One in four companies believe that their sales and marketing departments are disoriented. Customer reach enablement for sales or popularly sales enablement is that missing piece of the puzzle that unites these two departments together, helping businesses significantly boost sales productivity and have more meaningful sales interactions.

The good news? A sales enablement plan can help solve the problem if well executed. Other than laying the foundation upon which the business allocates resources to the sales and marketing departments, a sales enablement plan promotes equal resource distribution between the two departments. It also ensures that both teams remain aligned throughout the sales process.

Here, we will discuss what sales enablement is and how to boost it with a well-executed customer reach enablement program.

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is any measure, step, or effort undertaken by the sales department in procuring resources, data, systems, technologies, and procedures that help turn leads to customers in a simpler, more efficient way. The goal is to equip sales representatives with various types of sales enablement tools, info, and resources they need to streamline the customer acquisition process and maintain a good relationship for as long as possible.

How Sales Enablement Improves the Sales Process

Sales enablement touches on various stages of the sales process. For instance, customers at the first stage of the sales process (the prospecting stage) will need content resources (blogs, social media posts, web copy, and so on. Leveraging sales enablement techniques, marketers and sales reps will provide this content and nudge the leads towards the sale in a subtle and methodical manner.

Below are a few other ways sales enablement can boost the sales process:

1. Customer Guidance, Education, and Nurturing

Sales enablement deals with the acquisition of resources by the sales department. Such resources include data-driven insights, content, and technology. However, today’s customers are more knowledgeable and educated than ever. They want to move on with a sales rep after conducting their own research.

A good sales enablement program should aim towards guiding prospects to action, not selling to them. Ask questions, understand the prospect’s pains, offer guidance, and most importantly, provide solutions to the prospect’s problems.

2. A Cleaner, More Efficient Sales and Marketing Process

The difference between sales enablement vs marketing is subtle. Sales enablement empowers the sales team with data and tech to help them do their jobs better. Marketing, on the other hand, refers to the actual promotion and selling of products and services.

Both processes are long and tedious. A rock-solid sales enablement plan can help cut them into shorter, manageable steps. By identifying what the prospects, sales and marketing teams need, the company can plan how to acquire these specific resources. Doing so leads to a more efficient sales process.

3. Predictable and Measurable Sales Efforts

A sales enablement strategy drives the sales process in a unified direction. It all begins at the very first step of the sales process; prospecting. Sales managers have to monitor how leads respond to different strategies at each stage, monitor results, and tweak whatever doesn’t work.

Following this routine creates a repeatable system that can be executed again and again. A repeatable system is easy to predict. As a result, your sales personnel can always project the expected results and work towards these expectations.

Technologies Powering Sales Enablement

Technology cuts right at the heart of any sales or marketing plan. Sure, a perfectly executed business plan can drive the overall success of the business. But for the sales and marketing departments to continuously turn those leads into prospects, the sales enablement plan must be entwined with the latest sales enablement technology. Here’s why:

• 55% of executives believe that sales enablement technology is key to a better sales performance.
• 27% of large businesses, 44% midsize enterprises, and 23% of small businesses use CRM software.
• 47% of sales experts say that they use sales technology at least once a day.
• 59% of business leaders believe that AI will be deployed in sales by 2022.
• Sales and marketing teams that use technology in training and development are 57% more effective than teams that don’t.
  

With that, here are the technologies behind a successful sales enablement program:

1. Content Design, Creation and Management Tools

Customers, no matter where they are in a sales journey, need relevant content. A sales content management tool enables sales reps to create different kinds of content for their leads at every stage.

2. CRM Software Solutions

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) entails the acquisition and retention of customers. It refers to all the techniques and strategies used by businesses to build and manage customer relationships.

Companies today rely on cloud-based and AI-powered CRM software for automated customer interactions. Such tools aid in the coordination of various CRM functions, including customer service, data analysis, activity tracking, and data audit to improve customer satisfaction, brand productivity, and overall efficiency.

