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Systematizing Sales Enablement for success

If you’ve ever been in sales, hopefully, you’ve experienced the feeling of being “in the zone” and having a huge sales day/week/month. When you’re continuously generating new leads, configuring the right offer and closing deals left and right, it seems as though you can do no wrong. Sports psychologists call this state “flow” – the realm of performance where skill, training, and mental discipline come together and lift you to your peak level.

Systematizing Sales Enablement for Success

According to NBA All-star Kobe Bryant, “when that happens you really do not try to not focus on what’s going on, because you could lose it in a second.” But if you want this level of performance to happen again, someone should probably focus on it, right?

If you’re sick of waiting around for your sales reps to “get in the zone,” then maybe you should strive for your own level of perfection – consistency. Figure out what your top dogs are doing when they are outperforming everyone else. Then build your sales enablement programs to reflect those activities, thereby helping all your reps to consistently have more productive intro calls, quote optimized solutions and write the best proposals.

Seems simple enough, but 40% of sales teams do not have a systematized process in place. The ones that do are 33% more likely to be high performers.

Sales Calls

In an IDC Customer Experience Panel, only 16% of respondents said their sales rep was “extremely prepared” for their initial sales call. Even worse, 26% said their rep was not prepared at all.

Does this mean that only 16% of your reps are trying their hardest and a quarter of them don’t give a damn about their jobs? Not necessarily. Ask yourself – have you ever defined what your organization considers “extremely prepared”?

In order to get the best performance out of your reps, arm them with customer relationship management (CRM) systems with built-in corporate intelligence tools and create specific workflows they can follow to research potential clients. Offer scripts and checklists they can use to ascertain a buyer’s needs during the discussion. Ensure that all sales materials, use cases, and product information are centrally located and easy to find. By optimizing your CRM solutions for these specific tasks, you can ensure that reps are fully prepared for their next meeting.

Price Quoting

Nothing loses trust or kills a deal faster than inconsistent pricing. Whether your rep made promises that couldn’t be kept, didn’t get a pricing update, or made an error when configuring a quote, failing to provide an accurate proposal at the start can be a disaster for your company.

To avoid these errors, provide your reps with a CPQ solution to allow them to build error-free quotes on demand. By eliminating complicated spreadsheets and the constant update memos, manual errors will decline dramatically. Including automated price optimization tools will ensure that your rep leads with the most appealing proposal possible – from the start.

Proposal Generation

Studies show that 90% of sales proposals don’t lead to a sale. If you are working hard to optimize the sales process, only to see it fail 9 times out of 10 – you have to ask, is it a rep problem or a proposal problem? Are your reps only putting their best effort into the 1 or 2 deals they know will close and letting the rest fall by the wayside?

One of the reasons for proposal inconsistency may be the fact that reps are generating an average of 14 proposal a month – and are being pressured to do even more. However, those that use a CPQ solution are able to increase their average proposals to 20.9 a month and still increase their lead conversion rate by 16%.

Systematizing the proposal generation process is the best way to get faster, more consistent, and ultimately more successful proposals time after time. Create intelligent templates that control every aspect of the proposal to ensure that your reps are providing all potential customers with an extremely professional, accurate, and all-encompassing proposal every time.

You may not be able to force your sales reps into “the zone” every day – but you can optimize the track to get them there. While you may not get every rep to be a superstar, systemizing individual performance via sales enablement tools will help your company operate as close to its peak as possible. Take your best case sales scenarios, clearly, define them and then give your reps the tools they need to make them happen over and over again.

Sales

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