Sales enablement
Boost leads & revenue by turning losses into wins with a custom sales enablement framework to stand out & sell more.
Marketing softens the beachhead, but your sales organization charges into battle. The question is: Are you giving them the tools they need to win the war?
Brown Bag Marketing partners with sales teams of all sizes to better understand the typical sales call. For example, does it happen face-to-face or by phone? What is your average sales cycle—6 weeks or 6 months? Does your audience require education or are most calls transactional?
By answering these questions and more, we are better equipped to develop custom sales enablement tools—such as tablet-based sales apps, traditional collateral, sales tool portals and engaging presentations—to help move your prospects from awareness to close.
Always be closing (ABC) with our custom sales enablement framework.
Our tools and strategies are designed to help you boost leads, turn losses into wins, and close more deals. Explore our success stories and see how we’ve helped businesses stand out and sell more.
What is sales enablement?
Imagine you assign someone the task of assembling a chair but fail to give them any information, tools or resources to get the job done. Sure, they might put the chair together eventually, but rest assured that it won’t be accomplished efficiently or effectively—and there’s a likely chance that it’ll collapse when someone tries to take a seat. The same goes for your sales team.
Sales enablement entails providing your sales teams with content and tools to help them sell more efficiently and effectively.
The goal is to equip your salespeople with everything they need to guide the buyer through the buying process, ultimately shortening the sales cycle and closing more deals.
Tailored sales enablement for better engagement and results.
Flexible content delivery
Developing a successful sales enablement strategy will provide flexibility in presenting sales content to your prospects and customers.
Maximized engagement
Sales enablement helps connect sellers with the best relevant content. This results in maximized buyer engagement and increased sales revenues. A strong sales enablement strategy will aid in analyzing the real-time visibility of the buyers with the products, allowing you to better understand the effectiveness of the content. Sales enablement also allows you to implement advanced analytics with content training and optimization processes that work best for attaining a desirable business output. The final step of a sales enablement strategy encourages the sellers to train and learn the process. This result-oriented training helps sales professionals attain more strong sales leads.
Tailored for your team
Your sales enablement strategy should be custom tailored to fulfill the needs of your sales team and help them effectively target prospects through:
- Standardized reporting and conversion analysis
- Marketing technology and prospect automation
- Optimization of sales content (case studies, email templates, etc.)
- Sales enablement tools and software (CRM, chatbots, etc.)
Sales and marketing collaboration
Both sales and marketing teams must be actively engaged in sales enablement in order for the strategy to be effective and robust. Marketers can provide content, training, graphics and resources to support the efforts of sales reps as they engage with prospects and improve the value proposition, while sales reps must work with the marketing team to let them know what materials would be most helpful for closing leads.
Sales enablement starts with content.
Sellers need content to begin conversations, help inform buyers throughout the buying decision and engage with an increased number of involved buying influencers. On average, 6.4 decision makers are involved in a longer sales cycle. Most sales reps can’t produce this kind of content themselves and need to focus on revenue-generating activities by nurturing leads and engaging in sales conversations.
According to CSO Insights, salespeople only create approximately 21% of the content they need.
Marketing agencies and teams can help create content that the sales team needs to build brand awareness or provide top-of-the-funnel content. Sellers near the bottom of the conversion funnel need content with one-to-one messaging that addresses their prospect’s specific challenges. An effective sales enablement strategy shares the needs of the sales team with the marketing department to create the right balance of content. Brown Bag Marketing has created many forms of sales enablement content, including ungated blog posts or podcasts, gated whitepapers, and vaulted content that is only accessible internally or by sharing a specific link to a prospect outside the organization. We believe that an effective sales enablement team is in tune with the specific needs of the sales team at every stage of the customer’s buying process.
Why sales enablement matters to marketers.
For many businesses, a newly created sales tool developed by the marketing department may fall to the wayside as soon as the project is accomplished and high fives are over. But sales teams often struggle to adopt and adapt to new value propositions and talking points. As marketers, it is tempting to blame the sales department—after all, marketing provided thought leadership and top-notch sales tools.
