What is Sales Enablement and Why is it So Important for B2B Companies?

Is your sales team drowning in outdated spreadsheets, overflowing inboxes, and unanswered prospect messages?

Add the pressure from sales managers to meet sales goals on time, and you have a recipe for underperformance.

On the bright side, sales enablement can be your best bet for fixing such sales inefficiencies and helping reps close deals faster.

In this detailed article, we’ll answer the most pressing questions on sales enablement:

• What is sales enablement?
• Why is sales enablement so important?
• Who is responsible for sales enablement?
• Which sales enablement tool should you choose?
• How to use sales enablement in the outbound process?

Ready?

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement continuously aligns people, processes, data, and tools via relevant training, coaching, content, and communication.

At its core, it aims to gather and organize necessary data, tools, and training material so each sales rep is at their productive best.

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Picture this -> A sales rep is great at objection handling but spends more time personalizing outreach, while their counterpart is the opposite. In such an instance, enabling each sales rep “just-in-time” enablement – i.e., giving them the right sales resources at the right time can bring them closer to success. 

Sales enablement helps SDRs and AEs to better interact with potential clients at each stage of the buyer journey by:

• Offering quick, instant access to tailored content

• Providing tools to allow the automation of routine tasks, such as filling RFPs, data entry into CRMs, note-taking post-sales meetings, and personalizing outreach 

• Offering personalized training and regular workshops to educate the team about evolving buyer needs and recent product features   

Content clearly plays a major role in successful sales enablement. A recent report shows how content adoption is the top metric used to measure sales enablement success:

Let’s look at some of the main requirements in a typical sales enablement strategy and the most used content types.

Main requirements for sales enablement content

#1: Tailored material

All sales material, be it sales playbooks, outreach templates, pitch outlines, or training programs should be created for the specific goals and objectives of the company, as well as the ICP and buyer personas of your target customers. 

Learn more about ICP and tips to create one here. 

#2: Regular maintenance 

Buyer preferences, product features, and sales targets are prone to change.

So ensure every piece of sales enablement content is constantly updated and relevant. For example, update product pricing details across data sources so the sales reps have up-to-date information before reaching out to prospects and discussing pricing strategies.

#3: Convenient for distribution 

Every sales enablement material should be in a ready-to-use format so sales reps don’t have to duplicate efforts cleaning up the data and reorganizing stuff—for example, pre-made, copy-pastable templates for email or LinkedIn outreach.

Main types of sales enablement content

The most essential types of content in sales enablement are:

• Case studies
• Articles
• Sales scripts and templates
• Sales presentations
• Video testimonials
• Lead magnets like eBooks, Infographics, webinars, etc.

Why is sales enablement so important? 

Prospects’ are bombarded with sales messages day in and day out. The rise in competition for attention and the ever-changing buyer behaviors and expectations are pushing brands to refresh their selling strategies. 

Open selling is no longer sufficient to grab attention and is merely perceived as white noise.

What you need is social selling.

Social selling uses content as the main tool to share valuable, expert information to prospects and earn their trust before anything else. 

And a proper sales enablement strategy is the right way to get started and earn target customers’ trust:

• Enables better knowledge management 

No more data silos or scattered information. Sales enablement helps collect key sales-related information into a single source of truth like the Knowledge Management System (KMS). 

This way, your salespeople have instant access to necessary materials without needing to spend hours looking for content.

• Up-to-date and verified documentation 

Social and other forms of modern selling need up-to-date, relevant, and accurate information without which reputation can be easily stained. Sales enablement ensures only current and approved materials are ready to be used for outreach activities. 

• Track how leads interact with your content 

Sales enablement tools (discussed later in this article) help you evaluate content effectiveness by tracking how leads interact with your content. For example, you can monitor what types of outreach emails generate the highest open rates.

• Quicker onboarding 

Here’s the truth: seasoned sales reps hate spending time on non-selling activities, and that includes training new sales reps. 

But thanks to sales enablement, new hires can quickly get onboarded with the new sales processes as they now have quick access to information right from the get-go. This can include:

• Work process details, such as instructions to use the CRM, various tools for outbound lead generation, stepwise information on transferring leads until deal closure, etc.

• Case studies of real sales rep experiences, such as content use, examples of high-converting email sequences, best email timings, video training, and more

• Product demo recordings, detailed breakdown of the product’s features and benefits, frequently raised objections, etc.

• Descriptions of ICPs, buyer personas, and customer journeys

• Key metrics that must be tracked and met based on the company and sales goals

Sales enablement automation makes all this and more possible for seamless onboarding. For example, some AI sales enablement learn from disparate data sources and provide on-the-spot responses to sales rep queries through a simple chatbot-like interface. 

Who is responsible for sales enablement?

Many businesses have this misconception that sales enablement is completely owned by the sales team alone as they’re the ones behind talking to prospects and closing deals.

In reality, B2B sales enablement is the joint effort of both sales and marketing departments.

The marketing team works behind-the-scenes creating content for sales to use and managing the sales enablement system. Meanwhile, sales are responsible for putting this content to the best of its use and communicating feedback so marketing can continuously improve resource quality. 

