Sales Enablement is the continuous and ongoing process of providing your sales team with the right kind of resources, materials, tools, and collateral that will allow them to land more deal closures, efficiently. It’s a process that helps sales team members sell more effectively to prospects and convert them into long-time customers using data analysis, resources, and training.
Establishing a dedicated sales enablement team is a non-negotiable requirement for any modern organization that aims to scale rapidly in today’s competitive SaaS landscape. However, since sales enablement as a vertical by itself is a concept that has fairly new origins, there are a few common questions to which you might seek answers before setting out on this exercise.
The goal of this blog post is to explain everything about how you can build a sales enablement team for your organization. Let’s start with the most important question of them all.
Who Owns Sales Enablement?
Sales teams need to find gaps in their sales processes, and communicate the same to the marketing team so they can eliminate issues by providing essential content and resources.
Both- sales and marketing teams of companies make up the sales enablement team. They take care of content management, training and refresher content for new and existing sales reps, and engage customers through continuous campaigns. Which brings us to the next question:
What Does An Ideal Team Structure Look Like?
Now that we know who owns sales enablement; let’s take a look at what an ideal sales enablement team structure looks like.
Dedicated Manager: A dedicated sales enablement manager isn’t a set requirement, but if you can spare/hire a resource, it might help streamline your sales enablement process and segue your team into adopting it. This dedicated manager will be responsible for making sure all the members in the team work together to execute and drive the goals, tactics and program performance efficiently.
Sales Manager and Marketing Managers: It takes another level of coordination between marketing and sales to develop a new age sales enablement strategy specific to your business. Managers from both the teams can make sure that aspects such as blockers or processes are aligned between the both to facilitate long term goal management.
Customer Success Manager: The primary aim of the Customer Success Team is to help clients achieve their desired outcomes when they use your product. The Customer Success Manager can help the Sales Enablement Team understand the pain points of the customers, how effective their strategies are, and what collaterals could be created and shared to make the onboarding or upselling easier.
Hiring A Dedicated Manager For Sales Enablement
Responsibilities Of A Dedicated Manager
A sales enablement manager is the bridge between the marketing and sales teams. Although they have several job responsibilities, the main one is to ensure that the sales staff have everything they need to improve their sales conversion rates.
Since this individual will oversee your sales enablement team, they need to have strong soft skills as well as certain hard skills. Plus, you want to make sure all of the above sales enablement team functions are being handled. If some of these responsibilities will fall on existing team members, make sure these team members are aware of their new responsibilities. This ensures nothing gets left behind.
Required Skills
Skills required for this position include both hard and soft skills as aforementioned. Let’s take a look at some of these:
Hard Skills
Training Experience: A candidate needs to know how to create effective training objectives and implement these successfully. Training should be on skills/processes like sales methodologies, negotiations, proposal writing, and marketing collateral.
Onboarding Experience: This is a key skill in hiring because you always would want to get your sales up to speed as soon as possible.
Analytics Knowledge: The candidate should be able to identify and fix bottlenecks that are lowering sales and conversion rates. Analyzing how the sales team sells, what tools they use, like a CRM, and why sales may be lost is crucial.
Soft Skills
Empathy: Empathy is an essential skill for a sales enablement manager. They have to deal with various teams on a daily basis, and also coach and talk to reps. She/he should be able to visualize themselves in the position of a sales team member, and understand their point of view.
Excellent communication skills: This is a given. As a sales enablement manager, they have to act as a mediator between multiple teams within the organization. If they are not able to put their point across well, it can cause a lot of misunderstandings within the company.
Time Management and Prioritization: There will be a lot of tasks thrown their way, and they need to be able to prioritize and efficiently manage their time if they want to go anywhere near completion of their tasks. Sometimes it can happen that all “to do” things are priorities, in situations like these, they should be able to gauge and assign tasks effectively.
Time To Build A Sales Enablement Team For Your Company?
As the competition in the market gets fiercer, so should your company’s sales enablement strategy. It is not anymore just putting together collateral and imparting generic advice. Customers have a variety of options in most markets these days, and a solid sales enablement strategy can make the difference between your team losing the deal and gaining a new customer. Also, here are some other resources that your team can use for free to upscale themselves.
Are you looking to create a dedicated Sales Enablement team? Let us know your thoughts on this below!
