Five years ago, if you asked a room full of sales leaders to raise their hand if they were implementing sales enablement initiatives at their companies no hands would have gone up. In fact, you would have got a lot of blank stares because no one had heard of the term “sales enablement”.

Today if you ask that same question to the same room of sales leaders, you’d get a smattering of raised hands, but still quite a few blank stares. Most have heard of sales enablement, but a lot of sales leaders are confused on what it is; what it looks like in the everyday life of a sales professional; and why it’s important.

In 2015 (yes, five years ago!), I published, “3 Things Every Media Company Needs to Do in 2015,” and it was one of LeadG2's top-performing blog posts.

I consider myself uniquely qualified to write about this topic because I spent the first half of my career selling advertising at a media company and the second half (so far) consulting media companies on their B2B marketing, lead generation, and sales enablement needs, with a focus on helping them drive new, local direct business.    

In today’s market, two of the biggest differentiators for success in sales are based on sales coaching and sales innovation. The most successful salespeople are multi-talented, with their greatest differentiators being knowledge and professional development.

Proactive sales coaching is vital to sales teams because of a well-known principle in the field of psychology known as self-serving bias. Self-serving bias is defined as people’s tendency to attribute positive events to their own character but attribute negative events to external factors.

Salespeople with a self-serving bias will not ask for coaching, or don’t feel the need for further innovation because they don’t think anything is wrong. Additionally, there are six other biases stopping salespeople from closing sales.

What if your sales team had access to not only the guide that could help them move faster and smarter in any given sales situation? How might this impact your conversion rates and new business development? 

That's where a Sales Playbook comes in... It’s a customized approach to your unique sales process that puts the right strategy, best practices, content, and resources at the fingertips of your salespeople so they can take the right steps, at the right time, with the right people. 

But, once you've got a Sales Playbook, how do you use it to effectively drive revenue and improve sales performance?

Congratulations! Your prospect has downloaded a piece of premium content such as an eBook, a sales sheet, or a whitepaper – which means your next task is to nurture the relationship.

By getting the right pieces of content in front of them at the right time, you’ll establish credibility and thought leadership, and potentially shorten their decision-making time.

In order to provide valuable information, you’ll need your new lead to continue to open the emails you send.

When you’re managing a busy sales team, the last thing you want is another time-consuming task.

But what if you had the secret to increasing new business revenue and overall conversion rates?

What if you had access to not only the guide that could turn your team into a sales powerhouse but also have a reusable framework that could be replicated for the same process over and over again?

From training a new salesperson to providing a seasoned seller with new material, a sales playbook is useful across all scenarios for your team.

Sales enablement is a broad term that covers a lot of sales functions under one large umbrella. We define sales enablement as the strategy, content, technology, and training that empowers sales teams to sell smarter and faster. 

Sales enablement tools simply put the right resources and content in the salesperson's hands right when they need it. While these tools have been around for a while, businesses are just realizing that properly utilizing sales enablement tools improve sales productivity, drives revenue, and increases customer alignment.

Providing sales teams with the proper tools, knowledge, and processes to maximize every sales opportunity is invaluable. Effective sales enablement tools can significantly benefit your company – here’s how.

At LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy, our tech stack not only serves to support our sales and marketing efforts, but it also enables our consultants and content teams to super-serve our clients and provide top-notch service and deliver quality results and help them achieve success. Are you utilizing tech to support your marketing, sales, or service efforts at your company? 

We asked our team what marketing and sales technology they use most frequently, and here's the top 10 tools from what was submitted. Yes, there's actually more!

Most managers and sellers have experienced this:

• A seller is moving a new business prospect through the sales process.
• All signs are positive.
• The prospect goes silent, and will not respond to email, phone calls, letters, or stop-ins.
• The seller goes to his/her manager and asks for advice.
• The manager spends time listening to the seller, conducting diagnostic work, and providing advice to the seller (what to do to restart the stalled sale).

On the surface, this sounds like a good system, but in reality, it is not. Here’s why:

• Managers work with multiple sellers—doing this for many sellers takes up a great deal of time and is often redundant (same problem… same solution).
• Sellers might not have easy or timely access to their managers—this delays the sales process and allows the sale to get further off track.

Sales enablement is the technology, strategy, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell smarter and faster. Our high-paid salespeople should be spending the majority of their time having quality appointments with potential buyers and presenting solutions, NOT trying to figure out what they're going to say and do next, having to wait on managers for coaching, or creating/finding the right content and resources to share in any given scenario. Salespeople in 2019 should be efficient and smart - so they can work smarter and faster, but also so the buying experience can be better and easier.   

It's our belief that every single successful sales organization needs sales enablement content, and today I'm sharing three types of sales enablement content that every sales team needs.