When time is money, accelerating sales productivity is mission-critical to succeed. Sales enablement is the strategic lever to help sellers become more productive; in fact, sales leaders report their enablement programs impacting an 18% increase in rep productivity last year.
However, you can’t establish a sales enablement team today and expect to move the needle on business outcomes tomorrow. First, you need to set a strong foundation with a Strategic Enablement approach that helps you align your efforts to key business priorities so you can turn strategy into action. After establishing this foundation for success, you can more effectively mature your efforts over time. Ultimately, by continuously optimizing your enablement efforts as you progress in your maturity journey, you can realize greater business results.
So, how can you increase your enablement maturity to accelerate business outcomes?
Below, learn best practices to implement Strategic Enablement, mature your efforts over time, and maximize the business impact of enablement.
The Value of Strategic Enablement
The goal of a world-class enablement program is to drive change at scale – and the Strategic Enablement Framework provides a map you can follow to achieve this. By equipping, training, and coaching your reps to succeed, you can improve the productivity of your sellers so that more of the team is contributing revenue.
However, the specific steps to take in your journey will depend on where your company is in its enablement maturity. Most sales enablement programs follow a path known as the Strategic Enablement Maturity Model, working through the different stages of maturity over time. Evolving in your enablement maturity to achieve consistent sales results requires addressing the core pillars the Strategic Enablement Framework. Below, learn key insights to do so based on a study we commissioned from a leading B2B research firm, surveying more than 500 sales and sales enablement leaders globally:
Defining Your Call to Action: To operationalize behavior change, first understand what outcome you are trying to drive for the business, and what sellers need to do differently to achieve that outcome.
INSIGHT: When organizations have a systematic approach to behavior change, reps are 31% more likely to know what behaviors lead to high performance.
Equipping Your Team: Ensure sellers have the content they need to be successful and the contextual guidance to know how to use that content.
INSIGHT: When provided with examples of what good looks like, reps are 27% more likely to know how and when to use content with buyers.
Training Your Team: Build an effective onboarding program that can prepare new hires quickly and develop ongoing training to refine their skills and improve sales performance.
INSIGHT: Organizations that measure rep progress against key competencies are 26% more likely to accelerate rep ramp time.
Coaching Your Team: By aligning with sales managers on the key rep behaviors to coach to, you can develop a standard for what good coaching looks like and improve consistency in rep performance.
INSIGHT: When sales managers understand how to have good coaching conversations, reps are 38% more likely to view their managers as effective coaches.
Assess and Evolve Your Sales Enablement Function
Once you understand the foundations of Strategic Enablement, it’s crucial to assess where your company falls on the maturity model and determine your path forward to greater results. Whether you are just getting started or you have a well-established program, follow these steps to advance in each stage of maturity:
- First Steps → Structured: Your first priority should be to remove friction, so your sellers can easily access the materials needed to do their jobs. Establish a single source of truth for content, use e-learning to enhance your sales training, and empower your sales managers to be effective coaches.
- Structured → Intentional: Once you establish the foundations of Strategic Enablement, your next priority should be to nail the basics. Integrate more rigor into your training and coaching programs, and align on what good looks like to determine success.
- Intentional → Action-based: To maximize the value sales enablement delivers to your organization, get intentional about changing specific rep behaviors. Align with leadership on measurable calls to action, and build training and coaching materials around the desired actions.
- Action-based → Value-driven: This final step to becoming a mature sales enablement function focuses on optimizing your programs to maximize value. Use data to inform your adjustments to your programs, and measure the impact of your efforts on business outcomes.
Accelerate Business Impact By Maturing Your Enablement Function
Ensuring revenue teams excel today requires a successful strategy that is rigorous and scalable. Combined with sufficient resourcing and execution, you can evolve the maturity of your enablement efforts and maximize the business value they deliver. Learn a few of the business outcomes you can achieve through progressing in your sales enablement maturity, based on our customer research:
Improving Buyer Engagement: By pitching content through personalized microsites known as Digital Sales Rooms, which centralize relevant materials for buyers, you can optimize the buying experience.
INSIGHT: Our internal research reveals that reps see a 2.3x increase in buyer engagement when pitching content with Digital Sales Rooms.
Accelerating Ramp Time: By structuring your onboarding and training in a unified platform with your content and analytics, reps can access learning quickly, develop new skills, and expedite ramp time.
INSIGHT: Highspot customers experience 19% faster rep ramp times on average.
Maximizing Deal Size: By tracking whether reps take actions that lead to successful outcomes, you can learn where you need to optimize your efforts to achieve desired results and also improve manager effectiveness.
INSIGHT: Customers who leverage Highspot Training and Coaching experience a 22% increase in average deal size.
Strategic Enablement Drives Results
Tangible business outcomes are more attainable with a map to follow. The Strategic Enablement Maturity Model provides an effective, repeatable framework for executing on business priorities so that you can unlock the potential of your sales teams to perform and your business to grow. Leverage these resources to help you progress in your enablement maturity:
- The Value of Strategic Enablement: Understand why strategic enablement is important and how the Strategic Enablement Framework helps teams enact change in their organizations.
- Assess and Evolve Your Sales Enablement Function: Evaluate where you fall on the enablement maturity model and how to progress.
- Accelerate Business Impact By Maturing Your Enablement Function: Learn insights from our customers on how to move up the maturity curve and improve the business impact of enablement.
If you’re a Highspot customer, unlock more enablement insights like these by joining our exclusive customer community, Highspot Spark Community!
This blog post is part of Highspot’s new research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
