Implementing Sales Enablement? Learn How to Maximize Your Efforts

If you’re jumping on the sales enablement boat this year, you might be wondering what you can do to put the wind back in your team’s sails. With the right strategy, the right training, and the right tools, you can bring up that anchor and set course for closing more deals.

Strategic Approach to Sales Enablement AI

Every team is unique, and their strong and weak points will vary business to business. Make sure your sales enablement strategy is tackling the problems your team is facing, and not just problems in general that sales teams face. Before you get started, take the time to come up with the right plan for your team.

Talk to the team and identify where they’re struggling so your strategy can attack the problems that will cause the most change if solved. Larger teams might consider a survey to get input from as many representatives as possible. Once you know where your team stands, set clear goals that will solve the biggest problems and create an action plan to meet them.

Optimize Sales Enablement Training

If you’re shaking things up with your strategy this year, it’s important to make sure everyone’s on the same page; although, getting everyone in a training meeting might be a feat of its own.

Sending out a team of coaches for training sessions might not be as impactful as providing online options, especially if your team is national or global. Whether it’s a pre-recorded webinar or an online class structure, giving your sales team more flexible options allows them to dedicate the time that’s best for them to take in the new strategy.

In addition to being accessible for anywhere, team members can go back to online training materials if they have a question or want to refresh or take another look at the material. Online also allows training to happen over a length of time instead of packing it all into a day or two of endless, long meetings. Have a clear set of goals to tackle in mind, but ask for ten or fifteen minutes of your sales team at a time instead of blocking off entire days.

Incorporate AI into Sales Enablement

We promise AI won’t start planning world domination if you introduce it into your sales enablement strategy. AI is used in a myriad of industries for more than asking Siri for directions to that new lunch spot, and it’s lending its power to data collection and machine learning that are helping sales teams with more than productivity.

What exactly do we mean by AI?

As with most things, AI isn’t just the personal assistant in your smartphone, or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or your business’s marketing automation platform—it’s actually all three, and more. Artificial intelligence is a broad term, generally referring to a computer’s ability to demonstrate some behavior associated with human intelligence, from reasoning and problem solving to motion and perception.

Although AI technically includes everything from the program that learned to write Olive Garden commercials to the autopilot function of a commercial airplane, the AI we encounter and use on a regular basis is a category called narrow AI. Narrow AI are the types of artificial intelligence powering your website’s chatbot, scheduling your meetings, and prioritizing your inbox. They specialize in one to a few tasks, and they’re probably not planning to take over the world anytime soon.

AI in Your Sales Enablement Strategy

Bringing AI into your sales enablement strategy can be as simple as assigning AI for administrative tasks to give time back to your sales team to build connections with qualified leads. But AI can do more for your sales team than manage their calendars.

AI is behind a data-driven approach to sales; that is, AI programs can collect, analyze, and organize data much faster than humans, and they can do it around the clock. This goes beyond chatbots who can assist website visitors at 4AM—AI powers lead qualification and lead scoring capabilities and collects your contacts’ interactions with your brand across the web and adds the data to your CRM.

Bringing programs in to do human work isn’t about taking work away from humans—it’s about making human work more meaningful. While the AI is collecting, sorting, qualifying, and scoring, it’s giving your sales team better pictures of their leads, which allows the them to focus on what leads want at each stage of their buying journey as well as the leads who are the best fit for your business.