12 Questions to Ask Your Sales Reps Before Building your First Competitive Enablement function
Open any sales folder on your company drive and you’ll find at least one sales deck in it.
Look further and you’ll find tons of sales decks in different sizes, colors, and even a few different ones on the same topic. All looking mildly disappointing with a touch of, “ummm that’s not our value prop and what are those blurry screenshots doing in our enterprise deck?”
Yikes.
Instead of communicating a coherent message to your prospects, churning the well-oiled sales machine that pushes leads to customers, your sales team is:
- wasting time creating ugly decks and two-pagers
- running their own gig, independent from your company’s communication strategy and marketing campaigns
While this might work for the top 1% of your salespeople, the majority will feel lost spending time building materials instead of doing what they do best — closing deals. Sales enablement is here to support them.
Why Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement empowers your sales reps with the right strategies, content, and other materials to help them succeed in closing deals. The team is made up of sales enablement experts (which is where “Grow and Scale” comes in) that improve sales productivity and your bottom line.
Do you need it? Well, let’s talk numbers. In their 2020 study, Hubspot discovered that 65% of sales leaders that outperformed against revenue targets had a dedicated sales enablement person or team.
Why do businesses that tap into the power of sales enablement outperform others?
They have high-quality sales materials at their fingertips
A sales enablement team dedicates hours to researching, writing, and designing sales content. With their sole focus on creating the strongest materials, your sales will end up with best-in-class content designed with your end customers in mind.
They have strong messaging
Instead of pitching all the features, bells, and whistles of your product, your sales reps hone in on the most important pain point and build a narrative around it. It’s necessary to show how your clients’ lives will become easier and how their revenue will increase with your product.
The best way to showcase these benefits is to highlight client pain points and break down value propositions while tying the values to the product. While sales reps love focusing on your product, sales enablement content helps sales teams balance advertising the product’s key features with introducing different layers of product narratives fitted to the target audience.
They have aligned end-to-end funnel activities
Sales team is not an independent unit of your business. Their success depends on the inbound leads captured by your marketing team. There’s nothing more disappointing for your lead than downloading a “how to” ebook only to be attacked with a general product pitch five minutes later. For the sales team to succeed, they need to continue the narrative marketing introduced to push your leads down the sales funnel. Without consistency, you’re prolonging your already long AF sales cycle.
Sales enablement content aligns perfectly with marketing activities, making sure all your teams are working towards the same goal without confusing your audience with mixed messages.
Grow and Scale Sales Enablement Framework
We’ve been empowering sales teams at Fortune 500 companies for the past few years. Based on numerous talks with sales teams, their feedback and improved closing rates, we developed a simple framework that ensures the creation of top notch materials every time.
Let’s discuss these elements in detail.
ICP research
If there’s one thing you got to do really well, it’s research. Dedicate hours and hours to conversations with your sales team, trailing your ICPs online, and joining relevant communities.
By the end of our research phase, you’ll understand your ICPs’ daily jobs, pain points, motivations, channels, and basic demographics.
G+S 5-step ICP research process
a) Research calls with 2 to 3 sales reps
b) Research call with a member of your customer success team
c) LinkedIn deep dive — take names from your client lists and research their interests
d) Community crawl — target the most asked questions
e) Account mapping — outline what the typical account looks like and which people are involved in different stages of the buyer’s journey
With these steps, you’ll end up with a one-slide summary for every target persona. This summary will be a go-to resource for creating materials and aligning with your marketing activities.
Buyer’s journey alignment
Now that you understand your ideal accounts, their structure, and individual target personas, it’s time to align sales materials with marketing communications.
In this stage, spend time with your marketing team, studying their live campaigns and upcoming strategies. Here’s the information you should look for:
- The messaging in the best performing ads
- The content of the lead-gen materials
- Email drip campaigns
By studying these elements, you’ll get a good understanding of your top two layers of the funnel.
The next step is the sales enablement content proposal. The content proposal includes the buyer’s journey stage, main messaging, content type, and alignment with marketing.
Take the learnings from the ICP research and marketing activities and then create a list of narratives and materials your sales team could work with. Review the proposal with sales reps and the marketing team, making sure everyone is on the same page.
Sales enablement content creation
Once the proposal is approved, dive into content creation:
- Sales decks — highlighting value propositions and products and used for closing the deal.
- 2-pagers — often used for their internal review with the decision-maker. This content is why account mapping is crucial in setting up the right communication.
- Use cases — short ebooks with the most relevant use cases for their case. This content helps your product to truly shine.
- Email sequences — automate your sales outreach for upper-funnel stages. We’ll create, copy, design, and help you with the setup.
- Case studies — social proof needed in the final stages of their journey. We’ll take your existing customer stories and repurpose them into sales ammo.
Sales and customer success feedback
Sales and customer feedback is often overlooked, yet plays an essential role in our sales enablement framework.
To create the best performing materials, you need constant insights into what works best in the field. What better way to get the information than to create a constant feedback loop with your sales and customer success teams?
When the materials go live, introduce a feedback spreadsheet into the process. Here’s what you should measure:
- How do different narratives resonate with different ICPs?
- What materials are the most useful and why?
- What do target personnel like most about the narrative and what least?
- Are there any repeating questions? Leads seeking additional clarity?
- Is there any misalignment between expectations and delivery (customer success feedback)?
Implement your findings to the ICP profile, reassess the marketing alignment, update content, and wait for another round of feedback. This process is ongoing and ensures constant alignment, improvement, and iteration for closing high-ticket deals and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Want to improve your sales?
Move content creation out of your sales reps’ hands. Bring alignment, quality work, and results with our tested and proven sales enablement framework. Let’s talk.