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Buying journeys have become complex. As more buyers get involved, sales reps find it harder to close more deals faster. This is one of the reasons why sales enablement is considered a critical business function.
Buyers require constant engagement at every stage of the buying process—but many companies struggle to maintain this momentum. They don’t know how to engage or even what to do at which stage. This creates a ripe market opportunity for agencies to fill this gap for companies lacking a sales enablement plan.
In this article, we’ll review the benefits of offering sales enablement services and how you can create a differentiated service in today’s market.
Here’s why you should consider offering sales enablement services:
Your clients want to do two things: sell better and sell more. But there are many moving parts in a sales team that it makes more sense to offer a holistic service rather than a niche training to improve their selling capabilities.
“Investing in a full-time head for sales enablement doesn’t make a lot of sense for most companies under 200 employees. However, they still have products to enable sales and new hires to onboard,” says Meredith Jung, founder and principal product marketer at Amplified Edge. “Investing in sales enablement services allows them to build reusable training and resources to fill these organizational gaps.”
When you address the entire sales ecosystem, your clients get a better ROI on their investment. This sets your agency apart in a crowded market and adds significant value to your client’s operations.
A HubSpot report found that only 30% of sales professionals have a strong alignment with marketing teams. And companies where there’s strong internal alignment are 107% more likely to beat their sales goals.
When every internal team is evaluated based on the same goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), it ensures everybody’s on the same page. You can only do that with the right people, processes, and tools in place. And a key part of that is getting specialized help to achieve this alignment.
Low sales productivity results in longer sales cycles, fewer closed won deals, and resources wasted on the wrong priorities. This is why 44.4% of sales enablers say that improving sales productivity and reclaiming selling time is a top priority for their organizations.
When you come in with specialized expertise and dedicated resources to help them, it empowers their sales reps to do more faster. It leads to meaningful buyer interactions, improved conversion rates and higher sales figures.
Google “sales enablement tools,” and you’ll see multiple ads and listicles on different categories of sales enablement tools. The problem? Sales enablement is a collective issue that covers other areas. For example, content management, video prospecting, and CRMs, to name a few.
Most companies don’t know where the real problem lies. They tend to waste resources on the wrong tool, leading to no returns and an ineffective sales process. Using your expertise, they can avoid these issues as you audit their sales processes and provide recommendations on what needs to be fixed first.
Unlike services like content marketing or brand design, it’s easier to measure the effectiveness of your service.
For example, KPIs like sales cycle length, win rates, and customer engagement levels are simpler to track with the right systems. So you can demonstrate the value of your service—making it easier to get clients in the future.
Convinced that this is a sector where you can help your clients? Let’s look at how you can structure your service offering.
The way people buy keeps changing, especially when it comes to technical products like software or big equipment. This is why you need to understand how your client’s prospects buy and learn to adapt accordingly.
According to Gartner, here’s what the current sales enablement environment looks like:
Source
It all boils down to understanding what your client’s prospects want and how your clients can engage with them. It’s all about making it about the buyer—not the seller. So, create a service that lets your clients be prepared for small or large buying committees, stay agile to keep up with industry trends, and evolve as their buyers do.
Chris O’Riordan, managing director at Firestarter Business Solutions, says that companies typically recognize the need for such a service when:
“For us, sales enablement is ultimately about giving your sales team everything they need to increase performance,” says O’Riordan. “The real measure of success within any sales enablement program is improved productivity across an entire sales team (whatever size, scale, or geography), with the maximum number of individuals performing at or above their sales targets.”
So, understand these needs in the context of your client’s sales systems and fill that gap.
Use a simple four-step process to package your services:
If needed, you can even offer packages for only one stage or customized plans depending on your client’s needs. But do consider that this would require additional resources on your part and better processes to adapt to their needs.
Use pre-packaged tiers to simplify the decision-making process for potential clients. This gives them clear, concise options that are easy to understand and compare.
Create three tiers and clearly outline the services included, the benefits they offer, and the investment required. This approach makes buying more manageable for clients and allows agencies to market their services efficiently to a broader range of prospects. You can do this after you’re done with an initial discovery call to understand their needs.
Also, consider offering a customized package to bigger companies like enterprise clients to have some flexibility in the process.
Use these tips to structure the specifics of your packages and deliverables:
Conduct a sales enablement audit before you offer any recommendations or even propose an enablement plan.
Mark Osborne, the founder of Modern Revenue Strategies, uses a diagnostic framework to achieve three things:
“Based on this diagnosis, we prioritize one of those three areas,” says Osborne. “Next, we identify the Critical Customer Flow, or path that customers follow in that process, and identify their informational needs at each stage. We also evaluate existing content for consistent positioning strategy, powerful differentiation, and persuasion on the specific informational ‘job to be done’ at that stage of the process.”
Understand how the sales team works, their capabilities, and how they function. The goal here is to identify areas of strength, potential gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
Companies spend a lot of time creating detailed buyer personas. But despite having these documents, their messaging and sales plays don’t account for the individual buyer. Buyers with the same title deal with different issues depending on the type of company and industry they’re in. So, getting a clear idea of who your clients are serving is important.
