The business world has been turned on its head, and sales organizations across the globe have been forced to adapt or risk losing deals and, ultimately, revenue. So what does the future of selling look like?
As companies adjust and prepare for what comes next in selling, sales enablement becomes a priority. The pandemic has underscored the need for sellers to have tools and resources to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.
How do you make sure your road warriors who once spent more time in airports than their own homes can be as effective and engaging in Zoom meetings as they were in-person?
How do you help your sellers convince today’s increasingly budget-conscious buyers to say “yes” and continue to meet sales quotas?
When selecting sales enablement tools, it’s important to carefully consider what capabilities will work for your organization today and help you grow your business in the future.
To empower your commercial teams to compete in the future of selling, here are three things to look for in a sales enablement platform.
1. The future of selling prioritizes dynamic, interactive experiences
While sales content management may be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of sales enablement technology, it isn’t enough. Your platform should help you accomplish two primary goals:
- Put relevant, engaging, and up-to-the-minute content at your sellers’ fingertips
- Give sellers the ability to pull that content into dynamic, interactive, and personalized sales experiences
In the current selling environment, it’s become more difficult than ever to capture your buyer’s attention and keep it. As a result, sales discussions must be more prescriptive, interactive, and personalized than ever before.
Find a platform that enables your sellers and marketers to create and launch rich content experiences leveraging a variety of different content types, intuitive interactive selling tools such as ROI and TCO calculators, and AI-powered content recommendations to ensure they always know the next best action.
Sure, a virtual sales meeting will never truly live up to an in-person selling experience, but the right sales enablement technology will get you close.
2. Consistency & personalization
With more remote buyers, even more of your buyer’s journey is happening online. In fact, the typical B2B buyer is already 57% through the purchase process before reaching out to a sales rep. This makes the content your buyers self-discover online a critical component of the sales process.
For this reason, your sales enablement platform should support consistent and personalized content experiences from the first time a buyer engages with your brand on your website through to conversion and post-sale. Look for a platform that provides the ability to house sales and marketing content from your sales application in a content hub on your website.
With this capability, you can dynamically target buyers with relevant and personalized content based on their behavior on site. This shortens the path to purchase and allows sellers to engage earlier in your buyer’s journey while buyers are still influenceable.
Once a seller gets involved, they’re then able to leverage data about what content the buyer found most interesting to pick the conversation up and take it exactly where the buyer needs it to go.
3. The future of selling requires using data insights to distinguish your brand
Now more than ever, marketers are expected to prove the ROI of their content. But few marketers have data and insight into what content is being leveraged by sales and whether it resonates with buyers or helps to close deals.
A sales enablement platform with advanced analytics and intuitive dashboards not only track and measure how sellers leverage content, but also how buyers consume it – from time spent viewing an asset to the number of shares.
Some platforms in the market today go as far as allowing marketers to tie specific content assets directly to pipeline creation and revenue. They also have the ability to score buyers based on their content consumption, so sellers and marketers can accurately gauge their interest and focus more attention on the buyers who are most likely to close.
These capabilities provide marketers with data-backed evidence they can use to optimize existing assets, reallocate budget to the content types they know work, and refine their content roadmaps.
While 2020 has brought a lot of uncertainty for sales organizations, one thing is clear: sales enablement is critical for success in the future of sales. Today, sales enablement must do more than help you deliver sales and marketing collateral to your sales team.
The technology you choose must equip your sellers and marketers with the data, knowledge, and tools needed to effectively engage prospects and guide them through their entire buyer journey.