But can (and should) marketing teams go further in helping implement sales solutions?
Yes, quite a bit.
Marketing teams must go beyond the creation and distribution of sales materials by creating learning environments that foster opportunities for sales teams to study, synthesize and apply these new concepts.
At Brown Bag Marketing, we’ve found that providing sales learning and development in conjunction with large marketing initiatives is the key to driving thought leadership, employee adoption and, ultimately, sales.
5 steps to create a successful sales enablement strategy.
There are five steps that an organization should follow to create and implement a successful sales enablement strategy:
Understand why a sales enablement strategy is needed
Before you implement your sales enablement strategy, sellers must understand the value that sales enablement provides them. Help your sales team see why content is important for each buyer persona at every stage of the funnel. This includes onboarding materials, training videos and ongoing coaching to help them improve in specific areas.
Seek executive-level commitment to include a documented plan
A sales enablement strategy can only be successful if you are backed by company executives. To earn executive-level commitment, you must present current gaps and challenges within your organization’s sales process. Then, provide specific details on how sales enablement will solve those problems by increasing performance. A documented sales enablement plan is essential for its success because the foundation of your strategy involves closing the gaps between your sales team and their selling efforts. To create an in-depth plan, you must review the entire sales cycle, the experience of individual sellers and team performance as a whole to identify gaps.
Obtain commitment to produce content
Google and social channels require informative content that addresses the needs of today’s buyers. An effective sales enablement strategy emphasizes creating all types of content the sellers need to nurture prospects along the buying process.
Leverage technology to support your plan
To scale sales enablement, you will need supporting technology. There are many sales enablement services and software that help you structure your program and can be included in your sales plan. A sales enablement platform can simplify the activities of your sales team by making it easier to find content, training materials and even gamification leaderboards.
Integrate with learning and development
Sales enablement is not only focused on training, but should encompass everything needed to help the sales team. Every aspect of sales enablement must be integrated with learning and development to ensure that sellers understand current techniques, how to use the different tools and are given ongoing coaching to continually improve their sales performances.
Supercharge your sales enablement with HubSpot.
We’re a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner offering consulting, implementation, and ongoing support to align your sales enablement strategy with the power of HubSpot’s platform.
How we can help you accomplish your sales enablement strategy.
Are you hitting all of your sales goals? Does your sales team have the tools they need to do their job most effectively? Can you be sure that your sales reps are providing the right message to prospective clients and customers? Do you have a formal sales training and onboarding process?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, then your company can benefit from sales enablement solutions.
Crafting compelling stories
At Brown Bag Marketing, we work hard to create compelling stories that resonate with our client’s target audience. Whether developing an irresistible value proposition or a brochure to arm their sales team with factual information, we dive in and shape information to encourage interaction and drive sales.
Talented behind-the-scenes team
We have an army of smart and talented designers, writers, and marketers who serve as your behind-the-scenes team to make the magic happen.
Learning and development
What makes us different is that we also offer learning and development in tandem with our state-of-the-art digital marketing services.
Training and coaching support
We will work with your existing training team or serve as your outsourced coaching department. As your committed marketing partner, we will become keenly aware of the unique nuances, purpose, and goals of your marketing efforts, positioning us as experts in sharing that message with your sales department.
Custom training solutions
It all starts with conducting a needs analysis, then we design and create custom training content to address your individual needs. Finally, we will deliver interactive sessions online or in the classroom to ensure every employee can internalize the new content and message.
Our awards and accolades.
We have heart and hustle, and have the gold stars to prove it! Whether accepting accolades for marketing campaigns or being a great place to work, Brown Bag is no stranger to the limelight.
Heart & Hustle.
Meet the brains behind Brown Bag Marketing.
Our team of “baggers,” as we call them, come to our Atlanta internet marketing agency from all walks of life and professional backgrounds. We are an exceptionally talented, hardworking and seriously curious bunch of folks — and we want to get to know you and your business needs. We invite you to get to know us too!
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