Conduct customer interviews, survey professionals with specific titles, or market research. Knowing what resonates with the buyers—a particular communication style, content type, or sales approach—is key to tailoring the sales enablement strategy.
Talk to your clients to determine who owns the sales enablement initiative. This person is your point of contact and will help you navigate internal obstacles during service delivery. It also keeps your client accountable while facilitating smooth implementation and management of sales enablement strategies.
One of the reasons why sales enablement is an issue for companies is because the metrics sales reps are held to aren’t truly contributing to the overall organizational goals. For example, if the goal is to drive more sales from a particular market, the sales team needs to be trained on selling to a buyer in that market. Previous playbooks may not apply—and there needs to be internal training goals, too.
So conduct discussions or workshops to bridge gaps between the sales team’s activities and the company’s strategic direction.
O’Riordan explains, “Our programs use a range of elements to ensure success beyond just training. We work with our clients to establish a clear senior leadership vision and manifesto, then engage with second-tier leadership to secure their engagement and participation. This engagement is wide in scope, stretching from how technology facilitates rollout and engagement to designing the right incentive and reward structure to ensure the entire sales community is fully engaged.”
Taking such an approach lets you create an operations model that works for your client and leads to better outcomes.
A Mindtickle report found that 15% of companies have no formal sales coaching process and 12% struggle with measuring these programs' success. This leads to diffidence during sales calls and more negative outcomes over time.
Include a training component in your packages to keep your client’s sales reps prepared. If needed, this can be via self-paced sessions, workshops, or even 1:1 coaching. Gauge this need during your enablement audit and structure it to allow the reps to learn how to sell using the right practices and technologies.
Too often, marketing creates tons of content, but none gets used. This happens for several reasons, such as:
All these issues result in wasted spend, low conversion rates, and repeated content requests from sales. Instead of working in silos, encourage internal alignment and work with your client’s teams to create a strategy that caters to the current needs that sales reps have. For example, case studies, demo videos or even product sheets with updated features.
Create a system that bakes this into your process so that it’s not an afterthought.
As marketing teams are overwhelmed, regular optimization activities tend to slip. Ideally, you should audit your content every quarter and identify areas for improvement. But some companies don’t even get the chance to do it once a year—and it’s not always their fault. They’re either strapped for time or don’t have the resources/capacity to do the job.
When you include this process as part of your service, it ensures your client’s content repository is up-to-date, reflects current messaging, and engages their buyers. Evaluate the content based on factors like:
Every company has its own challenges, so create an offer that ensures that while there are non-negotiable elements, these are tailored to their needs. Here are a few things to evaluate no matter which stage the company is in:
For example, some companies might have the right technology, like HubSpot, but have no idea how to maximize its usage. On the other hand, some companies don’t know how to position themselves against competitors, making it harder for reps to sell. So, assess first and then create a tailored strategy.
Look beyond traditional training and content provision to include various tools and technologies. This can include digital sales tools like email tracking software, video conferencing tools for virtual sales calls, and AI-driven analytics for customer insights.
Even though by 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations want to move to data-driven decision-making, only 22% of their budget is allocated to sales technology. It shows the lack of knowledge or training in these aspects.
So, implement them based on your initial assessment of the gaps in your client’s sales team. And if your clients aren’t using these properly or aren’t sure how to use them fully, consider offering bespoke training sessions to bring reps up to speed.
Sales reps spend hours, if not weeks, manually entering data into their CRM or analyzing sales calls. Instead of going through all this trouble, teach them to automate their processes without overwhelming them.
“The biggest gap is too many platforms for sellers,” says Lisa Dubernard, sales enablement and implementation consultant at Appinium. “They need more efficient training programs that recommend content and training in the flow of work. When updating a sales opportunity in Salesforce that the competitor is ‘ABC,’ the system should be smart enough to recommend relevant content to send to the prospect or to guide the seller.”
A Hubspot report found that sales professionals save 2 hours and 15 minutes daily using automation capabilities.
For example, they can use Gong to analyze sales calls and access insights without doing it manually. Or use Zapier to connect different software and set up a workflow. You can offer a lot in this sector, as companies lack an in-house automation expert.
Due to the pandemic, many newer techniques that were not being leveraged have become commonplace. These include techniques like video sales or social selling.
In 2021, 43% of organizations reported using video for sales. And it makes sense, too. With buyers demanding a more personalized approach to selling, videos make it easier to engage prospects and make the interaction more memorable.
Additionally, social selling through platforms like LinkedIn is also becoming more popular. It goes beyond a mere sales pitch and requires you to use relevant content, participate in the right conversations and connect with the right prospects to make a difference. Educate your clients on these techniques to truly make a difference.
As more companies realize the need for sales enablement, no matter their company size, there’s going to be an increasing demand for such services. Considering that it directly impacts pipeline generation and revenue, there are many ways you can come in and fill critical gaps in your client’s organization.
Whether it’s conversion-oriented content creation, sales coaching or even technology implementation, curate a service that adds value for your clients and position yourself as an authority in this space.
If you’re looking for a sales content management tool to help your clients, consider Content Camel. Take a tour to learn more about how we help.
Get the most out of your content and deliver trackable results
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.