Sales teams today are markedly different from those just five years ago. While data has been an integral process of the sales pipeline both then and now, the emergence of finetuned, powerful AI models have completely changed the sales ecosystem.
In light of this, it is essential for enterprises to revisit their sales enablement strategy. Sales enablement here refers to the process of strategically empowering your sales teams with the right resources and context to close more deals.
Apart from being a long-term solution, sales enablement has also proven to increase a company’s deal closure rate by over 16%.
However, due to the cross-discipline nature of sales enablement, most companies are unable to implement a robust strategy that can arm their sales teams with the right tools.
Before we step into how to streamline and improve your sales enablement strategy, it can be beneficial to see why sales leaders are counting on it to drive the future of sales.
Why You Need A Robust Sales Enablement Strategy
At any given point in time, sales teams are bombarded by data from thousands of different streams.
This data, often unclean and disorganized, consists of information that can help them glean insights into upcoming technology trends, digital and business intentions of top spenders and competitor investment areas.
Apart from this, placing a focus on sales enablement makes sales teams more effective by:
- Extracting highly relevant content for maximizing buyer engagement
- Delivering content to customers through multiple pathways
- Obtaining real-time feedback into customer engagement metrics
- Leveraging advanced analytics to optimize pitches and content
- Empowering sellers with streamlined training modules and measuring how effectively that training delivers results
How To Implement A Sales Enablement Strategy
Each sales team designs and executes this sales enablement differently.
However, a common thread is that a successful sales enablement strategy is built jointly by sales and marketing teams and hinges on collaboration and open communication.
Sales enablement technology, particularly those using AI, has turned out to be a significant boon for the industry.
Here are some ways AI-powered sales intelligence platforms that are equipped with such tools have helped turn around and revitalize a sales team’s efforts.
One dashboard to rule them all: Given the enormity of data that sales teams process on average before approaching a single prospect, it makes sense to make all of it available on a single, accessible dashboard.
Know thy prospect: It’s not enough to give your sales teams a whole bunch of data on industry metrics. Today’s sales professionals should also have a firm hold of their prospect companies’ stakeholder persona.
In other words, they need to be aware of the likes and dislikes of the decision-maker in the company.
Stay on top of trends: As product evangelists, your sales team is often at the forefront of customer interaction. This means that they should be well-versed in the latest happenings in the industry.
Draup for Sales features a Signals Cast app that aggregated signals related to mergers & acquisitions, partnerships, deals, etc, and curated them at an industry level.
For a more deep dive into certain topics, Draup also builds Braindesk reports which are considered exemplary in terms of the Account Intelligence, Ecosystem Intelligence & Sales Intelligence information they contain.
Understand your ecosystem: Naturally, before approaching a prospect in a new geography or a new industry vertical, it is important for sales teams to understand the ecosystem thoroughly.
What are the top 25 accounts in this region?
What are their digital intentions?
Who are the top outsourcers?
What are the top outsourced workloads?
And more.
Answering these questions paints the true picture of available opportunities within an industry/region and empowers sales teams with the right information to make targeted pitched.
Sales enablement in the AI-era is performed using platforms that can leverage huge amounts of data from disparate sources to paint an organized, well-formed picture of the sales ecosystem. Analysts predict that the success of future sales teams hinges on their successful utilization of AI within their sales process.
Draup for sales is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform capable of delivering cutting-edge sales solutions & market intelligence data.