A sales enablement platform is a tool that you can use to store internal materials for your sales team, along with customer-facing content sales reps use during the sales process. These resources include a mix of sales enablement content, training materials, and coaching resources.
A sales enablement platform can help your team align throughout the sales process and keep sales content and training materials in a central location. This can help reps stay focused on day-to-day tasks, hit their sales goals, and help teams align on processes and messaging.
Did you know that organizations with a dedicated sales enablement function have a 4-point higher win rate, 8-point better quota attainment, and 9-point better customer retention than those without one?
Companies with enablement teams also see improvements in employee engagement, better sales coaching results, and discover better data about how well they’re meeting their objectives.
One of the best ways to implement a sales enablement strategy is to have the right sales enablement tool. Based on the 2021 State of Sales Enablement report, organizations that purchased sales enablement tools had significantly higher win rates than those that didn’t.
Understanding sales enablement platforms and choosing the right one for your needs is vital to empower your team to meet their sales goals.
In this post:
Why are sales enablement platforms important?
A sales enablement platform helps your enablement team do their job more effectively. You can do more with fewer people when you have the right all-in-one platform that makes rolling out sales enablement improvements easier.
It’s important to understand what an enablement platform is and is not to understand its true benefits.
A sales enablement platform is not a CRM or solely a collaboration tool. Instead, the platform is focused on allowing you to improve your sales workflow across all tools, from CRM to social media listening and more.
In other words, with an enablement platform, you have a focused way to achieve agile goals to improve sales results. You can also improve efficiency at every stage of the customer journey so that your reps spend more time selling and less time doing admin work or searching for information.
When do you need a sales enablement platform?
A sales enablement platform is a significant investment as soon as you decide you want to improve your sales process, coaching, and other aspects of the work of your sales team.
You might wonder if you should have an enablement platform even if you can only dedicate one employee to sales enablement. The answer is yes—a team of one is even more in need of the efficiency and benefits of a dedicated platform.
Concerned about the investment? One of the best ways to address this is to choose an all-in-one platform that can provide efficiencies in multiple areas.
An all-in-one sales enablement solution can help your organization address:
- New hire training
- Sales follow-up training
- Leadership development
- Customer education
- Internal learning and development
- Partner education
- Support enablement
- Compliance training
Reddit uses a sales enablement platform in multiple ways. Ashley Crisostomo, the Principal Program Manager on the Sales Enablement team, used WorkRamp to train new hires and go-to-market teams, build out the company’s L&D, and roll out company branding initiatives.
The result? A 33 percent decrease in ramp time, a score of over 90 percent on a recent brand narrative pitch challenge, the establishment of an L&D program, and an increase in internal NPS of 13 points.
As you can see, an all-in-one platform can give you an excellent return on investment.
What to look for in a sales enablement platform
There are several features that your sales enablement platform should have so that you can maximize your investment. Here’s what to look for.
The ability to measure results
You can’t know how well your investment is paying off if you can’t measure results. Be sure that the sales enablement platform you choose has robust analytics and insights that make it easy to refine your enablement practices to make them more effective.
You should be able to track sales reps’ results following sales training, for example, to see the benefit. Tracking and analytics also allow you to understand the cost of training sales reps so you can reduce inefficiencies while driving better results.
Read more: Data-Driven Sales Enablement: Track, Measure, Improve
Onboarding management
One of the key responsibilities of sales enablement teams is onboarding new hires and reducing ramp time. That means that onboarding is a key function of any sales enablement platform you choose.
You should be able to create engaging, easy-to-use training modules and track how well new hires perform after training. You can also create smaller modules of micro-training so reps can get refreshers and brush up on areas they’re struggling with.
Finally, a great sales enablement platform allows you to identify areas where reps need improvement and effectively coach the new hires accordingly.
Gamification
Gamification is a major trend in workplace training for good reason. Blending gaming ideas into training and work can help employees enjoy their work more and be more engaged in what they’re learning.
Some of the benefits of gamification include:
- Increased productivity and engagement
- Improved teamwork and collaboration
- Nurturing creativity and innovation
- Giving employees immediate feedback on their progress
Multiple applications within your organization
Using a sales enablement platform for multiple training opportunities is another feature to look for. An all-in-one option allows you to avoid cobbling together multiple software systems and struggling with integration and data transfer.
Choose a sales enablement platform that you can use for new hire training, L&D, customer education, vendor training, and more. This will allow you to get the best return on your investment.
What are the benefits of sales enablement platforms?
You know about the power of sales enablement, but what does having a dedicated platform add to the mix? Here are a few of the benefits.
Give sales reps more time to sell
Studies show that sales reps spend significant time on non-sales activities. Salesforce found that sales professionals only spend 34 percent of their time selling, with the rest going to data entry, generating quotes, and finding sales content.
With a sales enablement platform, your team will be more effective in identifying and implementing more efficient processes, creating better sales enablement content, and helping reps spend more time converting leads during every stage of the sales process.
Better connections with sales prospects
A sales enablement platform lets your team track customer interactions to determine which leads are most likely to convert. Reps can see how often a proposal has been viewed, which emails are making an impact, and more.
This allows the sales team to combine data with effective sales strategies to pursue the right leads in the right way, increasing conversions, quota attainment, and overall company revenue.
A better new hire experience
Annual turnover among sales reps is as high as 27 percent, twice the rate of workers overall. One of the best ways to prevent turnover is to provide a strong onboarding experience and training process.
Effective onboarding lowers ramp time and improves employee engagement, creating a stronger bond between the new employee and the company. Using an enablement platform to train and coach new hires makes the new employee experience less stressful, helps new reps retain information, and reduces turnover by as much as 25 percent.
Alignment between sales and marketing
Sales and marketing teams may not always understand each other.
And that lack of alignment can be costly. Companies lose $1 trillion per year due to wasted efforts and lower productivity when sales and marketing are not aligned.
The good news is that sales enablement teams can make a significant difference. The 2019 State of Sales Enablement Report found that organizations with sales enablement departments were twice as likely to have formal cross-departmental collaboration between sales and marketing.
How WorkRamp’s sales enablement platform can help your business
WorkRamp is an All-in-One Learning Platform that can help you equip your sales team with the training they need to drive revenue performance and close more deals.
You can customize learning paths and certification modules for customer-facing teams to get ramped up faster and increase win rates.
Learn about how to use WorkRamp to empower your sales enablement program. Contact us for a free, personalized demo.
Complete the form for a custom demo.
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