Sales enablement is the foundation of success in today’s ever-changing sales landscape. With the majority of B2B purchase decisions now starting with self-guided research, according to Forrester, sellers face a new reality: buyers are more informed, selective, and in control than ever before. These empowered buyers expect personalized solutions, seamless experiences, and value-driven conversations at every stage of their journey.

For sales teams, this means adapting quickly to deliver relevant insights, build stronger relationships, and stand out in an increasingly competitive market. That’s where sales enablement becomes a game-changer.

More than just tools and training, sales enablement is a strategic framework that aligns sales, marketing, and enablement teams to deliver consistent and impactful buyer experiences. By leveraging innovative technology, actionable content, and streamlined processes, businesses can empower their sales teams to exceed expectations, close deals faster, and thrive in a fast-paced, buyer-centric world.

In this guide, we’ll explore the fundamentals of sales enablement, its critical role in addressing modern sales challenges, and actionable strategies to optimize your enablement efforts. Whether you’re starting fresh or refining your approach, this guide is your roadmap to success.

First, let’s begin by defining sales enablement.

What Is Sales Enablement?

At its core, sales enablement is the ongoing process of maximizing revenue per rep, by ensuring sellers convey the right concept using the right content throughout each stage of the buying process.

The essentials of sales enablement include content, skills training, knowledge, coaching, and tools to help sellers engage effectively at every stage of the buying process. These tactics must be integrated, driven by a unified strategy, and enabled by sales enablement technology.

Today’s competitive economy—and the new requirements of virtual selling—have increased demand for sales enablement. There is a greater need for sales teams to be flexible and responsive and to align more closely with their marketing teams. Functions that were siloed—training, learning, and coaching—are merging with content creation and management. Now that most B2B sales are virtual, a holistic approach to sales enablement is more critical than ever for keeping teams on track.

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The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement ROI

Are your sales enablement programs making an impact? Can you measure the ROI of your enablement tools and technology? This eBook will help you figure it out. Download it to get actionable advice that will help you measure and maximize the impact of your sales enablement investment. Get the report today.

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How Do Analysts Define Sales Enablement?

How you define sales enablement often depends on who you ask. Different organizations have different views on what it means, how to approach it, and what the role encompasses. You don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s how the top four industry analysts define this critical function.

Gartner: “Sales enablement is the activity, systems, processes, and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with clients and prospects.”

SiriusDecisions: “The job of sales enablement is to ensure that salespeople possess the skills, knowledge, assets, and processes to maximize every buyer interaction.”

Forrester: “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips employees with the ability to consistently have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s journey.”

CSO Insights: “Sales enablement is a strategic, cross-functional discipline, designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training and coaching services.”

What Are Sales Enablement Challenges?

Today’s buyers expect confident, informed and agile professionals who can convey value and educate them throughout each stage of their buying process. But two-thirds of buyers say their reps fail to add value. What’s the result? Fifty-eight percent of deals stall and 50% of reps miss quota.

Traditional approaches to sales enablement can’t keep pace with how fast market preferences are evolving. Sales enablement must evolve from a “top-down” mandate to a collaborative exchange that rapidly incorporates learnings from real-world interactions to accommodate sellers in the moment of need.

Sales enablement teams are facing new challenges in readiness, content, and coaching as they embark on this transformation:

Sales Readiness (Challenge for Sales Enablement & Training Teams): Traditional sales training isn’t retained and applied by the time sales scenarios arise. Reps haven’t mastered messaging, resources, and techniques in time to convey value at the moment of need—yet, reps spend only 1% of a typical work week on improving.

Sales Content (Challenge for Marketers and Enablement Content Creators): Traditional approaches to content management don’t support streamlining of enablement content creation based on a feedback loop with sellers and buyers who utilize that content. To make matters worse, reps can’t find the content they need and don’t know how to use it strategically throughout the sales process.

Without a sales enablement strategy, sellers are burdened by mountains of ‘just-in-case’ content, making it difficult to find what’s truly needed to advance a deal. With an average of 27 unique buying interactions required to close a B2B sale, it’s no surprise that 70% of generic enablement content misses the mark and is never used by sales teams.

Sales Coaching (Challenge for Sales Leaders and Managers): Traditional approaches to sales coaching use gut instinct that spreads managers too thin and doesn’t provide the resources, guidance, and visibility needed to improve coaching conversations.

Additionally, subject matter experts are continually taxed by sellers reaching out to ask the same questions again and again, and the best knowledge and sales approaches are locked in the minds of the ‘A Players’. Similar to sales readiness, having the time to coach is a significant barrier with 45% of sales managers only spending 30 minutes a week coaching their team and 60% of managers say they don’t have time to deliver effective coaching..

These sales enablement challenges result in:

• People: Ineffective sales teams that can’t maximize customer interactions and miss revenue targets.
• Process: Inefficient readiness and coaching processes that can’t get sellers productive fast enough.
• Tech: Siloed tools that don’t get used and add operational cost to marketing, enablement, and sales.

Modern sales enablement solutions have to address all of this, in a way that supports salespeople in the flow of their daily work, and looks and feels different to this generation of sales professionals. You can’t apply the same old tactics and expect them to work.

