A report by HubSpot states that a whopping 97% of consumers struggle with trusting salespeople. Hence, organizations need a capable sales force that can win customers while building brand reputation. That’s where sales enablement training comes in.

Sales enablement training empowers the sales team with helpful tools and resources, such as customer relationship management (CRM), a digital sales room (DSR), and professional skills development courses to hone their skills, thereby ensuring improved performance.

With a high-impact sales enablement training program, learning and development (L&D) managers can coach the sales team to drive meaningful customer interactions at every stage. This can help them earn customers’ trust and win more deals.

Here are eight actionable tips to help L&D managers and corporate trainers build an effective sales enablement training program.

1: Define Your Training Goals With KPIs

To begin with, define the objectives of your sales enablement training program. Then, establish the sales enablement key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for outcome analysis.

For instance, if you want to improve your sales team’s productivity, track:

• Sales Data
• Pipeline creation.
• Deal progression.
• Win/conversion rates.
• Cross-selling/upselling.

Sales enablement metrics and KPIs help you gauge how well your team is performing. This analysis can help you prioritize areas that need improvement. Build data-driven strategies and invest in resources that can move the needle.

2: Assess Your Sales Tech Stack

The sales tech stack can be pivotal in optimizing your sales team’s performance. So, evaluate your sales tech stack to understand its capabilities and impact.

Here are a few tech solutions to consider:

• Centralized storage system: Include a central storage system to create and store training-related content and other essential resources for your sales team. One option is to deploy digital sales room (DSR) software. With a DSR, you can provide a secure, central space for easily sharing crucial documents and information with your team, thereby making critical information accessible to reps in their moment of need.
• Advanced communication tools: Utilize an advanced communication tool that allows your team to collaborate with clients hassle-free. Choose a platform that can be used with clients to schedule meetings, give presentations and hold video conferences, allowing for seamless communication. What’s more? L&D managers can use these tools to improve internal team collaboration and communication.
• Data Analytics Platform: Ensure you have an advanced data-driven analytics platform that can help track crucial metrics like top-performing sales reps, deal size, average sales cycle length, and more. Choose a CRM solution to help the sales team streamline the customer sales lifecycle and make strategic data-driven decisions. Additionally, L&D managers and trainers can leverage this tool to track sales team performance.

3: Create a Repository of Up-To-Date Online Learning Material

Online learning material reflecting the latest sales practices and trends can boost sales enablement excellence. So, create a knowledge repository of helpful content that can guide your sales team to convert prospects in different stages of the sales cycle.

Here’s how:

• Create FAQs, blog posts, articles, videos, knowledge bases, and more to help the sales team understand and deal with target audience concerns in the awareness stage.
• Create successful case studies, how-to videos, and processes to help the sales team manage interactions with prospects in buying stage.
• Share buyer’s guides, product videos, research reports, and more to help sales reps convert prospects in the closing stage.

4: Share Successful Sales Call Recordings

Most sales calls offer insights about customer behavior, interaction patterns, choices, pain points and more. Recording and sharing successful sales calls of top performers can help the team improvise its strategies and adopt best practices.

L&D managers can further analyze the conversations and create communication guidelines to help sales reps define best practices.

5: Schedule Job Shadow Training for New Sales Reps

Shadowing is a type of hands-on knowledge transfer training that requires sales reps to listen, observe and understand how senior sales leaders handle client interactions. By scheduling job shadow training, L&D managers can help the sales team sharpen their communication, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Before arranging job shadowing sessions, ensure the mentors you choose will offer the best insights and guidance for your novice salespeople. Rank isn’t as important a factor as is performance and willingness to teach.

Once the session is over, L&D managers can inform future training by meeting with the mentor to discuss sales reps’ challenges and queries.

6: Host Role-play Exercises

Sales role play involves improvising various scenarios that reflect actual interactions with customers. Trainers should speak to sales leaders and create a list of scenarios that frequently happen during the sales process. Then, they assign scenarios to sales reps, especially the new hires, to help them anticipate and address potential roadblocks that may occur during live sales interactions.

7: Provide Constant and Constructive Feedback

Constant and constructive feedback helps employees understand their professional strengths and weaknesses. This can help them improve their craft, thereby boosting their productivity and morale.

So, L&D managers should monitor the performance metrics like win rates, conversions, profit margin and average revenue per user. They should speak to the sales team leader for more insights. Incorporating the findings and insights into the training material can help boost employees’ performances. Likewise, L&D leaders should ask for feedback from their employees to improve their own methods.

8: Align Sales and Marketing With “Smarketing” Sessions

The marketing team focuses on attracting and converting leads into loyal customers by creating relevant materials for the client. The sales team interacts with these leads to close deals. So, aligning marketing and sales on a “smarketing” front can be a game changer for an organization.

Here are a few tips to consider for smarketing sessions:

• Develop buyer personas to help both teams understand the target audience’s expectations and pain points.
• Create helpful material and resources for different sales stages. Train both teams to utilize them well. For instance, create blogs and knowledge-based articles to educate customers in the awareness stage.
• Train your teams to maintain a consistent tone across various channels. Ensure your team understands and can communicate brand value and vision.

This way, both teams will speak the same language with the prospects, thereby creating a solid omnichannel presence.  Aligning sales and marketing can increase revenue, win rates and number of clients.

Wrapping Up

Sales enablement training can arm your salespeople with customer-centric thinking. The shared tips can help you create a solid sales enablement training program, thereby improving your team’s performance. Implement the mentioned tactics to boost customer acquisition and retention while contributing to your organization’s bottom line.