In today's fast-paced business environment, having data alone isn't enough. Actionable insights derived from this data are essential for making informed decisions and driving growth. While basic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are valuable, relying solely on them as a repository may fall short of addressing all your needs. What you truly require is a comprehensive solution that not only manages your CRM data but also contextualizes it, highlighting vital trends and patterns that drive actionable insights. You need a CRM that can support and optimize your sales endeavours through and through. A technology that provides your reps with the right resources, tools, and guidance they need to convert leads, close more deals, and, most crucially, drive revenue for your business.
Sitting at the heart of this framework is sales enablement — the ongoing methodology and process of maximizing revenue per rep by ensuring the right messaging using the appropriate content throughout each stage of the buying process.
These are six ways you can harness sales enablement strategies to hit your revenue goals:
A sales enablement platform goes beyond managing customer data and interactions, offering a holistic strategy for customer engagement. Standard CRMs excel at storing and managing data and interactions, but a true sales enablement platform takes it a step further to elevate customer and user experience.
You want an expansive and fully mobile CRM product with a strong track record of solving issues quicker, identifying and fixing problems preemptively, and simplifying customer engagement to streamline your processes.
Sales enablement can unify customer and company data from many sources and even use AI tools to help better manage relationships across the entire customer lifecycle, spanning departments like marketing, sales, digital commerce, and customer service interactions.
If there’s one thing a good salesperson dislikes, it’s administrative tasks that cut into the time spent calling and talking to potential customers. As a business owner or leader, your job is to ensure salespeople use their time doing what they do best: generating sales.
"About a third of all sales tasks can be automated" (Mckinsey, 2020). This means there are ample opportunities for you to automate key activities like forecasting, conversation analysis, pipeline management, prospecting, and tracking customer interactions.
Sales automation can also sync data across tools instantly so that your reps don’t have to manually update everything in the tech stack. Even better, you know that if a customer engages with you on one platform, their information will be updated in all the others — no missed connections.
Whatever CRM platform you land on, check that it has real-time automation capabilities, so data is processed and available for use right after it’s captured. This allows for continually updating customer data after every interaction, such as sales calls, website visits, and conference scans.
Customers expect personalized experiences. They want to feel that they’re having a uniquely personalized customer experience, even though they’re interacting with a business.
For example, if a customer is communicating with a live chat representative today but is forced to repeat all the information they provided via email the day before, this damages the digital experience. It’s a waste of time, and customers will notice.
By integrating your CRM with all your other marketing tools and assets, you can target potential customers with personalized messages and email templates customized for each stage of their journey or resolve issues much quicker when a support ticket comes through. The key to personalization is gathering the necessary data together in one place, tracking customer behavior in real-time, and using this information to personalize the buyer's experience on all channels and devices.
As recently as 2022, organizations globally used an average of 130 software as a service (SaaS) applications. That number has likely increased since.
A centralized CRM platform with an extensive integrated ecosystem ensures that all certified apps you want to connect integrate and integrate smoothly, and that you’re assured that they’ve been reviewed for a certain level of compatibility. A helpful directory of all certified apps also makes it straightforward to find the right app to add whenever a particular need arises. The best CRMs allow you to develop a system specifically tailored to your needs, one that effortlessly incorporates your existing technology stack, too.
Sales enablement is all about providing leads with the right content and resources at the right time. For example, a new lead needs to see thought leadership content to develop trust in your business and see you as an authority in your space.
You should be tracking each lead's position in the sales funnel and providing content that aligns with their stage. An all-in-one CRM can automate this process, surfacing recommended content and insights to maximize resources that proved effective in past deals. Use filters to find relevant information such as sales calls, emails, notes, and social media interactions.
It's not enough to invest in a CRM that stores and manages customer data; you need a sales enablement platform that can continuously empower your team with the latest knowledge and skills essential for driving successful sales outcomes.
If you're still exploring your CRM options, ensure it offers ample learning and development programs to upskill in everything from inbound marketing to remote selling to B2B sales methodologies and prospecting for lead generation. Ideally, the CRM provider should deliver comprehensive courses, boot camps, and learning paths that encompass essential business skills as well as masterful inbound sales strategies.
A great customer experience hinges on an empowered sales force. By integrating sales enablement with CRM capabilities, you can bridge the gap between sales, marketing, and the customer.
With a CRM platform fitted with a content management system, you can seamlessly track content performance and customer touchpoints, enabling teams to coordinate efforts through a single, unified platform. This ensures that all team members have access to consistent, up-to-date customer data, allowing leaders to gain the insights needed to support, monitor, and improve the selling process effectively.
By investing in a sales-enabled CRM, you not only enhance your customer relationship management but also drive sales effectiveness and revenue growth through its robust sales enablement features. To learn more about adopting sales enablement in your organization and automating sales functions, contact our team today.