Seller and buyer expectations have changed, and demand highly customized and convenient selling and buying experiences. In our daily lives, we can answer any question by turning to mobile devices (think Google), learn any new skill through a short video (think YouTube), and make informed decisions based on crowd-sourced information (think Waze or TripAdvisor).

Traditional enablement has been too focused on theoretical classroom learning, static content repositories, and sporadic coaching based on anecdotal evidence. The most impactful sales enablement solutions help:

• Incorporate experiential and peer learning into sellers’ flow of work instead of just theory and product knowledge
• Make the right content accessible in the moment of need prior to sales conversations instead of static repositories full of hard-to-find assets with no context on how to use them
• Connect sellers and buyers with convenient experiences instead of focusing on training and internal content access

Why Is Sales Enablement Important?

Effective sales enablement strategies help companies achieve measurable results, from higher win rates to improved buyer relationships.

The data is clear: sales enablement leads to better win rates. CSO Insights’ data shows that organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without. It’s also correlated with more effective sales training, stronger customer relationships, and higher quota attainment.

Sales organizations with sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without. — CSO Insights

Sales enablement is about providing sellers with the right resources, processes, and technology to sell effectively and increase revenue. Sales enablement maximizes every point of engagement salespeople have with buyers and improves the experience they provide.

It also helps organizations streamline and shorten sales cycles by improving buyer interactions with relevant sales content that is tailored and personalized. Sales enablement technology unlocks insights into content engagement and how it affects sales performance.

Salespeople have better conversations and act as trusted advisors which allow them to foster long-term relationships with prospects and customers. When executed properly, sales enablement has a measured impact on time spent selling, win rates, and deal size.

What Does Sales Enablement Include?

Sales enablement teams handle a wide range of different activities and priorities. Any or all of these areas can fall under sales enablement, depending on company size and industry, the needs of the sales force, and enablement team structure.

Ultimately, every sales enablement team exists to support sellers. How each company accomplishes that tends to look a little different. These are the core functions that comprise a holistic sales enablement practice.

1. Sales Onboarding & Training

Sales training includes onboarding new hires and supporting them with continuous learning and reinforcement on product information, messaging, competitive positioning, and the skills needed to have valuable interactions throughout the sales process. The most effective sales enablement programs bolster training with collaboration tools to make sales training continuous.

2. Content Activation

Sales enablement drives the creation, distribution, and management of sales assets and sales training content of two types: 1) customer-facing content that sellers will share with the buyer and 2) best practices, research, and tools that sales will consume internally. All content needs to be easy to consume and reusable across the sales organization. It’s not enough to simply make assets available, sellers must know how to use these resources. Teams who know what’s working—and what’s not—can improve sales content to be even more effective.

3. Sales Methodology

Sale enablement owns and implements the sales strategy, processes, and methods that the organization has developed to qualify leads, nurture prospects, engage buyers, and close deals.

4. Sales Communications / Marketing Alignment

Sale enablement facilitates communication within the team and across other functions. Sales enablement fosters alignment and continuous collaboration with the marketing team to ensure consistent messaging and a unified approach. This allows the team to empower reps with relevant knowledge and information from all departments committed to their success.

5. Sales Coaching

Sales enablement extends not only to sales reps, but also to sales managers. Equipping front-line managers to inspire, motivate, and support reps with good coaching and communication skills improves seller productivity and leads to better results.

6. Sales Tools

Effective use of sales tools is also a core element of the role. Sales reps typically use several different tools every day—CRMs, engagement tools, intelligence tools, communication tools, role playing tools, call coaching, and many more. Some of these represent major investments for the company, so ensuring reps know how to use all the technology, and use it well, is essential. With the right preparation, reps can even turn their sales tools into a differentiator for the organization.

7. Sales Analytics

The final component of sales enablement is measurement. Meaningful metrics include: average sales cycle length; number of reps achieving quota; and average deal size. Measurement and reporting extends to the overall success of the sales enablement program. Teams who know what’s advancing deals can continuously iterate and optimize the process.

What Are the Capabilities of a Modern Sales Enablement Platform?

Today’s modern and forward-thinking sales enablement platforms take a holistic approach to ensure sellers receive the skills, knowledge, and content to engage buyers and win deals. They include five critical elements that not only set sellers up for success, but create a personalized and interactive buying experience that customers crave.

5 Elements of a Modern Sales Enablement Platform

1. Seller-Centric Design

A modern sales enablement platform puts the salesperson at the center, with learning, content, and coaching delivered in the flow of their daily work. It empowers sellers in their moment of need when they are most motivated, so that they perform at their best throughout each stage of the buying process.

The platform should be designed to support rapid and effective marketing content access, paired with the trusted resources and organizational knowledge that sellers want to hear most. And it should be a collaborative platform that connects sellers with their managers and subject matter experts to support them in conveying the best solutions for their customers.

2. Modern and Intuitive User Experience

Salespeople have come to expect experiences like those that they get from apps they use in their personal lives, such as YouTube. Your sales enablement platform should be centered on a mobile application that allows sellers to access learning, content, and expertise that they need anytime or anywhere—with or without an internet connection.

