Despite the fact that they have more customer data at their fingertips than ever, sales reps in many organizations are struggling to close deals. In fact, according to data from CSO Insights (via Small Business Trends), 47% of reps missed their quotas in 2018.
Effective sales enablement strategies can boost sales numbers. But more importantly, if they're done right, they can improve your sales team’s quality of work and bring in customers who offer a healthier ROI. However, stronger results require better sales enablement — and that means leaders need to be willing to widen their perspectives.
Here are four effective sales enablement strategies to help your reps meet and overtake their quotas.
1. Redefine Sales Leadership
Sales is driven by results. In many organizations, sales leaders are hard workers who climbed the ranks by becoming selling all-stars. But the best salespeople don’t always make the most effective sales team leaders.
Effective sales enablement requires a broader vision. Sure, an effective sales leader needs to understand sales, but I believe that leader also needs to see across lanes into marketing initiatives.
Too often, sales and marketing become siloed. If companies want to effectively usher prospects through the buyer’s journey, they should give their team content that bridges the marketing and sales gap — and that starts with having leaders who understand how multiple departments connect with customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
Because sales teams engage directly with customers, sales leadership should be instrumental in helping to validate personas (that are created by marketing) and should make recommendations for improvements. Sales teams will only be as effective as possible if marketing is attracting the right people, and the feedback loop from sales to marketing can be crucial to everyone's success.
2. Treat Sales Enablement As A Marketing-Driven Role
These wide-eyed leaders should be able to see where customers are falling through the cracks. In many businesses, there’s a discernible gap between marketing and sales content. Marketing teams spend hours building strategies around customer characteristics, goals and psychographics. Too often, that content is fumbled when it’s handed off to sales. The organization has all this content designed to attract the lead, but too much of the time, it doesn’t make it to the next stage.
For effective sales enablement, leaders should equip their sales team with their buyer persona battle cards. These should arm the team with customer pain points and shed light on the customers’ goals. For instance, if you’re selling to a marketing professional, you probably know it's their job — and likely part of their comp plan — to grow their company's website traffic. This information is often way more important than how many emails they’ve opened. It reveals what drives them. And that makes it easier to meet the customer’s needs.
3. Use Customer Personas To Serve Better Customers
Even if marketing is sharing buyer persona research with sales, it’s worth taking another look at that documentation post-sale. Ask yourself, “Are our buyer personas helping us serve the customers who align with our goals?” Too often, sales leaders become hyper-focused on the number of customers they’re targeting, and the quality of leads gets lost. The result is high churn rates and poor customer experiences.
Enter negative personas. These are profiles for customers who are attracted to your product but are not a good match. Basically, negative personas help you identify the decoys that suck energy and resources out of your organization. Not everyone who’s attracted to your brand is right for your product, and negative personas will save your team headaches in the long run.
One recommendation for creating your first negative persona is to schedule a collaborative meeting with a selection of sales, marketing and customer success team members to discuss the types of customers who are struggling with your solution or delivery model or who may have already left (or churned). It can also be helpful to schedule interviews with both current and past customers to better understand the experience they are having (or have had) with your company.
4. Set Up More Meaningful Benchmarks
To champion better results, sales leaders should strive for better benchmarks. I’m talking about the kind you don’t always find in a spreadsheet. Effective sales enablement will feed off of soft indicators.
For instance, instead of focusing solely on quarterly quotas and looking at them from a black-and-white perspective, tackle the “why.” Pore over monthly numbers, and pay special attention to outliers. They’re the guide to your sales enablement needs. If a customer sale fits your persona, but it takes longer to sell to them, dive into what behavioral commonalities you can identify.
Maybe all of your customers in education take several months longer than average to act. Could internal bureaucracy be the cause? If there’s a pattern, work that info into your benchmarks. Push past the temptation of check-the-box scenarios, and take another look at customers who are outliers.
Conclusion
If sales are lagging, consider boosting your sales enablement strategy with a more holistic approach. If you focus on developing better leadership, creating stronger benchmarks, bridging the sales and marketing gap, and using customer personas, you should eventually close more deals. More importantly, your business will embrace more compatible customers. That could mean less churn, better word of mouth and a more pleasant sales experience for your team.
