If you’ve started looking into sales enablement apps that promise to put your sales enablement strategy into action, what do you do if your company is not quite ready to commit to a single software solution? You may be asking how do you know if you’re ready for a Sales Hub and how are you able to overcome obstacles that stand between you and a commitment to a platform?
Purchasing a sales enablement hub is a big decision to make for any company, whether you’re a team of ten or ten thousand. While it is a big investment in time and resources, you’ll find that using a single app to activate your sales enablement strategy can transform your company. This claim is true, according to Wheelhouse Advisors, “B2B organizations with closely aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth.”
Still a little uneasy about investing in sales enablement? That’s okay! We’re here to answer your questions.
How Do You Know If You’re Ready for an Enablement Platform?
To simplify a sales enablement strategy, it can be helpful to think of it in relation to three topics: Customer, Content, and Collaboration.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Customer:
- Do you want but currently lack an end-to-end view of your buyer’s journey?
- Does your content have an impact, positive or negative, on your buyer’s journey?
- Do you need visibility into what happens after lead hand-off from marketing to sales?
- Do you want insight into how your marketing contributes to your revenue growth?
Content:
- Do you personalize your content?
- Do you update your content frequently?
- Do you have trouble keeping marketing collateral organized? Is it scattered across multiple platforms or hidden away in hard-to-access folders?
- Do you struggle to deliver collateral on time and keep it updated on all your devices?
- Does your Sales team spend too much time trying to find collateral?
- Are you missing metrics to track and determine which content is effective and which is not?
- Do you have a difficult time measuring the ROI of your content?
Collaboration:
- Do your sales and marketing departments have trouble communicating effectively?
- Are you lacking a single platform where sales and marketing can collaborate?
If you answered ‘YES,’ to any of these questions, you could benefit from a sales enablement platform.
What Are The Benefits of Sales Enablement?
Let’s look at what sales enablement can do for you. It’s essential to assess the benefits versus the investment when you’re considering a sales enablement strategy. When you opt for a Sales Hub, you’ll gain valuable data and insights, increase collaboration within your departments, establish consistency throughout all teams, and drive your revenue.
Gain Valuable Data - When you know your buyer’s journey, their insights, interests, personas, and even their pain points you’ll be one step ahead. Knowing more about the habits of your consumers means that your sellers will be able to back up their conversations with understanding. Using the right tools can help track your data and bring back valuable insights to your company. B2B sales activities can lead to discussions and ultimately decisions. When you want to improve your conversions, you’re going to need tools that help empower your sales reps to connect with their buyer and critical decision makers.
Increase Collaboration of Departments - Sales enablement isn’t just for the sales team, it should be for the whole company. When your sales and marketing teams share an enablement hub, your entire organization will benefit from the increase visibility of sales team activity, customer insights, and content efficacy. Once everyone is collaborating on the same solution, you’ll be able to create new goals, responses, and adapt to issues quickly with support teams.
Establish Brand Consistency - Working from the same playbook means that your reps don’t have to be in the same area to stay in sync and on message. Maintain your brand consistency by having the most up-to-date collateral and relevant information readily available to your reps, so that they can deliver content to the customer that is worthwhile, at the right time. With current collateral at their fingertips, synced to the Cloud, your sales reps won’t waste time searching high and low for the latest information. Ensuring your company has effective content is key to aligning your sales and marketing teams with a Sales Hub. When everyone has direct access to the latest content, your whole company will benefit.
Drive Revenue - Conversations between your sales and marketing departments can also drive your revenue by increasing the efficiency of your process. When you streamline distribution of sales collateral to a central hub, your reps are instantaneously updated with the key information that they need to communicate to buyers. With efforts focused on deals and sales conversations rather than finding the most current content, your reps can close deals faster, leaving time to close more deals overall.
Increased revenue is often cited as the number one reason for exploring sales enablement. HubSpot, one of the leading sales and marketing SaaS companies in the world, claims, you'll see a 208% increase in revenue. Furthermore, it’s true—aligning your sales and marketing can benefit your company in many different ways.
Seven Steps to Implementing a Sales Hub
So, you’ve gone through the questions you should ask yourself, and you’ve also learned more about how unifying your sales and marketing teams with one platform can benefit your company, in more ways than one. Now you want to jump on the sales enablement bandwagon—Great!
It’s time to create a plan for your implementation of a sales enablement app. We have seven steps you’ll want to take to help ease your way into the wonderful world of enablement platforms.
Seven Steps for Implementing a Sales Enablement Platform:
- Create Objectives and Goals for Your Company
- Build a Case for Sales Enablement
- Organize Your Sales, Marketing, and Content
- Research the Sales Enablement Market
- Shortlist Top 3 and Demo Solutions
- Select Your Vendor based on best fit for your goals and team needs
- Execute Your Sales Enablement Plan
Aragon Research states, “sales enablement technology is currently a $780M market, and it is expected to be worth $5B by 2021,” and according to HighSpot, “over 75% of companies using sales enablement tools indicated that sales increased over the past 12 months.” It’s clear that if you want to succeed with the long-term goals of your organization, you should look at sales enablement solutions.
Even if you’ve only done preliminary research, the idea of a hub that aligns your two most powerful departments—sales and marketing—will bring you down a path you never thought of before. Consider these benefits to sales enablement, and you’ll be on your way to a successful company.
What Are Your Next Steps?
At Modus, we’ve got the perfect guide for deciding your next steps within implementing sales enablement platforms. Download our fantastic guide below, and you’ll get to know more about how sales enablement creates the perfect interactive Sales Hub for your company!