That means the sales enablement tool they use must have superior mobile and video performance on the go. This includes video optimization, team collaboration, and predictive caching of content for offline viewing and fast launching. The tool must also automatically sync off-line activities, such as comments and feedback, when the application is accessed with internet connectivity.

So, if one of your sales reps is sitting in their car preparing for a meeting, or on their computer getting ready for a videoconference, they can quickly access short videos to help them understand the best ways to differentiate against a competitor. Or they can pull up a key piece of collateral to use, accompanied by an explainer from an expert on how to use it properly.

Further, when the sales rep opens the app in the morning or throughout the day, they should get personalized recommendations for content, best practices, or examples that specifically address the challenges they’re working through. It means your sales rep can work with their manager, peers, or trusted internal experts to develop the best solutions for my prospect.

When you give your reps a modern user experience they’re accustomed to, they will use it. Mandating salespeople use technology that is difficult to use will reduce adoption. And poor adoption means minimal to no ROI.

3. Comprehensive and Flexible Approach to Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is a holistic function that encompasses sales readiness, as well as onboarding and training, sales content and messaging, product launches, coaching, and virtual selling.

A comprehensive sales enablement platform gives organizations the flexibility to address specific use cases such as learning, sales content management, or Conversation Intelligence and implement expanded capabilities as requirements change and grow. Modern platforms offer solutions to current high-priority business challenges without limiting capabilities for future needs.

4. Open Architecture and Robust Integrations

Given the number of technologies that companies use, it has never been more important to ensure your software investments work cohesively across your technology stack. The global average of learning tools and platforms used today in a company is 23—double the number that companies were using in 2011. Sales reps alone use an average of six tools.

A modern sales enablement platform uses open web standards that allow you to embed or share any data and content with practically any tool. By providing out-of-the box integrations with your tech stack, you will drive higher performance and see better adoption of your complete toolset.

5. Transformative Customer Success Partnership for Fast ROI

It isn’t enough to just buy a sales enablement tool. The provider should also offer customer support and partner with you to deploy and implement the tool. The customer success team should leverage best practices, lessons learned, and a methodology that helps their customers avoid common pitfalls.

The supportive vendor’s approach ensures widespread seller adoption based on best practices for various use cases and industries. It delivers services from end to end—whether at the beginning of the project to ensure successful program management, during the deployment for training and adoption planning, or on an ongoing basis after implementation to support your strategic business initiatives.

The vendor can work with you to ensure that compelling content is available for salespeople on day one so that they’re excited and engaged with the sales enablement platform from the start.

It’s also important for the vendor to work with you to ensure you have executive and business stakeholder sponsorship. They can help define and execute a communication plan that gets everybody on the same page as far as priorities and objectives.

The vendor can help you define and redefine processes that need to change in order to streamline your sales enablement and lift performance. You also want a vendor who will work with you to define and track ROI on an ongoing basis so that your stakeholders and executives understand the value that your sales enablement investment delivers.

How Do You Know You Need Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement delivers a really compelling benefit – it ensures your sellers achieve quota in a scalable, predictable, and repeatable fashion. You might be wondering whether your organization should develop a sales enablement program—or expand an existing one.

Here are a few important questions to ask. The answers will show whether it’s time to take sales enablement seriously.

• Are we meeting all of our sales goals?
• Are we confident reps are always on-message?’
• Are we 100% sure reps are using sales content properly?
• Are marketing and sales on the same page?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, then it’s time to take a deeper look at sales enablement. Even if you answered ‘yes,’ it’s important to remember that businesses—and markets—change all the time. New competitors, new products, and new customer needs can disrupt your current plans overnight.

Your company might be growing, making it risky to rely on an informal or dated onboarding process. Your reps may sell a rapidly-changing product or service. You may do business in a regulated space with stringent compliance requirements. Your buying process may have become more complex. You could have significant messaging changes related to M&A or a new go-to-market strategy.

These are challenges that most companies will face at one time or another. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, there are over 30,000 new products introduced every year, and 95% fail. Many organizations must shift their sales strategy or make major changes to their value proposition over time.

Look no further than the start of the global coronavirus outbreak. Businesses shut their doors and employees were told to stay home. That meant no more business travel, in-person meetings, or nonessential trips to the store.

This created new challenges for businesses in all industries. Demand for some products and services dropped, while some industries experienced heightened demand, such as desks, webcams, and computer monitors for remote workers.

Sales teams and marketers had to pivot rapidly to sustain their business while prioritizing the safety of their employees and customers. The new normal is continuous disruption and adaptation. And in this environment, sales enablement is critical to sustain or drive sales success.

Empower Your Sales Team

Now you know what sales enablement is—and why it’s so important. When you empower your sales team with the right sales training, content, coaching, and tools, they have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently. Embrace this vital function to accelerate growth, boost revenue, increase your client base, and drive long-term success in a volatile world.

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The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement ROI

Are your sales enablement programs making an impact? Can you measure the ROI of your enablement tools and technology? This eBook will help you figure it out. Download it to get actionable advice that will help you measure and maximize the impact of your sales enablement investment. Get the report today.