Sales enablement communications are a critical part of any sales organization. Without effective communication, it’s difficult to align sales goals with marketing objectives and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the different components of sales enablement and why effective communication is essential for success.
Sales Enablement Communications: How Salespeople Can Sell More Effectively
Sales enablement communications refer to the strategies and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively. This can include things like training and development programs, sales enablement technology, and marketing and sales alignment.
By providing salespeople with the resources they need to be successful, organizations can improve their overall sales performance.
What is Sales Enablement, Anyway?
Let’s start by defining what it is.
Sales enablement is the act of empowering your reps with resources, tools, and information to help them close more deals with help from other employees.
Marketing enablement, for example, involves content, data, and insights that come from customer interactions.
The average customer journey is quite long. More prospects and leads are involved along the path to purchase.
Many marketing touchpoints occur as people get familiar with a brand.
Social posts, landing pages, blog posts. The list goes on.
Your marketing data is a goldmine, but it’s easy to get trapped in silos.
A staggering 87% of marketing and sales professionals say that having aligned goals between the two teams is key to growing a business.
By providing data and content that supports your sales reps, you can make their lives easier and help your company boost its bottom line.
As a marketer, you know that convincing your customers to buy your product is as difficult as getting them to pay attention to you in the first place.
Because there are so many ways for leads to get distracted or lose focus, sales reps need help making lasting, memorable connections with customers.
That’s where marketing comes in to save the day.
By supporting your sales team, you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Communication is Key to Sales Enablement
A communication plan is an essential component of any successful sales team. If you have a well-thought-out and communicated approach, your sales reps will be prepared to deliver the key messages to your prospects.
It’s important to have a communication plan that will keep your sales team informed without overwhelming them. You want the information they receive from you to be digestible so their attention is focused on what matters most: closing deals!
Consider sending weekly or bi-weekly email updates with important news about your company.
Enablement Communications Along the Customer Journey
An enablement communications manager leads the enablement team and is the person in charge of creating and implementing a comms strategy to address programs, product launches, changes in operations, and more.
While an enablement team will have its own internal structure, the communications director may also get involved with the executive message, the content creation for the internal website, the onboarding process, the training process, and any events.
It’s the ideal role for a split-brain thinker – half creative and half logistics.
The role will be responsible for creating and executing the communication plan with the go-to-market (GTM) team.
Many organizations still hesitate when it comes to investing in communications. Here’s why your marketing team needs a dedicated communicator:
- Boost employee engagement
- Directly drive cross-functional strategic alignment
- Invite creativity into the workplace, and increase revenue across the board
Align Comms from Sales to Customer Success
How can we be sure that the content we’re putting in front of the sales reps is timely and a priority? By adding an Enablement Specialist to your sales team, you’ll inspire conversations about strategy throughout the broader sales organization.
The communications team will need to work closely with the product and marketing team to align messaging. They’ll also need to decide whether or not to give experts air time when they ask for it.
One of the most important things you need to do when building an enablement communications strategy is to put together a cross-departmental priority matrix. This will ensure you’re delivering the correct message to the right people and will help drive operational efficiency.
By helping teams work more cohesively, we can make sure that everyone has the same understanding of our processes, and that everyone is working towards achieving the same goals.
To be a successful enabler, you need to be able to understand the business’ needs and then communicate them to the GTM team in a clear and understandable way. This requires you to have a thorough understanding of both the business goals and the goals of your marketing team.
It’s important to align your communications strategy with your business objectives. They play a pivotal role in getting the right information to the right people, and at the right time. This helps reduce noise and drives more targeted and strategic actions.
Increasing Employee Engagement
Sales reps use all kinds of tactics to personalize their emails. This not only improves response rates but also increases the chances of the prospect reading the email.
The same process should be followed for internal communication.
Catching the attention of a busy internal audience is a big ask, and requires creativity and thinking outside the box.
The enablement communications manager is tasked with communicating with multiple different teams, which is a challenge.
Each GTM team has unique needs. The enablement comms manager must deliver unique internal communications instead of a one-size-fits-all comms strategy.
Customer success teams, account executives, sales engineers, and every other team that makes up the GTM engine must receive a different weekly newsletter tailored to their specific needs.
Each team has different goals, metrics, and objectives, so their communications strategies should be unique.
The enablement communication team should look into new ways to engage employees. This could include buying new software tools (check out the list of best conference call services for example) or finding new ways to use existing ones.
A communications manager can help you create more engaging content, schedule your emails more effectively, and track metrics to ensure your messages are being received.
There are a lot of great tools out there for tracking your outbound sales efforts. They allow you to easily track your progress, brand your messages, and incorporate an NPS rating.
The communications team can deploy and own these new tools to increase employee productivity.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
The job of an enablement communications manager is varied and involves working with multiple departments. It’s impossible to do this job alone.
The enablement communications manager is a collaborative position that is focused on achieving business goals. They may not always know which product updates are the most important, but they will know how to find out what the business needs.
Part of the job is to develop a strategy for communicating each update to different audiences. The job of an enabler is to ensure the success of a new program by being involved with it from the start.
The job of an enablement communications manager is to collaborate with others to ensure the effective implementation of changes. The role should be involved in new projects from the start, so they can help employees understand and adopt them.
This will increase employee engagement, help achieve company goals, and will help your employees feel comfortable using the system.
Beyond the Email
A multi-faceted communications plan is essential for a modern sales organization.
GTM leadership needs to have a clear message that their teams can engage with. Video content is a great way to demonstrate best practices in an entertaining and creative way. Win story interviews are also a great way for reps to learn best practices and cheer each other on.
Event communication management includes managing and exceeding the expectations of attendees at events.
As your communications evolve, your communication strategies become an integral part of your team’s culture and an effective way to reinforce your most important messages.
An omnichannel communications strategy includes multiple channels, is targeted to a specific group, and is a collaborative process.
How to Hire
If your enablement team is without a dedicated communications manager, you may want to reconsider.
In addition to the benefits mentioned above, a comms manager will also help increase the revenue and success of the company and its clients.
If everyone in the marketing team has a clear understanding of what’s most important to them at any given time, it can have a huge effect on your organization’s revenues and customers.
If your team has no dedicated communications role, it’s time to create one.
What Exactly is Sales Enablement?
In summary, sales enablement is a strategic discipline designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the entire sales force. It’s all about providing the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right format.
It’s also about making sure that everyone in the sales organization has access to the same up-to-date information so that they can have consistent conversations with customers and prospects.
What Does a VP of Sales Enablement Do?
The VP of Sales Enablement is responsible for developing and executing strategies such as training programs, process improvements, and new technologies. The goal is to help the sales team close more deals and increase revenue.
What are the Components of Sales Enablement?
There are three primary components of sales enablement:
- People: This includes everything from hiring and onboarding new sales reps to ongoing training and development.
- Process: This encompasses everything from how leads are generated and nurtured to how opportunities are managed and deals are closed.
- Technology: This includes everything from the CRM system to the content management system to the proposal software.
Conclusion
Sales enablement communications are a critical part of any sales organization. Without effective communication, it’s difficult to align sales goals with marketing objectives and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
If you want to improve your sales enablement communications, remember to focus on these key areas: goal alignment, messaging consistency, and providing helpful resources. By doing so, you’ll be well on your way to achieving success!
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