Sales enablement refers to the technologies, processes, and strategies used to empower your sales team to be a high-performance, high-yielding team. Here’s how you can support your sales team to be top performers in 2021 and beyond.
A high-performing sales team is essential to be successful in business. Yet many businesses are lacking in this department. Statistics reveal that nearly 57% of sales reps miss their quotas and only 5% of small businesses meet all their yearly goals in spite of 77% of founders expressing confidence in executing their business plans. These numbers suggest that, despite the best intentions of business owners, employees are poorly equipped to carry out their jobs.
Rarely can a person do a job well, let alone be a top performer, without the right tools and resources available to them. That includes salespeople. That’s where sales enablement — the technology, processes, and strategies used to empower your sales team to be a high-performance, high-yielding team — comes in.
In a survey on sales enablement strategies from last year, 40% of sales leaders missed their targets. Despite the pandemic creating an economic downtown — when sales reps should have been statistically more likely to miss their quotas — more than half of sales leaders were still able to somehow meet or exceed their revenue targets. In fact, 38% of sales leaders were able to overperform despite the hardships posed by the pandemic. Was it sorcery? No. It’s strategic sales enablement. Keep reading to learn four ways you can support your team with sales enablement strategies that work.
Automate sales tasks
You hired your sales team to sell, and if they’re not producing, it may be because they’re quite literally not engaged in selling because they’re tied up with other tasks. Recent studies have shown that salespeople spend less than half their time at work — only 35.9% of their time — actually selling. They spend the remainder of the time doing other non-selling work such as team meetings, writing emails, entering data, conducting lead research, and scheduling calls.
In HubSpot’s 2021 Sales Enablement Survey, more than half of overperforming sales leaders used CRMs to automate parts of their sales processes. Automating parts of the sales processes frees up sales reps to focus on what they are there to do: sell.
Have a dedicated sales enablement person or team
In a survey on sales management training, 41% of the companies who responded had allocated zero budget for sales manager training. While 59% did allocate some type of budget, it was for general management — not for leading a sales team. Besides a dedicated budget for a sales manager, you should also have a dedicated sales enablement team. This is especially vital for a hybrid or fully remote sales team — which you should also be utilizing if you want to remain competitive and adaptive despite economic disruptions like COVID-19.
A sales enablement team is dedicated solely to proactively increasing sales rep productivity. They serve to provide reps and managers with technology, tools, content, and reports to increase sales capacity and efficiency. More than half (65%) of sales leaders who exceeded their revenue targets in 2020 had a dedicated sales enablement team. Of companies that already utilized sales enablement teams, more than half of them increased their sales enablement budgets due to COVID-19.
Leverage technology
As buyer behavior changes, business behavior has to adapt as well. How sales leaders utilized technology was a defining trait that set those who overperformed on their revenue goals apart from those who didn’t meet their revenue goals at all in HubSpot’s 2020 Sales Enablement Survey.
While most sales leaders surveyed ranked CRMs and videoconferencing software as vital for remote selling, regardless of their performance, it was how the sales leaders used the tools available to them that seemed to make the most difference. One such example: HubSpot found that 61% of overperforming sales leaders leveraged technology and used their CRM to automate parts of their sales process, while only 46% of underperforming leaders did the same.
Technology can also be used for relationship-building both internally and externally. More than half of sales leaders surveyed believe that virtual meetings were just as or more effective than face1to2face meetings in moving sales through the pipeline.
Adopt a hybrid or fully remote selling model
The pandemic has revolutionized the way we work and how we conceptualize the idea of the office. Businesses that continued to have employees selling in the field last year were unlikely to hit their targets for obvious reasons. Those that adopted a hybrid or fully remote selling model were among those who either met their revenue goals or outperformed despite the pandemic. Sales leaders who invested in remote selling met or exceeded revenue targets 64% of the time.
Pre-pandemic, flexibility was something that 96% of employees were asking for but only 47% had access to. Remote work is a top priority for younger workers, which is crucial to keep in mind as the older generations age out of the workforce. The World Economic Forum cited a study that found that for most companies, productivity either remained stable or increased during the COVID-19 remote work boom.
Not only will your employees appreciate the flexibility, but so will your customers. Just as businesses have had to adapt with unprecedented flexibility to survive this past year, customers are also demanding increasing flexibility and innovation from the companies they choose to do business with.
Let the experts at MetaGrowth be your sales enablement team
At MetaGrowth, we deliver massive growth with minimal investment, so you can ditch the daily grind of “founder selling” by having an amazing team of dedicated sales professionals to do your selling for you. Co-founders Josh Hirsch and Joe Arioto will put their combined 30,000 hours of coaching and consulting expertise to work for you on solutions-based sales consulting that will help you free up time to focus on what really matters: Your growth strategy.
If you want to build your very own world-class sales team without investing a ton of time — not to mention headaches or hassles — contact us today. We’ll help you build a dream team to start boosting sales in no time!
Written by
Joe Arioto