Sales enablement is crucial in empowering your sales teams to engage effectively with customers and drive revenue growth. According to Fit Small Business, 62% of businesses have a sales enablement event or person in place. While it plays a vital role in your business growth and event success, sales enablement challenges may affect its operation and efficiency.
You must overcome these challenges to maximize the impact of sales enablement efforts and empower sales teams to achieve their targets. This guide will explore some common sales enablement challenges and how to overcome them!
What are sales enablement challenges, and how do you overcome them?
Here are some common sales enablement mistakes that you must overcome to take your business to new heights of success:
1. No Alignment Between Sales and Marketing Teams
One of an organization’s biggest sales enablement challenges is the need for more alignment between marketing and sales teams. Neither team talks to the other about the business goals or gives updates about sales efforts. This results in miscommunication and wasted sales enablement efforts, affecting your business’s overall revenue. Here’s what you should do to overcome this challenge:
- Foster Good and Regular Communication: Encourage open and frequent communication between the sales and marketing teams. This can be achieved through scheduled meetings, joint planning sessions, and shared communication channels.
- Establish Shared Metrics: Define common key performance indicators (KPIs) that align sales and marketing efforts. This could include metrics like lead quality, conversion rates, or revenue generated. Having shared metrics ensures both teams are working towards the same goals.
2. Salespeople Fail to Find Relevant Sales Enablement Content
Another one of the common sales enablement challenges is that salespeople don’t get hands-on relevant content. They often waste valuable time fumbling with content, trying to locate the right resources.
This challenge leads to wasted time, decreased productivity, and missed opportunities. Not only this, but an inefficient content search process directly impacts their sales productivity and hampers overall business growth. Let’s discuss a few ways to overcome this challenge:
- Implement Content Management Tools: You can utilize content management tools that enable tagging, categorization, and metadata to improve searchability. This ensures that salespeople can quickly find relevant content based on various criteria, such as customer persona, industry, or sales cycle stage.
According to SPOTIO, 40% of salespeople say prospecting is among the most challenging parts of the sales process. Doing this empowers sales reps to quickly and easily access the materials they need. Hence, they spend more time on selling activities, following up with prospects to maximize their productivity.
3. Not Leveraging Technology and Sales Tool and Its Solution
Technology has revolutionized everything, and the business landscape is no exception. Nowadays, businesses use modern and advanced tools to attract potential customers and be ahead of competitors. According to HubSpot Survey:
Most sales reps ranked video conferencing tools or software and Customer Relationship Management systems as the most important tools for remote selling.
Failure to leverage technology and sales enablement tools can hinder the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales team. Overcoming this challenge requires embracing and implementing appropriate technological solutions, such as:
- Evaluate and Implement Sales Enablement Platforms: Invest in sales enablement platforms that offer features such as content management, sales content analytics, sales training, and integration with other sales tools.
- Provide Comprehensive Training: Offer thorough training on the usage and benefits of sales enablement tools. Ensure your sales team understands how to leverage these tools effectively to enhance productivity, automate repetitive tasks, and access valuable insights.
4. Not Enough Transparency
Transparency is critical to every sales process as it helps build trust between the sales team and sales managers. But when there’s no transparency, it leads to miscommunication, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities within your sales process.
Without clear visibility of the actual sales activities, pipeline status, and customer interactions, it becomes difficult for the sales team to make informed decisions. Hence, you might fail to align sales efforts with organizational goals. Here’s how you can establish transparency in your organization:
- Use a Sales Enablement Platform: Centralized hub, offering real-time data, collaboration, and performance insights, enhancing transparency and enabling effective sales team management.
- Foster Open Communication Channels: Encourage regular communication between sales teams, marketing, product, and other relevant departments. This can be done through regular meetings, collaboration tools, and shared project management platforms. It ensures every department is aware of what goes into the sales pipeline and other organizational goals.
5. Content Creation Becomes Difficult
Another sales enablement challenge is that your marketing teams may find it difficult to generate more engaging content. This challenge can arise due to many reasons, including:
- Lack of updated and relevant sales collateral
- Inefficient content creation processes
- Absence of content that addresses the specific needs of different buyer personas and stages of the sales cycle
You can avoid one of these sales enablement mistakes by developing a comprehensive content creation strategy. This involves understanding your target audience, identifying their pain points and needs, and creating content that aligns with their preferences. According to Exploding Topics, 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they offer personalized experiences. So, leverage customer insights, market research, and feedback from your sales team to target potential customers and hook them to your products and services.
6. Sales Reps Fails to Sale Effectively
Undoubtedly, the success of sales enablement is measured by the ability of sales reps to close deals by offering customer-preferred services. However, customer preferences keep on changing, and not keeping up with the latest market trends may result in your sales team failing to sell effectively.
Investing in comprehensive training programs can easily overcome one of these sales enablement challenges. These programs equip your sales reps with the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed. You can also implement technologies that help them track changing customer preferences and offer regular training sessions to enhance their product knowledge, sales techniques, etc.
Conclusion
To ensure your sales enablement program runs successfully, you must know the common challenges and how to overcome them. You should organize events to capture more leads and regularly communicate with other departments. momencio is an ideal event lead capture and sales enablement platform with functionalities like lead capture, retrieval, badge scanning, e-mail follow-up, digital collateral sharing, and real-time lead engagement insights.
It empowers your sales team to make the most of their events by streamlining lead management and facilitating effective communication with prospects. Contact us now to equip your sales team with the right technology!
