The signs are all around us that 2023 and beyond may be a challenging time for sales organizations. Sales enablement technology from Salesforce andSummit can help you bridge the gap between quotas and realities.
Sales enablement tools and technology can increase close rates by as much as 35% on average. What does effective sales enablement technology look like? It consists of the tools that ensure any sales representative can find the proper content, submit it to prospects, and track prospect engagement with full visibility for sales management. But it is so much more than that. A robust suite of sales enablement tools provide learning tools, selling insights, centralized content, and sales team collaboration all in one place. Based on Salesforce’s recent benchmarking of companies that have implemented a formal coaching process for sales reps supported by technology, they often have the following components:
• Learning Tools: a learning environment to facilitate continuous learning. Training modules are available on topics such as product capabilities, competitive differentiation, purchase cost justification, etc., that salespeople can leverage as they engage prospects throughout the sales cycle.
• Selling Insights: technology-generated recommendations to supplement one-on-one coaching sessions. For example, analyzing a salesperson’s territory, selling insights could recommend which accounts to pursue first and what value propositions are most likely to resonate.
• Centralized Content: a centralized online repository that salespeople can easily utilize to get access to the information/sales tools needed to effectively engage prospects and customers throughout the sales process.
• Sales Team Collaboration: a social network that supports data, file, and knowledge sharing among sales team members as they work together to pursue and close opportunities.
In the early days of sales enablement, these initiatives typically involved implementing point solutions that were loosely connected to CRM. Now Summit is seeing the emergence of sales enablement suites. The most recent example of this is the release of Salesforce’s Enablement, which provides functionality to cover all four areas mentioned above. It is fully integrated with Sales Cloud to optimize how sales professionals engage with prospects, customers, and other members of their team.
The pressure is on for sales leaders to create enablement tools and programs for their teams that make a real impact on revue goals with built in tools to measure how well it is working. Selling in a hybrid world is challenging and 58% of sales people say virtual selling is harder than selling from an office.
Salesforce’s Enablement provides:
- Revenue Milestones
- Tailor-made Templates
- Insights and Analytics
- Structured Enablement with Drag and Drop Building
- Einstein Conversation Insights to Harness the Data and Power of Artificial Intelligence
- Tools to Manage Change and Drive Adoption
With heightened uncertainty of what the buyer/seller environment will look like in 2023, sales management has no choice but to challenge the “status quo” around how they have been selling.
Summit and Salesforce are ready to drive success for your sales organization with outcome-based enablement. Are you ready for the challenge?
Reflecting on the above, the importance and value of optimizing sales coaching are clear. Sales organizations choosing not to do so will put their sales performance at a higher than necessary level of risk—at a time they cannot afford to do so.
Summit is ready to implement Salesforce’s Sales Enablement with your new or existing Salesforce CRM tools to provide an empowered sales force.
