The pressure is on for sales enablement teams.
Leading businesses now recognize sales enablement as a critical element of their success and have invested accordingly – but with the increased investment comes greater expectations for return.
Fortunately, technology has kept pace. New advancements have made it easier than ever to empower your sales force, measure results, and demonstrate business impact. Here is advice from expert practitioners on you can use sales enablement technology to set your company — and yourself — up for success.
Drive Adoption with Tailored Experiences
Low adoption is a serious problem. If salespeople aren’t using your sales enablement platform, that means your carefully organized assets and detailed plays are invisible. Ultimately, this can undermine your entire sales enablement program, waste time and resources, and negatively affect revenue.
To combat poor adoption, enablement practitioners are using sales enablement technology to create seamless, personalized rep experiences. For example, our own Growth Enablement Manager Kendall Michaud relies on Highspot SmartPage™ technology to make her content user-friendly and easy to browse.
“We build SmartPage homepages for every user group, including granular distinctions like account development, account executives, and account managers,” she said. Now, when salespeople log in, they are immediately greeted by clean landing pages featuring curated, role-specific content.
According to Kendall, tailoring the experience “avoids overwhelming reps” by only showing what’s relevant to their jobs. When your sales enablement solution is easy to use and simple to navigate, salespeople are more likely to integrate the platform — and the wealth of resources it offers — into their daily workflow.
Follow Kendall’s lead and use SmartPage technology to personalize your sellers’ experience. A little customization can go a long way in ensuring adoption of your tool — and your deal-winning guidance.
Deliver Guidance at the Point of Action
Sellers need both content and context to close deals. Modern sales enablement teams know this information must be on-hand at the moment of action, but many are still relying on outdated methods to share sales critical intel.
This means that reps must dig through an inbox to find content and guidance, or visit multiple portals for training before a customer conversation. Beyond wasting time, this increases the chance that reps will work with stale content or ignore important updates all together.
To ensure that training, content, and guidance are consumed, Kendra Pecan, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Amplitude, recommends delivering it all via SmartPage technology.
Following a recent product launch, she found that having a one-stop shop for her sales communications made enabling a successful deployment that much easier. Said Kendra, “We created a SmartPage that featured key messaging, information about pricing, and email templates, all in one package.”
This created a single source of truth for content related to the product launch. Better yet, with SmartPage technology she was “able to put context around those things, including a digital training they could watch on their own time.” Following the initial training sessions, reps now know where to find the guidance and content necessary to navigate critical customer conversations.
Emulate Kendra by effectively delivering guidance alongside content via Highspot Smartpages.
Uncover Success Patterns with Powerful Analytics
A key component of any sales enablement program is identifying and replicating successful content and supporting assets, like sales plays or training. But uncovering what works is easier said than done.
Sure, you could shadow individual reps to see which content they frequent — but this solution doesn’t scale. Rather, modern enablement practitioners are solving this problem by diving deep on analytics within their sales enablement platforms.
Said Sue Poor, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Monster, “I use Highspot analytics to see what pieces of content are being used, whether it’s viewed internally or being pitched out.” This helps Sue and her team understand which assets reps rely on — and which matter to buyers.
From there, Sue can examine buyer engagement and open rates to understand whether or not messaging resonates with potential customers and further optimize content.
Josh Binstock, Senior Communications Manager at Intralinks, has a similar process. His team uses Highspot analytics to get an all-up view “of what is important to our sales team, what content really drives their sales motions, and what they think our customers need at a given moment.”
With SmartPage technology, you can save additional steps by viewing all of this data in an easy-to-read dashboard. Like Josh and Sue, you can quickly pinpoint which actions, sales assets, or email templates enabled your team’s success by tracking content usage against sales performance and impacted revenue — all in one place.
Make an Impact with the Right Technology
Investing in the right tools is a surefire way to secure an ROI on your sales enablement program.
See how more leading businesses are strategically applying technology to solve modern enablement challenges by exploring our Highspot success stories.