Unlocking Sales Success: Your 7-Step Guide to a Customer Centric Sales Enablement Strategy

Are you looking for a step-by-step guide to sales enablement? Look no further! Sales enablement is a powerful strategy that can help your sales team become more effective and efficient in their roles. But how exactly do you go about implementing it? In this article, we’ll take you through the seven key steps to develop a customer centric sales enablement strategy. By following these steps, you can create a comprehensive sales enablement strategy. that will help your team close more deals and achieve your business objectives. So, let’s get started and explore the seven steps:

Step 1: Formalize the Structure of Your Sales Enablement Strategy

It is crucial to establish a clear and formal structure for your sales enablement strategy at the outset. The lack of a well-defined strategy can lead to the unraveling of sales enablement plans. To prevent ambiguity, you should ensure that the C-Suite and all relevant teams are cross-functionally aligned on the primary objectives and expected outcomes of the strategy. You can achieve this by creating a charter.

Step 2: Develop a Sales Enablement Charter

Establish a transparent sales enablement charter for your organization. The expectations of a sales enablement strategy can vary across companies, making it essential to align goals at the start of the planning process. A formalized charter provides a strong foundation for success by ensuring that all stakeholders have a complementary vision of sales enablement.

The charter should provide a clear and comprehensive plan for how your company will support your sales team in achieving their goals, and the resources and support that will be provided to make this happen.

The charter acts as a blueprint, outlining the mission, key stakeholders, and expected results of the sales enablement process. You are more likely to gain executive support and engage cross-functional collaborators if you document it clearly and align it with the executive team’s objectives.

Step 3: Implement a Customer-Centric Sales Enablement Strategy

When developing or refining your sales enablement strategy, it is crucial to approach it from the perspective of the customer journey. You should align the sales enablement strategy and the sales process in terms of structure and objectives, with the customer journey at the centre of both.

A comprehensive sales enablement plan should arm sales reps with the information they need to have impactful conversations with customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey. To achieve this, it is important to map out the customer path and provide reps with the knowledge they need to tailor their messaging to prospects’ specific needs and pain points. A strong sales enablement plan should support teams from the initial awareness stage through to adoption.

Step 4: Consider the Impact of Sales Enablement on the Customer

To ensure that sales representatives are ready to meet your prospects’ requirements, it’s crucial to comprehend where the prospects are in their journey and when they will most likely engage with a salesperson. According to Forrester, 67% of B2B decision-makers prefer not to interact with a salesperson as their primary source of research. Keep in mind that:

• 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage when they are first learning about the product.
• 60% prefer to connect during the consideration stage after researching options and developing a shortlist.
• 20% want to talk during the decision stage once they have decided which product to buy.

To ensure consistency in your process, map out these stages and the corresponding content.

Step 5: Align Sales Enablement Strategy with the Customer Journey

To ensure that your sales enablement strategy is aligned with your customers’ journey mapped out previously, by answering the following questions:

• Have you collaborated with sales, marketing, customer experience, product teams, and existing customers to map out the buyer’s journey?
• Does your sales enablement strategy take the buyer’s journey into account as its primary design point?
• Do you have specified content for representatives to use at each stage of the journey?
• Does your current sales enablement technology empower representatives to have personalized and relevant conversations with prospects as they progress through the journey?

Step 6: Develop a Comprehensive Sales Playbook

Once you have aligned your sales enablement strategy with the customer journey, focus on creating a Sales Playbook. This playbook should be a central component of your strategy and provide immediate access to the most relevant assets and information for your representatives to share with prospects.

Step 7: Define Sales Enablement for All Roles

Sales enablement is more than just sales, and it’s increasingly expanding beyond the sales team. The term “revenue enablement” is becoming more common, emphasizing the need for a strategy that supports all individuals with customer-facing responsibilities. To ensure success, define what enablement means for your team and involve key stakeholders in the conversation. We consider enablement as a means to bridge the gap between sales and marketing by simplifying the process of transferring marketing’s valuable content and assets to sales. While this is an essential aspect, enablement should also foster better communication between these teams and beyond.

As sales enablement continues to grow, it’s becoming a company-wide effort, with the C-suite and learning and development teams becoming increasingly involved. Empowering all customer-facing teams with the knowledge they need to communicate consistently enhances the buyer’s experience and leads to new business opportunities. Don’t overlook the importance of enabling support teams as well. Ensure all customer-facing teams have access to updated product information, feature breakdowns, and customer stories to foster authentic relationships with buyers