Paldavi shares three ways to scale sales enablement: tie it to revenue metrics and measure impact, embed it into tools reps already use like Slack, and personalize coaching to individual skill gaps. Seventy-six percent of organizations investing in enablement see measurable impact.
How's it going everyone? I'm Paldavi. Today we're talking about sales enablement, what it is, why it's important and how to do it in a cost effective way that scales. I'll also give you three tips you can use to turn every rep into your best rep with a few examples on how we do it here at Salesforce. Sound like a plan? All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our sales service, marketing and IT businesses with helpful how to tips you can use for your business. For Sales Professionals Professionals will have tips that can help businesses save on cost with automation, be more efficient with productivity tools and so much more. As always, you can learn more on Trailhead, Salesforce's online learning platform for more information on this topic and many others you might find useful for your business. So first, what is sales enablement and why is it important to drive pipeline? Enablement can simply be defined as providing your sales organizations with the right training, tools, content and processes they need to sell more effectively. Every B2B business and an increasing number of consumer businesses are dependent on a sales organization to drive their company's growth. They are the ones out there day in and day out, speaking with customers, hearing their pains and providing solutions through products and services. Not every business is supporting their sellers in the right way, which makes it difficult and expensive to efficiently generate revenue. 76% of organizations who invest in enablement see a significant impact on sales according to CSO Insights. So prioritizing strategies that are relevant, actionable, measurable and predictable shouldn't be a part of the strategy, but an imperative for every sales leader. Since the beginning, Salesforce has been hyper focused on turning every rep into our best rep and we've learned a lot along the way. So here are three tips you can use to enable your sales teams to drive success Efficiency Increasing revenue while saving on costs Tip number one Focus on Outcome Based Enablement Outcome based enablement is when you use specific business results to drive the enablement agenda and track the impact of your enablement on those metrics and KPIs. It is about providing a clear plan for your reps. You'll want to tie your enablement to revenue outcomes to prove the business impact of what you're working on with your reps. According to CSO Insights, 76% of enablers are unable to prove ROI. If this is something you are struggling with, also try this four step method that will help improving ROI for your enablement strategy. First, analyze your sales engine to identify one thing your reps are struggling with, say connecting the value of your product or solution to your customer's specific pain points or needs. Next, device a training program to impact the specific behavior they need to change to improve their targeted revenue metric. Then validate the program is changing how reps approach their day to day selling activities. It helps to have a powerful analytics tool to help identify those trends and finally prove that new behavior is moving the needle on revenue. And if it's not moving the needle, identify where exactly the efforts are falling short. At Salesforce, we looked closely at our pipeline generation numbers for our small medium business reps and saw an opportunity. We created a training specific to increase connect volume which are calls and emails to customers with relevant, targeted and industry specific communication. We then monitored rep behavior and overall pipeline over the course of the single quarter we saw that pipeline generation overall went up more than 50% in that enablement population and those that achieved company enablement targets saw more than 85% uplift. It's about investing in the right tools for your reps. Think of it as an insurance policy to protect you against losing winnable deals and unnecessary confusion for your reps. Tip number two Integrate enablement into the rep workflow have you ever heard the saying people hate change? Well, that's not entirely true. People don't hate change, they hate being changed. The same can be said about implementing a new enablement strategy. The key to effective sales enablement is to weave into existing workflows and the tools reps are already using every day, which will lead to higher adoption and more everyday impact. At Salesforce, we want to help reps support customers, which means putting information, resources and support right into their flow of work. That might look like an in app guidance to speed onboarding and adoption, or creating a global consistent selling methodology and then embedding it into the process throughout our tools. With Slack, we integrate enablement into the rep workflow in a number of ways. We speed up onboarding and minimize manual tasks by automatically adding new reps to cohort specific and account specific channels with workflows, we make it easy for reps to access account information right from Slack without having to leave. This way they know exactly where they can go to ask questions as as stay up to date with new training and resources. And when reps have access to information they need right in the moment they need to use it. It helps them avoid one of the worst phrases in sales. I'll get back to you on that. Yikes. Tip number three Personalize enablement in the moments rep need it People are different. Every seller has their own unique set of skills and areas they should be focusing on to improve their tool set. Enablement should be relevant to the person and the skill that they are trying to improve. It's future looking and it's proactive. To do this, sales leaders can set priorities and work in tandem with the reps to identify what skills need improvement. For example, one group of reps may need to improve how they approach discovery calls. Another group may need to refine how they approach roadblocks or objections in the deal cycle. You can create segmented, customized programs to address those skill gaps to train and upskill at scale. At Salesforce, we enlist the help of specialized training teams who work with sales leaders to create customized enablement experiences for their operating unit or teams. They build personalized training based on each customer's needs and a deep understanding of their business. From those insights, we have additional personalization components in onboarding like team based simulations that require each person to play different role in the sales conversation. Another example is predictable quarterly enablement expectations where sellers are encouraged to carve out learning time at the beginning of every quarter. Sales leaders can also build on personalized training through one on one coaching. For example, a sales manager may use conversational insight tool to review customer calls and surface common objections and then share those with the reps facing those specific challenges. Look at us. We did it. Three ways to make enablement work for your reps, your team, and ultimately your business. Check out the additional resources provided and be sure to watch other episodes in this series to learn how we at Salesforce deliver exceptional selling experiences. We'll see you next time.
