My sales career has largely centered around helping SaaS organizations navigate the sometimes rocky transition from founder-led sales to a more structured and scalable approach. Because so many inbound leads in the former circumstance have pre-existing relationships with the company founder(s), it’s common to see those relationships doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to moving the prospect through the sales funnel.
My first order of business in these situations isn’t to sell. Instead, the immediate goal is to establish a robust sales enablement process that will eliminate the gap — or chasm, really — between initial touch points and closed deals and ultimately set the stage for sales success.
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What Is B2B Sales Enablement?
B2B sales enablement is the process of supporting a sales team and helping them close more deals — whether that involves equipping them with the right tech stack, providing training resources for internal and external tools, creating a library of content that helps deals progress, or ideally, all these and more.
Think of a football team now that fall is upon us. The players might be the ones in the trenches, but they’re supported day in and day out by coaching staff with playbooks and advice, physicians who mitigate the risk of injury and help get injured players back on the field, nutritionists who help the team perform at its physical peak, and more.
I don’t have much advice to share about a championship diet and exercise regimen, but I can certainly chime in on the transformational benefits of a solid B2B sales enablement strategy.
The Benefits of B2B Sales Enablement
Sell More
This one may come as a shock, but sales enablement content can actually help you… sell more.
In addition to my own anecdotal experience, HubSpot’s 2024 Sales Trends Report found that sales pros who use sales enablement content in their role are 58% more likely to be performing over goal this year than those who don’t use it. Perhaps even more telling is that most salespeople acknowledge the causation, with 79% reporting that enablement content was important in making a sale.
Increase Efficiency
Sales enablement strategies often include a lead qualification system, ensuring that sales reps are investing valuable time in the leads that fit your company the best. For example, HubSpot’s Sale Hub includes a predictive lead scoring feature powered by machine learning that allows reps to automatically prioritize leads based on thousands of data points.
Even if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can start with a much less sophisticated implementation. Simply identify some key properties (company size, site visits, social media engagement, etc.) that have historically been a good indicator of a prospect’s potential value. Assign positive scores for promising qualifications while penalizing qualities that point to a prospect likely being a poor fit, and you’re off to the races with a basic scoring system that you can expand and iterate on over time.
Improve the Customer Experience
Sales enablement isn’t just about making more sales, faster. When salespeople are better equipped to do their jobs, customers benefit as well. G2 provides a key insight here, finding that sales enablement can cut onboarding times by 40-50%. That accelerated timeline means your customers are getting a faster return on their investment, improving their experience and making them more likely to stick with your solution for the long run.
There are even more benefits to be had, but hopefully, I’ve convinced you. While enablement initiatives will vary in scope depending on your organization’s size, budget, and appetite, I’ve got four actionable steps that will help you put together a clear B2B sales enablement strategy and help your sales team win more — however you define those wins.
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How to Develop a B2B Sales Enablement Strategy
1. Identify (and Agree On) Clear Goals
Create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals that your sales enablement strategy will work toward. You might want to shorten your sales cycle, increase your win rates, or bolster the size of your average deal, for example. Of course, you inevitably want to do all three, but I’d recommend keeping your scope narrow and focusing on a single goal a time.
It’s also important to align departments around the enablement goals. If your sales team is trying to win more deals but the marketing team is attempting to increase the typical deal size, you’re unlikely to make significant progress in either endeavor — and in some cases you might find different goals are actually at odds.
2. Map the Ideal Customer Journey
How do customers currently move through the buying process? How did they get from the initial interaction all the way to a closed deal? Which pain points were the most pressing for them, and what objections did the sales team need to overcome to progress through each stage?
As I ask myself these questions, I make sure to think back to the goal(s) outlined in step one. If I’m looking to increase the average deal size, for example, I might only map out the buyer’s journey for customers in the top 25% of deal value.
Focus on ideal customers in this exercise, but keep them real — mapping the customer journey around aspirational customers that don’t yet exist is a risky proposition.
Pro tip: If you want to explore this further, you can outline your company's customer journey and experience. Try these free customer journey map templates to get started.
3. Develop Stage-Specific Enablement Resouces
Look at the stages of the customer journey you’ve outlined and identify the tools and assets your sales team will need to help advance the deal to the next stage. For example, getting a buyer from the consideration stage to the decision stage might require you to overcome the classic “price is too high” objection.
Instead of requiring each sales rep to approach this predictable objection anew, I like to create an ROI calculator that illustrates what the buyer can expect to gain by implementing the solution. Feel free to use the one for Sales Hub as inspiration. A high price tag is a much smaller hurdle when it comes with a demonstrable return. If your product is of better value than the competition, you can also create content showing the total cost of ownership of your solution compared to your main competitors.
4. Keep Your Sales Team Updated With Enablement
Your shiny new ROI calculator won’t help you reach your goals if your sales team doesn’t know about it, which is why it’s imperative to keep the lines of communication open between sales and enablement personnel.
My favorite tool to accomplish this is a shared Slack channel where enablement teams can post updates and sales reps can ask questions, share their first-hand experiences, give feedback, and more. You should also save the most important information in this channel to an onboarding document so new hires have important historical context and up-to-date insights when they’re being trained.
While it’s easy to focus on shiny products that promise to painlessly accomplish enablement goals, training is arguably even more important. Because enablement is an ongoing process, it should involve regular meetings to ensure the sales team has the best information and training sessions that give them the know-how to put enablement strategies into practice. In addition, I think the following tips can also help you keep enablement efforts on track.
Tips for B2B Sales Enablement
Make Sure Enablement Pays Off
Alan Glaeser, client partner at Infor, rightly points out that, “Sales incentives and enablement goals should always be in alignment.”
If your sales reps are hitting quota and earning their commissions by targeting a certain type of prospect, for example, they’re not going to put that at risk based on an arbitrary goal mandated by sales enablement leaders. Any shift in strategy needs to take into account incentives and should pay off for your reps — not just figuratively, but literally as well.
Collaborate on Content
In many organizations, marketing is solely responsible for creating the content that sales teams use. And yet, your sales reps are on the front line of your business communicating with prospects every day.
To ensure valuable concepts aren’t lost in translation, make sure the content you’re creating is a collaborative effort. Here, Glaeser adds that you should, “Relentlessly and honestly track how your content helps achieve the goals you outlined.” If you have a great piece of content that doesn’t appear to be contributing, adjust it or get rid of it in favor of something more results-driven.
Collect Regular Feedback
Everyone involved in the enablement process has a valuable perspective to share, and it’s important to gather feedback from each department in order to hone your approach over time.
Feedback on wins is great, but so is constructive criticism. Sales might have advice on marketing content that isn’t resonating with its intended audience, marketing could see resources that aren’t being utilized often enough, and customer success can often help enablement teams tweak the organization’s ideal customer profile (ICP) if they find themselves onboarding a customer that isn’t as good a fit as initially thought.
Put processes in place to collect feedback and examine it regularly so everyone can grow from it.
Empowered Enablement
As you follow the steps and tips I’ve outlined above, remember that it’s imperative to build your B2B sales enablement strategy around a culture of continuous improvement. If it’s a top down initiative forced on your sales team or developed by marketing in a vacuum without input from sales, enablement won’t succeed — and indeed, sales might actually fight against it.
Instead, enablement should be an honest and ongoing dialogue between sales and supporting teams, taking aim at agreed-upon goals that are aligned with sales incentives.
Free Sales Plan Template
Outline your company's sales strategy in one simple, coherent sales plan.
- Target Market
- Prospecting Strategy
- Budget
- Goals
Download Free
All fields are required.
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