- Marketing & Customer Lifecycle
The Sales Enablement Technology You’re Missing
Great sales enablement today touches every aspect of your sales team’s development, preparation, and communication, and seeks to find ways to enhance each.
Our customers tell us there are five pillars of sales enablement. And while each organization will identify them a little differently, the core concepts typically break down as follows:
- Onboarding
Over the course of their first 30-90 days, you need to instill your team culture, vision, and mission into every member of your team. You’ll also need to get them up to speed on your company, your products, and your sales strategy and methodology. - Ongoing Training
The world never stops evolving, and neither do your products and processes. Ensuring your sales team sees and understands all the latest features and enhancements in your product line as soon as they are ready is essential to their success. Just as critical is your sales training — regular instructional sessions on team processes, overviews of business strategy from the executive team, internal compliance and regulations presentations from learning and development — all of which help your team better understand your organization’s priorities and generate the right kind of sales opportunities. - Internal Communication
Effective communication is the lifeblood of any team — and a particular challenge in when your sales team members can often be too busy for email. Whether it’s outbound messages from the home office to the field, or insight and best practice sharing among co-workers, the messages you deliver on a day-to-day basis are essential to helping your team, learning from one another, improving sales techniques, and closing more business. - Pre-sales Prospect Engagement
Your sales team will tell you — closing the next big sale is a marathon, not a sprint. Often the ongoing communications between prospect and sales are a driving factor in whether a deal gets done. This pillar is often a joint venture with your marketing team. The keys to making this a sales enablement success are ensuring sales and marketing are properly connected so that leads can be acted upon instantly and your sales team has effective tools and strategies at hand to help encourage prospects through your sales process. - Post-sales Communication
The importance of the connection your sales team creates with your customers doesn’t wane when the ink on the contract is dry — it’s just as essential to ensuring current customers stay loyal. Ongoing communications, insider tips to getting the most out of your products, sneak previews of coming features, and even simple routine check-ins are all moments your team can use to reinforce your relationship, identify potential trouble spots, and work to ensure renewals can be quick and easy.
The most effective sales enablement processes are those that find a way to come to the aid of their sales team members in each of these five areas. And that’s where video comes in.
Across the five pillars of sales enablement, the way you communicate with reps and the way they communicate with clients needs to rise above everyday email in order to avoid getting overlooked.
To be more effective, you need another tool — something faster, easier, and more engaging that can help you get messages across in full.
Sales enablement needs video.
In recent years, video has proven its worth in just about every aspect of sales enablement.
While video is well-known for its ability to attract new prospects, it isn’t just a tool for marketers. It’s also an excellent way to help sales teams communicate more effectively — with each other and with your customers.
Watch an example sales onboarding video recorded with Panopto below:
Short of face-to-face conversation, video is the most effective way to share a message. As organizations adopt video, sales teams benefit with anywhere, anytime access to training, tips and strategies for selling, a means to quickly record and share product demonstrations with prospects, a more engaging way to send personalized sales messages, and more.
With so many benefits, it’s no surprise video is taking off in sales organizations. The Aberdeen Group has found that many forward-looking companies are already using video across the sales cycle:
- Marketing and awareness (In use with 67% of research respondents)
- Lead nurturing (53%)
- Conversions (60%)
- Lead qualification (47%)
- Deal closings (33%)
- Post-sale communications (33%)
Related Reading: Video For Sales Training: A Small Investment with a Million Dollar Payoff
Take advantage of video to give your sales team an edge.
Find out how — plus 18 ways your organization can use video boost your sales enablement programs — in our new white paper.