HubSpot and SalesForce are renowned CRM software technologies that enable marketers to collect and generate reports on customer engagement. Your sales team can finally enjoy an automated process with minimized chances of error.

3. Sales Management Systems

Sales management systems consolidate your sales and marketing teams’ efforts towards a common goal. In essence, they minimize manual admin tasks, bringing about better customer satisfaction and better efficiency.

They should bind together the team’s strategies and resources and enable your sales team to close deals, sell faster and make smarter decisions.

How Customer Reach Enablement Technologies Help with Sales Enablement: 5 Benefits to Consider

Customers are the most important part of the business. However, a plan alone is never enough to convert leads into customers. Technology plays the central role, streamlining the process and performing manual administration on the sales rep’s behalf.

Here are the 5 benefits the sales teams receive from a well-executed customer reach enablement program:

1. Sales & Marketing Staff Training on Customer reach Insights

The reports and stats on what worked–and what didn’t–in the course of customer reach are invaluable for sales. The insights need to be regularly shared among the whole sales team in the form of meetings and trainings. Since sales enablement is tailored to the business, sales and marketing staff can be taught how to achieve desired results based on the KPIs.

2. Efficient Sales Process Through Process Automation, Tracking, and Management

Manual processes in an organization can be a nightmare. Dealing with vast loads of customer data, unprocessed documents, unverified customer information, etc. undermines the integrity and accuracy of the sales process.

Companies can respond by integrating their already existing infrastructure with various sales enablement software. Inkit, for instance, is a world-leading Reach Enablement Platform that helps the sales team automate postal address data collection, direct mail outreach, and more. The platform verifies given customer addresses against reliable databases. It also enables your sales team to process and send print communications based on customer data.

3. Sales and Marketing Coordination

A unified sales and marketing function ensures a combined mutual effort from sales and marketing departments. A sales enablement plan brings together all the resources pertaining to customer acquisition, lead nurturing, and related activities under one roof.

Both sales and marketing departments then share these resources in the quest to fulfil the organization’s overall goals. Together, they can modify, update, and utilize the sales enablement resources more efficiently.

4. Better Customer Engagement and Customer Satisfaction

Customer reach enablement grants the sales team better control over each stage of the customer journey. We know that prospects at different stages of the sales process require specific content to keep them engaged or educated.

Content marketing and content creation tools can help target prospects with the right content, while Inkit Send will help turn customer communications into an automated and trigger-based multichannel process.

By addressing the customer’s pains and offering solutions through the right content, the sales team can confidently steer prospects in the right direction.

5. Boosts Sales

Empowering sales managers with the tools, software, and information they need to improve the sales process enables them to close faster deals. Sales enablement platforms reel themselves in all stages of the customer sales journey.

By analyzing these stages of the sales process, marketing and customer reach data, and identifying the need for improvement, the sales team can better persuade customers to take action, cross-sell, and upsell to them.

How Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform Can Help

In a world dominated by technology and increasingly complex processes, Inkit can help streamline the sales process. Gone are the days of manual customer data acquisition & processing.

Our products, Send, Render, and Verify can help your brand reach customers more confidently.

• Inkit Send allows businesses to create and send print communications based on real-time customer data. No more manual file processing. Inkit Send will automate print communications tailored to your customer’s needs.
• Inkit Render helps with your HTML into PDF conversion to make sure the paperless reports your team or customers get are well-formatted, well-encrypted, and ready for print, if needed.
• Your sales team no longer needs to worry about sending follow-up messages to the wrong email address. Inkit Verify performs form and website checkouts to exterminate errors in the customer’s postal address.

Final Thoughts

Every sales enablement plan needs careful execution before expecting meaningful results. However, planning and execution alone won’t work magic without technology. A good sales enablement plan bound to sales enablement technologies enables your sales team to streamline the sales process and close more deals faster.