Building a successful sales enablement strategy for your go-to-market team

When building a successful sales enablement strategy for your go-to-market team, there are various requirements to be considered. 

Firstly, using the business intelligence and insights from your existing customer network to create a data-based strategy for business growth should be your starting point. 

From here, you can determine specifically what a sales enablement strategy looks like specifically for your business, in your sector and for your products or services. 

WHAT A SALES ENABLEMENT STRATEGY LOOKS LIKE 

Sales enablement is the continual process of providing your GTM team with the resources they need to make more sales. These resources can cover a wide variety of assets, including sales tools, training, content, industry knowledge and insightful information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. Ultimately, everything needed to enable them to make more sales.

In 2022, it is no secret that a salesperson’s world is driven by data. However, a constant stream of information can have a detrimental effect and hurt productivity if your salespeople become overwhelmed by too much product knowledge or training content. The key is to equip them with the right amount to close more deals and collectively grow the business, whilst also having the mental capacity to adapt to new or updated processes or service knowledge.

This not only includes a strategic marketing plan that feeds into your sales team, but also product introduction and related strategies to fully make use of the window of opportunity around consumer needs.

The best way to break down a sales enablement strategy for your go-to-market team is as follows: 

Creating a uniformed way of reporting - for organisations to be able to scale effectively, valuable insights from business data must look the same for every salesperson. That way, the data can be analysed to see where business is being won and lost, for example, and make note of any trends and improvements needed as a result.

Regularly reviewing all sales processes - an audit of your existing sales processes is the key to creating an in-depth, data-backed report of how to pinpoint areas where sales performance could be improved. Businesses looking to grow on a large scale must consider this as one of the most vital aspects of sales enablement for their GTM team, in order to spot any opportunities where there are gaps in processes that could be impacting leads or closed deals.

Training and development for your go-to-market team - whether this is training on how to use a specific piece of software internally, or continual development for employees to ensure they are consistently learning about the products and services they are offering your customer base, training and development is a vital aspect of your sales enablement strategy. 

Usability - one fundamental aspect of sales enablement is that it benefits all of your salespeople, regardless of whether you have an organisation of 10 or 10,000. For this reason, it’s imperative that everything you provide your salespeople with is easy to use. When designing your sales enablement strategy, from a usability perspective, ensure resources are simple to find and easy to apply. 

Customer feedback - asking for feedback from your customers is an important component of your many business life cycles that often gets overlooked under-emphasised. Data is, of course, the first port of call when analysing your consumer acceptance and the success of your business offerings. However, gathering tangible customer feedback - both informally and formally - is a crucial component of understanding the elements of your sales strategy that work or do not work, and how to best improve them going forward. 

HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL SALES ENABLEMENT STRATEGY

To begin with, look at your existing strategy, and answer the following questions:

• What reporting systems do we currently have in place? Do all sales staff use the same reporting platform? Are they accessible  to everyone? If not, why not? Can this be centralised to be monitored and analysed?
• How often are sales processes currently being reviewed? If so, how often are they reviewed and what improvements have previously been made? If not, who can monitor and review them on a regular basis, and feed back to the wider team?
• Is your GTM team fully equipped with sufficient training and development material? If so, what is their feedback? What is and is not useful? If not, what can the team be provided with for continuous improvement?
• How easy to use is our current software? Does our sales team agree that it is simple to use? If not, where can improvements be made? What other software is available?
• How do we currently receive customer feedback? Do we send follow up email surveys, or make phone calls? What is the general consensus in terms of customer satisfaction? Where can improvements be made? How is customer feedback being monitored and improved?

When the above has been answered and a sales enablement strategy for your GTM team is in place, business leaders will be able to monitor and analyse the full 360 metrics of sales enablement practices. 

Analysing all of the combined feedback from customers about their sales experience, your salespeople on usability of the software, and continually assessing the success of internal sales processes, will collectively create your 360 metrics. Information on what does and does not work is extremely valuable to business leaders, as understanding where re-investment or reallocation of resources can be made will become more connected and streamlined over time. 

SUPPORT IN DEVELOPING AN ELITE GTM TEAM FOR YOUR ORGANISATION

Here at Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hyper-growth tech companies. To learn more about how we can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com.