On a regular day, the average sales representative will spend just over a third of their time selling to prospects. The rest of their time is quickly eaten up by other tasks: sending emails, scheduling meetings, joining internal syncs, and prospecting leads. A mere tenth of their time goes towards training… if they’re lucky.
Considering how packed sales reps’ calendars already are, it’s no wonder results can stagnate unless new reps are added to the team. But what if there were other ways you could keep your sales team constantly evolving? How can you spend that 10% of training time improving the results sales reps see in their limited hours of selling?
That’s the question our sales enablement team at Vimeo asks daily, and it’s one that’s helped our sales team increase their results across the board.
Before we dive into a few ways that you can do the same, let’s cover some basics.
In this article
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a strategic function that works across a company to equip customer-facing teams with the tools, training, and resources they need to successfully support a company’s go-to-market strategy. Every piece of sales enablement content created aims to empower internal teams to have the best possible conversations with external customers.
Three pillars of sales enablement content
At Vimeo, we generally split our sales enablement content into three key pillars.
New hire onboarding gets new sales representatives business-ready. Sales enablement content for new hires might include:
- A self-paced learning path in a learning management system
- Interactive workshops to practice applying what they’ve learned
- Video tutorials
- Cheat sheets or reference material for certain personas or industries
Ongoing training and development keeps existing teams up to date on best practices, sales skills, or any new products or services. It often includes:
- Coaching on new sales processes and selling skills
- Virtual interactive workshops and AMA’s (ask me anything)
- Video demos showing off new features
Communication channels and cadence ensures that our sales reps get the information they need when they need it. That means surfacing, at the right time, by leveraging communication channels like::
- Weekly Newsletters
- Just in time Video Updates
- Monthly Sales All Hands
- Annual Sales Kickoff (SKO)
If the sales team is the surgeon at the operating table, you can think of sales enablement as the nurse handing them the scalpel just in time, the hospital benefactor supplying them with new tools, and the medical school providing their ongoing training.
How to build an effective sales enablement strategy
A sales enablement team works with multiple teams across an organization, since it touches on so many functions. It supports a company’s go-to-market strategy, so leadership is involved; it includes onboarding and training, which overlaps with Human Resources; and sales enablement needs to work closely with Sales Operations, marketing and product marketing to make sure the sales team has all the tools and resources they need to be successful.
Since sales enablement is so wide-ranging, it’s important to build a sales enablement strategy methodically — and It all starts with laying a solid foundation.
1. Create a team charter.
While this step might seem elementary, a team charter sets the stage for your work ahead of you and serves as a reminder to keep your day-to-day work aligned with your North Star.
Here are a few details you might consider as you craft your team charter:
- Your mission and vision
- Team roles and responsibilities
- How you’ll define and measure success
- How the team works
2. Understand the state of the union.
Before you build your sales enablement strategy, it’s important to deeply understand your company’s unique goals, challenges, and opportunities. This means getting all relevant stakeholders in the room, doing a deep dive into your go-to-market strategy, and collecting all of your current sales metrics.
A few questions you’ll want to ask at this stage include:
- What are we trying to accomplish with our go-to-market strategy?
- What is currently working well? What isn’t?
- Where can sales enablement be a critical lever in helping us reach success?
This step is critical, since every organization faces different challenges and opportunities. A strategy that might have worked beautifully for one organization may not work for another, so don’t assume you can just “lift and shift” another company’s existing strategy.
3. Create a roadmap.
Your conversations with stakeholders will likely reveal a ton of challenges and opportunities — definitely far more than you could realistically tackle in a year’s time. However, rather than looking at each challenge or opportunity individually, find the consistent themes that emerge from these conversations. These will form the building blocks of your roadmap.
Ideally, your strategy should include no more than three or four big opportunities or challenges that you can tackle in the year ahead. If you spread yourself too thin or try to tackle too many, you won’t make meaningful progress on any of them.
One of the first challenges we tackled as a sales enablement team was improving our new hire onboarding. During our exploratory phase, the challenge we repeatedly heard was, “It’s taking our reps too long to get up to speed.” When we dug into the data, we saw that we were forecasted to hire over 140 sales reps over the next year, but our onboarding program was still tracked in an Excel sheet. It wasn’t scaleable, and it wasn’t getting us the results we needed.
So one of our key opportunities became creating a new, scaleable onboarding program that decreased the time it took new sales reps to become revenue-generating, so we built out role specific learning paths and continue to iterate on the program based on feedback from reps and managers.
Six tips to build your sales enablement program for a high-performing sales team
Of course, once you’ve built your strategy, you’ll need to figure out how to implement it, which means creating content and rolling it out to your sales teams. How you go about that can make all the difference to the success of your strategy.
Deliver content in context
Sales enablement content is no use to anyone if sales reps can’t find it, so make it easy for sales reps to find your content easily.
