Sales Enablement Best Practices to Speed Up Sales Cycles

Introduction

In a perfect world, sales and marketing would be tightly aligned, working toward the same goals and achieving the best possible results. But marketers and sales teams know this isn’t always easy. And sometimes, it feels downright impossible. From this challenge, sales enablement best practices were born. 

Sales enablement is an ongoing strategic process that supports sales teams with the right tools, resources, and skills to improve efficiency and drive higher revenue. As a result, B2B companies are investing heavily in sales enablement tools. But the challenge is that without a strong understanding of the people, processes, and enterprise-wide insights, you can still miss the mark. Fortunately, sales enablement best practices can set you on the right path to hitting your goals. 

TL;DR: Sales enablement helps sales teams close deals faster by giving them the tools, content, and insights they need — all aligned with the buyer’s journey. To build an effective program, start by deeply understanding your audience and creating clear buyer personas. Then, build targeted content for each stage of the funnel, empower your sales team with training, adopt the right technology (like marketing automation), and continuously measure and optimize performance. The result? Shorter sales cycles, better-qualified leads, and stronger alignment between marketing and sales.

Know your audience & define buyer personas

When improving sales enablement, always start with your audience by building personas. Why? Research finds that over half of organizations report higher-quality leads because they use personas. Moreover, 36% say that personas contributed to shorter sales cycles. And who doesn’t want shorter sales cycles, right? 

Here are a few tips for getting started: 

1. Complete updated research. Whether you have existing personas or you’re creating them for the very first time, you’ll want to update your research. Research can include customer surveys, sales team interviews, reviewing internal data, and more. And remember: what you think a customer wants and what they really want are often very different. 
2. Create persona profiles. With your research in hand, you can create (or refresh) personas with details such as background, demographics, challenges and frustrations, and more. 
3. Iterate and refine. Customer needs are a moving target, and so are personas. As a result, you’ll want to periodically review, update research, and align to ensure you’re positioned to get the best results from your content and sales efforts. 

If you want more tips and examples, we wrote a complete guide about creating buyer persona basics that increase ROI. And once you create your personas, you’ll want to design more targeted materials throughout the audience’s entire journey to more effectively support sales. 

Build content around the buyer journey

Personalization is critical, isn’t it? Yeah, you probably know that already. But it’s also an important part of sales enablement best practices. Personalization helps create serendipitous experiences that build connection and engagement and make it easier for sales to do their job. 

But here’s the tricky part: You need the ability to anticipate the audience’s needs at every turn, and doing that at scale is hard without a sales enablement tool such as marketing automation software. 

Marketing automation helps you provide the right content to the right person at the right moment. In other words, it helps you provide relevant resources at every turn in the customer’s journey. Here’s an example: 

• Awareness. Imagine that a prospect wants to improve sales enablement (sound familiar!?). As a result, they research how to best align content with a buyer’s journey. Blog posts, eBooks, and other resources about solving this challenge might be consumed. 
• Consideration. The customer has decided to leverage marketing automation, but with so many potential solutions, they read case studies, white papers, and other resources to narrow down potential solutions. 
• Decision. Finally, the customer is ready to make a decision. But first, they want to test potential solutions, so they schedule product demos. 

If you build content around every step in the buyer’s journey, you can help them as they move from awareness to decision, supporting the sales team and, hopefully, shortening the sales cycle. 

Create training and development 

Training and development become increasingly important part of sales enablement best practices as marketing develops buyers’ personas, shares them with sales, and aligns content to the buyer’s journey. When sales knows what marketing is doing, and vice versa, efforts organically become more aligned. And a by-product of that alignment is information sharing. 

For example, sales might share what types of objections they’re receiving from the various personas, and marketing can more effectively integrate that feedback into content along the buyer’s journey. As a result, objections will be addressed before a lead hits the sales workflow. 

Use the right tools 

A large part of sales enablement is the tools you use. Periodically, you’ll want to ask: Do our existing tools still serve us? 

Perhaps you use an email marketing provider, but it’s not as robust as it could be. Instead, you want a solution that helps you align with the customer journey through more personalized and relevant content. If so, you might consider adopting sales enablement tools, such as marketing automation. 

Marketing automation can also help with lead scoring by assigning scores based on a prospect’s interactions with content. Leads with higher scores are prioritized, making it far easier for sales teams to hit goals. 

Measure and optimize success

As you adopt best practices for sales enablement, you’ll want to ensure the strategies and tools are performing. And that requires sales enablement KPIs. Here are a few examples of what you might measure:

1. Sales cycle length. Is it speeding up or slowing down?
2. The number of closed deals. Is the number of deals that you’re closing increasing?
3. The size of deals. Are you growing the size of each deal? 
4. Retention rates. Are you retaining more of your customers, and equally important, are you cross-selling more relevant products and services? 

As time goes on, your goals might evolve. Once you hit a goal, consider adopting a new one or move the bar higher — then rinse and repeat. 

Summary

In the end, making the most of these sales enablement best practices is about attitude. It’s a team approach to sales that gives everyone in the organization a support role in aligning resources to make the right sale to the right customer. Marketing plays an important role in ensuring the content and tools are used in a way that is relevant to each unique selling situation. And if you need help with more effectively aligning sales and marketing teams, we’ve got you covered. Check out how Act-On can help.