For example, an SDR can use a conversation guide provided by the marketing team to sharpen their LinkedIn outreach strategy, personalize messaging, and share feedback with marketing based on sales’ experience handling prospect expectations. 

Which sales enablement tool to choose?

Sales enablement tools have an umbrella of use cases. From content analytics to sales rep training and AI-powered intelligence, they offer unique benefits.

For example, the reporting, analytics, and forecasting functionalities of most sales enablement tools answer the top pressing questions, such as:

• What materials are available for sales departments and reps to use at each stage of the sales process
• What content is used by each salesperson and what’s not
• Are there any noticeable knowledge gaps in sales reps
• How clients and leads interact with the sales material

Clarity in these and more questions on sales content are key to driving shorter sales cycles and winning the leads’ trust faster.

So, we recommend you add the following B2B sales enablement tools to your tool stack:

1. DocSend

DocSend is a sales communication and enablement platform used for document sharing and tracking. You can create trackable links to track how your colleagues and prospects interact with them.

The tool’s detailed analytics help you identify and shortlist warm leads based on document and link tracking, so you never waste time on uninterested prospects. For example, you can access analytics on how much time a prospect spends on each document page and if they’ve downloaded or forwarded the link to other stakeholders.

Best for:

• Document and link tracking
• Secured sales material sharing 

2. Paperflite 

Paperflite is a content management platform tailored for sales use cases. Here, you can manage all your sales and marketing material so customer-facing teams are never short of relevant resources useful for conversion.

The biggest advantage? Paperflite runs an AI-powered content recommendation system where sales reps can easily determine which funnel and content formats work best to lead a potential client toward deal closure.

Best for:

• Content recommendations
• Sales and marketing collaboration

3. Gong.io

Gong provides a complete set of sales enablement solutions like sales coaching, sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and more.

It’s for you if you’re someone looking for a tool to analyze sales rep-prospect conversations to identify potential knowledge gaps in your SDRs and bring them up to speed with suitable training programs.

Best for:

• Personalized training
• Sales call intelligence and analytics 

4. Tribble.ai

Tribble is a B2B sales enablement software offering digital assistance and conversational intelligence to help sales teams quickly answer prospect queries. It trains on your own data and collects information across sources to provide quick answers to tech-heavy questions.

Its sales enablement solutions also include the identification of the most-asked client/prospect questions that can help you train your SDRs better.

Best for:

• Fetching insights on knowledge gaps
• Instant sales assistance

5. Highspot

Highspot aims to drive sales productivity by providing sales rep useful and relevant timely information. This way, sales reps can customize their customer conversations based on their varying needs.

Since most of the sales reps’ effort go into information hunting, Highspot eases this challenge with its AI-powered search and instant answers functionality. 

Best for:

• Sales content management
• Sales team onboarding

How to use sales enablement in the outbound process?

Anyone familiar with the outbound process would know that outreach personalization and understanding the buyer psyche is key to capturing attention. 

The right tools and resources can help struggling sales reps curate compelling messages that resonate with the target audience while taking care of routine tasks with automation.

That’s how valuable sales enablement is in the outbound process. 

Here’s an example:

Let’s say an SDR’s greater part of the day is spent on searching for the right information to add into their outbound process rather than on improving their communication strategy.

And even after sharing every piece of information, tracking how it was perceived – was it opened, was it forwarded, how much time did the prospect spend on it, etc., becomes a next level challenge. 

All these challenges and more are solved when you add a sales enablement solution into your outbound process.

And here’s what it looks like:

• Foolproof analytics — Sales enablement and lead nurturing go hand in hand. For instance, an enablement tool’s analytics will let you track how leads are interacting with your outreach messages, regardless of the channel. This helps SDRs better understand prospects’ likes and dislikes to specific messaging styles. 

• More lead clarity by integrating sales enablement tools with your internal CRM — When is the perfect time to interact with leads? Integrating a sales enablement tool with a CRM can provide real-time insights on lead behavior. For example, setting up notifications every time a lead views the document you sent to them. 

• A single source of truth and repository for all things sales and marketing — Sales enablement aims to align teams via seamless collaboration and bringing together data by breaking down silos. So marketing teams can see how salespeople use their sales materials and how leads perceive content while SDRs can share content feedback in a singular space.

• Easier lead nurturing and social selling for the outbound process — From outreach templates to LinkedIn automation for social selling, sales tools can ensure outreach feels personal and well timed. For example, lead nurturing can be made more effective by enabling sales teams with tools to automate sending timely follow-ups.

• Better lead prioritization — Knowing what leads to prioritize (especially when there are many) is a formidable challenge for most sales reps. However, the right sales enablement tool can help you focus on high-value leads most likely to engage with SDRs’ outreach activities. 

What’s next?

Although sales enablement has been around for a while, most B2B companies and sales agencies still underestimate its effectiveness. 

What B2B needs now is a change in focus from providing sales teams with generic content to equipping them with the data-driven enablement strategies to power successful deal closures. 

And the best place to start this is with automation.

Expandi is a LinkedIn outreach automation tool that eases social selling and builds healthy prospect connections while saving your sales reps weeks of time performing routine outreach activities. 

Grab the free trial to explore the tool today!