One way to make sales enablement content more accessible and discoverable is to create a sales portal that serves as a content library for your reps.
For example, at Vimeo we’ve re-organized the sales portal to align to our GTM strategy so that it’s contextual. Whether you’re looking for content by content type, product, use case, or persona, you can find what you need easily.
We’ve organized our Video Library in the same way. Based on the topic a sales rep wants to explore, they can easily find historical and up-to-date content on basically anything they need, from town halls to product demos to to user stories.
Time your delivery
This is where that third pillar of sales enablement content — communication channels and cadence — comes into play. Go beyond simply organizing content intuitively by proactively serving your sales reps the right information at the right time.
What does this mean in practice? If a sales rep is on the phone with a customer, you don’t want them to have to go into your sales portal looking for a certain asset or information on competitors. Instead, bring the information to them — in a way that’s seamless and helpful.
At Vimeo, for example, we use Salesforce as our customer relationship management tool. However, we also use a sidebar that aligns content delivery to the stages of the sales process within Salesforce. If a sales rep is in a discovery call, we’ll serve up content that suggests discovery questions, a technical validation checklist, or a demo video to share with the customer. If the buyer type has a certain use case that we frequently see at Vimeo, we’ll surface a case study video that could potentially be shared with the customer.
It’s all about serving content up within a salesperson’s flow of work, when it’s most helpful to them.
Don’t forget about change management
With any new process, there’s a behavior change component you need to keep in mind. If you’re going to make any kind of change or introduce new processes to a team, they need to understand why it’s important — to your organization, to your customers, and to them. Start by getting buy-in from leadership, who can then communicate the importance of this process to their teams.
Then, once you’ve actually carried out the training, don’t stop there. It’s easy to run a training session and think, “Perfect! We had everyone attend a training livestream on a new sales methodology. Our work here is done.” But it shouldn’t be — not until you can confirm the team has actually processed and can consistently apply that knowledge.
You can do this in fun ways, like creating a mini-certification for sales reps. After training, for instance, perhaps reps need to deliver a video mock pitch proving their new skills. Once they’ve gotten the certification, they can go on to have that conversation with actual customers.
Have fun with it
I’ve been doing sales enablement for a couple of decades now, and it’s interesting to see how much has changed. Training no longer has to mean sales reps watch a boring, one-sided video recording or read a dry manual. You can create fully interactive virtual events today, where the audience can join in Q&As, answer polls, and engage.
Every enablement professional should see keeping content fresh and exciting as an essential part of their job. After all, the more engaging a piece of content, the higher the chances a viewer will remember it.
Gather feedback continuously
After we roll out a new course or certification, we always make sure to send surveys out to sales reps that have gone through the training. We also meet with sales managers to get a sense of how teams have reacted to the content. Whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, that feedback is a gift — it lets us know what we’re doing well and where we can improve.
It’s also important to be judicious with the feedback you receive. Our sales teams are super appreciative of everything we do to make their jobs easier and they want more, which is a good thing!
But we have to stay focused based on our resources, so we look for themes within the feedback we receive.
For example, when we receive sales feedback, we look for themes like:
- What are we hearing consistently?
- What are things we could do to really move the dial?
- What are some quick wins that could also scale long term?
Identifying those themes can help us evolve our sales enablement over the next week, month, quarter, and year.
Monitor and measure regularly
One of the great things about sales enablement is it’s a continually iterative process — you don’t just “set it and forget it.” Measuring your progress and monitoring your results helps you create a culture of continuous improvement within your sales enablement team.
There are so many different areas that you touch on within sales enablement, and each program will focus on its own metrics — from time to ramp, to deal size, to percentage of reps at quota.
Of course, sales enablement isn’t the only team responsible for impacting those metrics, but we use them as guideposts that indicate we’re on the right path. All functions want to show their return on investment, and that’s especially true when you’re eating into salespeople’s valuable time.
After launching a new program, we also monitor customers’ reactions to the change. While sales enablement works with salespeople, the work we do is ultimately meant to deliver an excellent customer experience. We’re looking for signals that help us understand whether we’re on the right track or if we need to change up the messaging or positioning that we’re training reps on.
Finally, we look at sales team retention. Our sales enablement content shouldn’t just improve our sales metrics — it should also make sales employees feel like they’ve had a great onboarding experience, that their successes are recognized, and that they’re getting continuous opportunities to learn, develop, and grow into new roles. All of these things help build a company culture that employees want to stay at.
Empower your teams with engaging sales enablement content
The business of sales is all about relationships — and without engaged sales reps, you won’t have engaged customers. There’s a reason that companies with engaged employees see 21% higher profitability. When sales reps feel excited and empowered to continually improve their craft, everyone benefits.
Power your sales team with video
