This article originally appeared in Business2Community
Sales teams are the lifeblood of business. Whether sitting in an inside sales call center, meeting customers in a B2B situation or a hybrid rep working from a home office – no matter how much the internet influences buyers, without a sales person guiding a prospect through the purchase decision, the results are almost always sub-optimal.
But gaining real world ROI is about more than just employing lots of sales people. Organizations need to think about how they can improve the productivity of the people they already have, and – as they grow the sales team – how they can help individuals better perform with a focus on improved win rates and customer satisfaction.
It’s no longer enough for sales operations to focus on the traditional approach to sales team productivity – group sales training, working with marketing to create sales product flyers and collateral, and pushing the sales team with incentives. Organizations need a new way to help sales people improve the way they work and make an impact on the bottom line.
Luckily, there’s a better way – and it’s rooted in the adoption of sales enablement technology. For organizations, these solutions offer a new approach to helping sales people be more productive, spend more time actually selling, better engage with customers and win more deals.
Here are the top two ways that sales enablement can drive business ROI:
Be More Effective in Front of the Customer
According to CEB, over half - 57 percent – of the selling process is complete for consumers even before they interact with a supplier. This adds pressure to the sales person when they finally get on the phone, in the room, or at a customer-facing event. With today’s sales enablement solutions, sales people are empowered with the right content the moment it’s needed to move a discussion forward, without having to spend hours creating new collateral or looking for the right presentation to use. Further, through the combination of mobile devices and the power of guided selling, sales people can navigate through the entire sales process, being enabled with the right content at the right point in the sales cycle to close the deal.
Be More Productive and Efficient
Sales people are busier than ever before. But sales reps often spend more time NOT selling, which is a drain on organizational resources and the bottom line. With sales enablement tools, reps are able to reduce time spent looking for marketing collateral, inputting notes into CRM systems and more, meaning they can spend more time actually selling and engaging with the customer. Improving the way the sales teams operate – from streamlining daily administrative tasks to optimizing prospect engagements – sales enablement solutions can deliver clear business ROI.
The market has already begun to shift, and sales enablement software is becoming a key ROI tool for every sales operations, marketing and senior management team working to help their sales teams to win more and get more done.
