Sales enablement models come in all shapes and sizes. Follow this one to improve your reps' productivity and help them to sell more.
You know the scene: your team's constantly working to nurture new prospects and close deals. But productivity is flagging, impacting your reps’ abilities to deliver the revenue stream the business depends on to grow.
When this happens, it’s important to review the situation objectively. One of our favourite sales enablement models puts the focus on the people you’ve hired to the processes you’ve put in place, you need to be able to assess the impact you’re having in both areas to determine how you can improve sales performance.
To help you diagnose where your sales function may be experiencing challenges, let’s look at your process and people.
When reviewing how to improve sales productivity and sell more, a key consideration is how well your salespeople understand the sales process.
Often, when a sales team doesn’t follow the process, it’s because it’s flawed. Reviewing the sales process can be challenging, especially if you helped define it in the first place, but it’s essential that you can step back and look objectively at the steps your team is following:
The theme here is that your sales process needs to be created around the needs of the buyer, not your internal accounts team. If you suspect that your process is broken, or over-complicated, it could well be that you’ve not reviewed it in regard to how your buyers are making purchasing decisions — and how you could best help them along the way.
Discover how an inbound sales approach could improve your team’s ability to engage and close new customers.
When assessing the activity and performance of your salespeople, there are several markers that you can use to indicate how effectively they are spending their time and where there might be problems with the way they’re carrying out their roles.
If you have a good solid process supported by a robust CRM and data but you’re still experiencing problems, it may well be people-related.
Related read: HubSpot CRM: best practices and pro tips.
Your team might spend upwards of 20 hours every week surfacing data and setting up dashboards, but it doesn’t mean anything if they can’t use that data or those dashboards to inform their actions.
An effective sales team is one capable of making fast, data-driven decisions. Underpinning this is a sales process designed around the salespeople and their activity, enabling them to quickly and accurately determine what is going on in the CRM at any given time, and what this actually means in terms of sales conversations.
Yes, every deal is different, but you still need to have a defined process, otherwise your salespeople will all follow different processes for every deal.
When we say ‘effective’ here, what we mean is a sales process that is both predictable and scalable, driving dependable revenue growth month on month.
People-based problems typically manifest themselves as salespeople who sell differently every time and a team of salespeople who all sell differently from one another. The underlying problem here is one of consistency.
Deal strategy should always be customised to suit the prospect, yes, but there’s a fundamental difference between knowing the process and deviating from it in a strategic way, and making up a completely new sales process ad hoc for every conversation.
You’ve identified what's going on in your sales team now — but what should be going on, and how can you fix the way your salespeople are selling to get there?
The more of the higher volume, lower value tasks you can automate, the more time you will save your salespeople. Lead allocation is one such task that benefits from automation, reducing the risk of leads going missing and giving your team the opportunity to follow-up with newly qualified MQLs more quickly and efficiently.
One way in which sales, marketing, and service software provider HubSpot recently achieved this was using a sales chatbot. The bot, which they built in a similar way to how you would set up a workflow sequence, lives within Slack and sends a notification to sales reps if there are unworked MQLs in their name.
When they reviewed the impact of this chatbot to see how effective it had been, they saw that it had actually reduced unworked MQLs by half.
A sales rep’s inbox is often overwhelmed. By implementing the chatbot in Slack, where the sales reps live and where they communicate, you can ensure that its notifications are visible and that it integrates naturally with a chat interface the team already knows and loves.
If your sales and marketing alignment is successful, marketing will have already conducted a baseline qualification before marking a lead as an MQL.
There are many methodologies for sales qualification, most of them claiming to be more sophisticated than the one before, but in reality, very few salespeople follow a consistent method. If you haven’t got one in place already, we recommend starting with the daddy of them all: BANT.
BANT is a means by which your sales team can further qualify the lead based on a series of key areas: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing.
Learn more about BANT and how you can use it to improve the quality of your leads in our free sales ebook, How to Sell More and Grow Better.
As one of the first UK HubSpot Partner agencies to proactively execute on the sales enablement market, we have a deep understanding of the way sales enablement services can be delivered.
Sales enablement wears many faces, but it comes down to equipping your team with the technology, processes, and content to best serve your prospects with what they need, shortening the sales cycle and increasing your close rate.
When we think of machines, we think of sexy words like efficiency and automation. But it’s important to remember that machines need maintenance. And for all their time-saving and automative capabilities, they still depend on operators to make sure they’re working to the best of their capabilities.
Get this right, and the impact of a predictable and scalable sales process will give your company’s stakeholders greater confidence to invest in your growth.
To learn more about maximising the time your sales reps actually spend selling and ensuring they’re as effective at this task as possible, download our specialist sales ebook now.