order of steps that your sales rep follows to connect with a prospect. It usually consists of a series of touchpoints or interactions that are personalized to the customer’s requirements and requires a sales cadence software for implementation.

Create sales documentation

It will be pretty hectic if your sales team doesn’t know the processes they have to follow or the next stage after the previous ones have been completed. To ensure that your sales enablement program flows smoothly, you have to create operation documentation. 

Sales documentation is written directions and processes that tell your sales team how your company’s sales process works and how to handle sales activities.

For example, Kovai.co, an enterprise B2B SaaS company, recorded its sales process in digital format to grow the number of sales and have a central content hub with sales content available to its sales staff.

Produce sales content

How can you engage your customers when you don’t have any content on your site about your product or service? You can’t. As I said before, content is the core of every online activity. 

That’s why you should produce sales content to engage your prospects and educate them about your product. This will allow your prospects to naturally get interested in your offerings and reach out to your sales team, which will reduce the outbound tasks they have to do. Good sales content should be educational, relevant, and created based on the needs of your target audience. 

Determine the distribution channels

When you have your sales content ready to go live, you should then think about the channels you will use to distribute it. Deciding the correct channel is crucial because you must publish content on channels that your audience frequently visits for multi-channel sales engagement. For example, some of the common channels for distributing your sales content include:

Website

Your company’s site is the first place you should put content as it brings more traffic to your site and increases the chances of getting new customers. For example, here is the blog section about training your dog.

Social media platforms

Social media sites are the second most popular outlet to distribute your content after the website. Social sites are the perfect place to engage your customers and build relationships to sell more personally. Here is an example of Airbnb’s Twitter campaign that generated interest among its audience about which is the best work-from-home workplace.

Newsletters

Sending information about the latest updates, announcements, or newly published content via a newsletter straight to the inboxes of your target market is also a great way to engage your customers and increase the number of sales. Below is an example of Mailchimp’s newsletter with a video to showcase its new product.

Monitor the content’s effectiveness

You can only go so far by blindly producing content without stopping to see how well it is doing. By monitoring the performance of your content over time, you can determine its effectiveness in engaging your audience and achieving your goals. 

For instance, some of the common content performance metrics you can track are:

Click-through rate

It is the percentage of people who clicked on a call-to-action (CTA) or the links embedded within your content.

Leads generated 

This is the number of new leads that you got from the content you created.

Social shares

The number of times your content was shared, retweeted, or reposted on social media platforms.

Conversion rate

It is the percentage of people who completed a desired action like subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form.

Page views

It is the number of times your content has been viewed by users on your site.

Bounce rate 

This is the percentage of people who left your site after visiting just a single page.

By constantly keeping track of your content’s performance, you can find the areas of improvement and optimize your content according to your sales strategy.

Improve internal communication

Communication is the first step toward solving an issue and the same applies to your sales team as well. Whenever one of your sales reps has any problems, they should be encouraged to reach out to you or their supervisor for its resolution. 

Effective communication is essential for building a productive workplace culture and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Make sure that you establish clear communication channels, encourage two-way communication, and be transparent with your sales employees about your goals, messages, and strategies.

For example, Zixflow’s sales CRM platform compiles all customer data in a single location, allowing your sales team to efficiently access it and streamlines communications. Also, having every piece of information in a centralized platform makes it easy for your sales staff to share it with one another.

Foster collaboration between departments

As you can see in this post, sales enablement requires a collaborative effort from all the employees of your company, not just your sales team. That’s why you must strive to build a collaborative work environment that allows sharing of knowledge and values from different perspectives.

By having a collaborative workplace, you can also make sure that there are no organizational silos in your company, where few people have all the knowledge and others are depending on them to complete their tasks. 

Ask for feedback

I have seen companies implement a particular system and think that everything will automatically flow smoothly without a problem. As much as you would like to think, this is not the case. 

There is always room for improvement. And asking for suggestions and feedback from your sales team provides valuable insights that will help you in identifying and resolving the problems to simplify your sales process.

Before you start asking for feedback about the sales enablement system, make sure that you have a proper feedback process in place. Ensure that you are clear about the purpose and ask specific questions from your sales reps. You can also tailor your surveys or feedback forms according to the reps who are filling them.

For example, Hotjar provides its clients with details about how their visitors are interacting with their website by giving research and analytics data on visitor activity. 

Hotjar uses a feedback form to ask the feedback from its team members. The form contains various questions and ratings so the staff can give their honest feedback and Hotjar can implement the necessary changes suggested by them.

Create a sales enablement ecosystem

Once you follow through and implement a sales enablement process within your company, you have to make sure that your sales and marketing team, in particular, are making the most of it.

To do this, ensure that you properly instruct your employees to use the resources that you have provided and ask for assistance if they face any issues. Foster the mindset that solving customers’ problems is the priority in every type of sale and then focus on guiding them through the sales process.

Decide indicators and metrics

Your sales enablement program must be based on solid numbers rather than hunches or guesswork. Determining the metrics and key performance metrics will allow you to handle your sales desk, understand how well everything is going, and ask correct sales qualifying questions from your prospects. 

Start by analyzing the current sales indicators or decide on any other ones that you want to monitor. Then you can look for places that could further be optimized and pay attention to details to increase your sales.

For example, Zixflow offers a dynamic analytics panel that you can use to monitor the metrics and find out where you are headed with your sales enablement process.

Continuously evaluate your efforts

Sales enablement plays a crucial role in providing your sales team with the required assets to do their job. By regularly evaluating the data you can find the areas in which your team is lacking and make necessary adjustments. 

For example, if the data tells you that a specific sales technique is not giving good results, you can drop it and try something else. Or if a sales agent is consistently performing better than the others, you can evaluate what that person is doing and ask your other sales team members to imitate their approach.

Keep improving your strategies

Finally, sales enablement is not a one-and-done process. You have to keep up with the market trends to stay ahead of the competition. Having a contemporary mindset and constantly identifying ways to be better can let you meet your sales quotas and drive long-term growth for your business.

Deploy sales enablement strategies to grow your business

Phew, that sure was a lot of strategies. But you can always expand on these to optimize your sales enablement program and grow your business. 

The key is to find the right strategies that are suitable for you and will help you in achieving your goals. The strategies that I mentored in this article are there to help you understand what you have to do to implement a successful sales enablement process. 

Of course, the same goes for the tools that I have stated. But if you have to pick just one tool, go for Zixflow. Zixflow is an all-around salesOS that offers a lot of features that will make it so easy for your sales team to guide leads through the sales pipeline. And the good thing is you can try it out for free to see if it fits your needs before making any decisions.