Due to increased competition, increasing sales efficiency is an ongoing priority for sales managers. Sales enablement tools have become the key to achieving this goal. Indeed, these tools combined with a Sales Enablement strategy drive sales efficiency.
According to Instapage, automation has allowed many companies to increase the volume of leads transformed into sales opportunities by 225%.
In this article, we will see how sales efficiency can be achieved through the implementation of a sales enablement strategy.
Sales Enablement: the art of selling better
Sales Enablement is the iterative process of providing salespeople with the right tools, content, and skills to improve sales efficiency.
Marketing and Sales Collaboration
It's no secret that the relationship between sales and marketers is far from easy. However, a study shows that the coherence of the two poles allows for a 20% increase in turnover.
In this respect, Sales Enablement puts forward this aspect via Smarketing, i.e. the alignment of marketing and sales. The cohesion of the two poles can only be beneficial because each one brings its expertise to the tasks in which they excel.
The figures are clear and illustrate the importance of this alignment:
- The collaboration of the two poles allows companies to record an increase of 27% in profit.
- 56% of companies in which marketing and sales are aligned achieve their revenue goals.
Thus, when sales and marketing activities focus on common initiatives and practices, the company increases its productivity.
Content Management
Content is an essential element in a Sales Enablement strategy. Its regular updating is essential for information sharing between teams.
On the one hand, the sales team must provide customers with relevant and personalized content. On the other hand, the marketing team is the source of the content used by the sales team. Centralizing content saves time for both teams.
The objective is to stimulate sales by creating relevant and consistent content. This way, the content can be used to engage prospects by responding to their needs.
Sales Enablement at the source of sales efficiency
Sales efficiency describes the various tasks in the sales process and allows the company to achieve its goals and results.
Good organization for better efficiency
Poor organization of work demotivates employees and reduces their efficiency. On the other hand, a good organization ensures sales efficiency and the long-term development of the company.
The latter is based on a system where each team is focused on a task within its expertise. In this way, the work is distributed fairly and above all efficiently.
In short, the sales process should not be left to chance, but structured in an intelligent way. A good organization of the work makes it possible to quickly identify weaknesses and work on them.
Best practices for sales efficiency
In order to improve sales efficiency, it is necessary to identify best practices that will help salespeople.
To discover new best practices related to the business, it is sufficient to ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the most effective tasks? Why?
- What are the tasks that can be improved?
- How can they be improved?
By identifying and responding to difficulties, the work of salespeople is optimized. In this way, they are encouraged to focus on the essentials to increase sales efficiency.
Sales efficiency: key measures
Sales efficiency monitoring is important to evaluate sales performance and revenue generation. To do so, investing in a Sales Enablement tool helps increase this sales efficiency metric.
Qualitative and quantitative indicators
First, quantitative indicators can be quantified to estimate the sales efficiency of the sales strategy. Here are the main examples:
- The number of appointments booked: this allows you to know if there is a problem with the prospecting method and to modify it to improve it.
- Lead conversion rate: represents the ratio of leads converted into customers compared to the total number of leads contacted.
- The average length of the sales process: average time elapsed between the first contact with the prospect and the signing of the contract.
Secondly, the qualitative indicators will help you to know how your company is perceived by the customers.
- Customer feedback: provides information about the prospecting experience from the customer's perspective.
- Customer satisfaction: can be measured via satisfaction surveys or by the NPS (Net Promoter Score) which allows you to evaluate the propensity of your customers who are ready to recommend you.
These indicators give a global vision of what needs to be improved in the strategy and thus promote sales efficiency.
Sales support tools
A sales support tool is digital support that facilitates the sales cycle. In fact, it accompanies sales representatives at every stage of the process and makes them more efficient.
First of all, a sales enablement tool can be used to bring new employees up to speed, allowing for targeted sales training and coaching. This way, new salespeople are operational and autonomous more quickly.
A sales support tool can also be used to better exploit data. Indeed, companies have an astronomical amount of data that they do not take advantage of. It is at this precise moment that the sales support tool makes its entrance in order to exploit them better via different means:
- Exporting data: Sales enablement tools can pull data generated by your various systems for processing.
- Data formatting: Proper processing gives salespeople the information they need to close a deal.
- Automation of tasks: The sales process is streamlined by automating time-consuming tasks.
In short, Sales Enablement is a discipline that offers salespeople the ability to increase their sales efficiency. From this perspective, the integration of a sales enablement tool within the teams is an excellent lever to achieve this.