Do you want to increase your sales? But which one should you do sales enablement or sales engagement? How will these two concepts help to improve your sales by up to 71%? Let’s take a look at these concepts separately.
What is sales enablement?
According to CSO Insights, sales enablement is “a strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by proving consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interaction.”
These concepts involve sales having relationships with every aspect of business to enable salespeople to do their best work. When we look at the concept closer it involves collaboration between sales and marketing. According to Salesforce.com, sales enablement is made of four categories:
Recruiting and hiring: This involves getting the right people in to do your sales. The responsibility can be held by sales, human resources or consultants. It is important to hire the right people for the job.
Training and coaching: This entails improving and honing the skills of the salespeople so that they are able to execute their tasks as sales people better.
Equipping: This is the core of sales enablement. This involves having the right tools to collect, structure, process and report information that encourages better selling.
Assessing: These tasks check if the salespeople and sales managers are working and what processes are working. And if they are sub-par then the other sales enablement activities need to be revisited.
Sales enablement aligns the sales process internally with the different departments of the business.
What is sales engagement?
This concept focuses on assisting sales professionals to communicate effectively with prospects and customers. They need to use the sales processes and tools to ensure that they effectively guide the buyer/customer through the buying experience.
So, what does all this mean?
Well, sales enablement and sales engagement need to work hand in hand. You can’t engage with your customers without having the tools and processes in place and you have to enable your sales professionals with the right tools and processes in place so that they can successfully and effectively engage with their customers.
And how do you do that?
Content management: You need to ensure you have well-developed customisable content for each stage of the buying experience that your salespeople can share with the right people at the right time. This should be contained in a content or document library.
Integrated communication tool: How do your prospects like to be contacted? With so many different communication tools like email, phone, SMS text, and web conferencing. You need to have the tools available to communicate effectively and efficiently with your different prospects.
Guided selling process: This involves scripts, automated lead routing and sales cadence. You may need to use a good customer relationship management tool to keep all the information at your figure tips. Hubspot is a good option.
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