Sales Enablement Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Sales enablement is used to help businesses increase their sales sustainably. Implementing it has proven effective to boost sales, from generating pipelines to accelerating and improving closing cycles. Not surprisingly, more and more companies incorporate sales enablement as part of their sales processes. Other companies might not know how to get started with sales enablement yet, or can even be not considering it at all. This translates to the many challenges preventing them from experiencing the hike in sales efficiency. Equipping sales reps with the right tools positively affects how productive they are at their tasks, but the technology is only effective when used in the right way. Some of the challenges you may face when incorporating sales enablement into your processes include:

Sales Professionals Use Sales Tools Within Their Existing Sales Processes

Several businesses are having challenges with sales enablement and not getting the effective, expected result because they have refused to implement a strategic and formal approach to using sales enablement but are not capable of scaling up the process or properly communicating it to the entirety of the team.

If you use a formal approach to implementing sales enablement, there is the possibility of increasing sales. This means setting a goal, for instance, how much percent of sales increase you are aiming for, then working towards that goal with practical strategies plus establishing sponsorship.

You have to make some evaluations before incorporating them into your sales flow. You should evaluate your existing sales processes, how they worked, the many challenges faced in the ineffective areas.

Aside from that, you should have an idea of how sales processes work, including factors that affect how effective the processes are, for instance, if the team and management are effective or not. That way, you’ll know how to incorporate the process so that it won’t affect their workflow or productivity. As long as you help the staff understand that the sales enablement strategy is not meant to increase their workload, but make it easier to achieve their goals.

New Employee Hire Onboarding Process

New hires need to be trained on how to do their job, as well as how to leverage the existing tech stack. It might be overwhelming, and this is where the sales enablement tools can prove their value by catalyzing how fast and effectively the onboarding process can enable your teams.

According to Microsoft’s report, 43% of executives and 42% of business development managers think their top knowledge sharing challenges are related to onboarding employees and upskilling new team members.

Companies that use formalized training methods to coach their new hires experience increased sales more than their counterparts because they train their new hires to use sales management tools efficiently. The process is more effective because they are being trained from scratch. Companies experiencing challenges in sales enablement tools can try to improve their onboarding process, and if the new hires are effectively trained, there will be an increase in sales. What if the current coworkers could transfer their actual practical experience to onboard in no time the new members of the same team where they will all be working together?

Dooly’s 2022 Sales Happiness Index may have the answer to this question: 86% of sales professionals say their company has a clear sales process in place and out of them, 42% said that they rarely stray away from them. Sales enablement works, and is working as we speak.

Strategy for Training and Coaching

Companies that regularly invest in training their sales reps have higher win rates than those that rely on informal coaching methods at random times. A high percentage of companies are not investing in training their staff, which is why an established training strategy yields higher win rates when managers and directors are actively involved. Yet, the lack of time is the main reason why managers and directors can’t coach or skill up their teams: For they’re too taken looking for information and making sense of it all.

Several companies prefer the informal, learn-on-the-job approach. Then, it is not surprising that their sales enablement strategy is not yielding as much as other businesses who apply a more formal approach to training their staff.

Close the Skill Gap Between Your High and Low Performers

By using a sales enablement tool, you can keep your sales team challenged and educate and support them through the sales processes with the use of videos. Sales enablement videos can include onboarding and can be used as training videos to ensure that sales reps are being trained on how to use the sales enablement tool effectively and can also be used to keep them up to date with new features.

Measuring ROI

A lot of companies don’t understand the benefits of measuring their progress rates. For sales enablement tools to work successfully, you must access and measure your progress rates, especially leading/lagging indicators, enablement ROI, and milestones and productivity metrics. Sales enablement teams must consistently prove a positive effect on their revenue, working towards achieving their goals.

Measuring ROI consistently gives insights on how the enablement tool is working, areas that need improvement, and areas working beyond expectations. With this information, the company will work on the areas where improvements are needed and increase the sales rate.

Video can effectively contain more information, in an easier way to digest and in a more palatable way to replicate across the team. The combo between a solid sales enablement strategy and video content can accelerate efficiency in no time.