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.

Most salespeople are always looking for an edge. They’re looking for new ideas and tactics that can help them improve their performance. However, they severely underutilize the resources they have at their disposal.   

Marketing departments invest significant resources developing content to help support the marketing strategy and generate leads. Sales and marketing teams are both working towards the same goal, securing business and helping the company grow.

As inbound marketers, we work really hard to generate leads for our salespeople. We labor away at content revisions, review analytics and trends, optimize for SEO, schedule tweets and posts, and do everything in our power to get qualified visitors to the site to ultimately convert into leads. 

But what happens when a lead comes in, goes through the sales funnel, and your salespeople make critical mistakes that jeopardize your chance of closing the deal?

Your salespeople could be wasting your hard earned inbound leads by not following up correctly, often enough, or at all. Keep reading, we have a solution! 

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.

I talk to a lot of small- to medium-sized professional services firms who are growing. Their revenue is going up in the right direction; they have a lot of activity and are busy. But when they take a step back to dive into their revenue numbers, there's one thing that is very scary.

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 quite the buzzword these days, but for good reason. When done effectively, it can have lasting impacts on a sales organization. It can shorten the sales cycle and strengthen the entire sales process. Sales enablement has the ability to increase conversion rates and drive new revenue while simultaneously saving your salespeople precious time. 

In today's business environment, your sales team is not only competing against the sales teams of your competitors, but also the busyness and expectations of your prospects. Sales enablement gives sellers a competitive advantage and empowers them to do more with their time and make smarter decisions along the way. Whether your company is just starting to dabble in the sales enablement game, or have already gone all-in, this article will cover the four key components to finding success with sales enablement.