Sales enablement is a fast-growing service offered by many marketing agencies, but we want to dive deeper into how agencies like yours can better embrace this practice internally to improve sales. As agencies face the challenges of scaling their sales efforts and improving conversion rates and ROI, they’re increasingly seeking out tools and strategies to raise the ceiling for what their sales professionals are capable of. And in that search for the best sales enablement tools, there is no shortage of options that can deliver value to your sales efforts.
Innovations in business technology have contributed to huge growth in the sales enablement market, and that growth is projected to continue over the next few years. In fact, the global market size for sales enablement platforms is expected to rise from $1.1 billion in 2019 to $2.6 billion by 2024, according to MarketsandMarkets.
As a result, today’s marketing agencies are facing a buyer’s market when seeking out the right solutions to support their sales efforts. With so many market entrants competing for your business, you can afford to be picky when choosing enablement platforms that will take your sales performance to the next level.
But which enablement tools are essential to your sales team? Which tools will give you better visibility into your entire funnel? Here are five core solutions that will benefit any marketing agency.
1. CRM
No sales enablement strategy is possible without a customer relationship management platform. This solution serves as a hub for both marketing and sales, centralizing data, tracking engagement, storing prospect contact information, and managing the sales pipeline.
Having a single source of truth for customer data is essential, especially as organizations scale their sales efforts, because of how easily a disorganized sales department can yield lower productivity, squandered opportunities, and less revenue.
But a CRM offers even more value to sales enablement than the features and tools offered within its platform. As one of the central solutions in any sales and marketing technology stack, the CRM integrates with many other sales solutions to collect and share data, elevating the performance of other solutions within your stack. For this reason, it’s hard to understate the value of a CRM to any sales enablement efforts.
2. Outreach automation and tracking
If your agency is serious about scaling its sales efforts, automation is key. Automation helps you generate more points of contact with prospects than you could realistically manage with a fully manual sales process. And, in many cases, automation also offers added efficiencies by optimizing the timing of outreach efforts and generating a bunch of data points that can power deeper, more valuable insights to guide your sales strategy in the future.
Automation and tracking can be deployed across many different sales engagement channels, including phone calls, email, text, direct mail, and other channels used to interact with your sales targets.
With automation tools as part of your sales enablement tool kit, you can increase productivity at the individual and team level and optimize selling strategies to improve results, whether you’re talking face to face with a prospect or engaging with them through these automated channels. With automation and tracking, you can directly enable your sales team to accomplish more than ever before.
3. Process and workflow automation
Managing the sales process is just as crucial to success as the sales engagement efforts taking place on the front line of your department. Better management of the sales process and workflows can unlock new efficiencies for your sales team.
One of the best sales enablement tools you can incorporate into your business is a sales management solution that automates some of these processes, ensuring that the pipeline moves efficiently and that sales personnel and resources are used wisely. Simple process and workflow automation allows sales professionals to focus on the demands of their jobs by alleviating the administrative demands placed on the sales professionals. For example:
- Tasks can be managed and automated.
- Reminders can be triggered either manually or automatically.
- Follow-ups in the sales process can be automatically delivered to help sales staff stay on top of each prospect they’re targeting.
Meanwhile, workflow automation data can be used to generate valuable insights about how your sales team functions. You’ll have an easier time understanding how and why bottlenecks are occurring, where your sales team needs better training and support, and how to better utilize resources and channels to drive better results. Process and workflow automation provides direct support for sales professionals, and it improves visibility for sales managers to improve the entire department’s performance.
4. Sales resource library
A sales resource library is a great centralized asset that sales staff can use to engage clients faster and with greater efficacy. Whether your sales team is looking for email templates or other sales content, such as phone scripts or battle cards to guide conversations regarding your top competition, a modern sales resource library makes it easy to store these resources in an easy-to-access place, keeping them organized and available whenever they’re needed.
A cloud-based sales resource library can also extend access beyond your office walls, supporting sales staff when they’re working remotely or traveling to meet with top clients. Sales managers can update this library over time, adding new templates, scripts, and other information that will help sales professionals put their best foot forward.
5. Reporting and analytics
Everyone likes the sound of analytics and data-driven insights. But sales teams generate a lot of data. In order to get value out of these insights, the information needs to be distilled into an easy-to-understand format — especially when you’re conveying this information to executive decision makers at your agency.
In this sense, reporting and analytics go hand in hand. After analytics generates meaningful insights that can enhance and optimize your sales performance, reporting organizes this information to provide the best visualization and rendering of sales performance, guiding strategic decision-making in the pursuit of better future results.
A good reporting and analytics platform will offer the ability to segment information and insights according to a number of different criteria, including specific time frames, as well as easy-to-use drill-down capabilities.
Sales enablement success goes beyond technology
These sales enablement tools combine forces to provide a critical final component of successful agency selling: communication. Although it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing sales performance on an individual basis, the reality is that sales is a collective effort. The rise of sales enablement is a reflection of this reality, improving collaboration and support within a sales department to elevate performance metrics and deliver more value to the organization as a whole.
It’s important to keep in mind, though, that sales enablement isn’t limited to the sales department itself. The best sales enablement tools deliver value through their ability to improve communication between sales and marketing, sharing important information and insights that sales professionals can use to improve their outreach and selling strategy.
Likewise, it’s important for executive leadership to understand the value offered by the best sales enablement tools. Through a combination of professional sales staff, a team-oriented culture, and the latest and greatest sales technology available on the market, your marketing agency can build a foundation for improved sales performance that continues to build on its own success well into the future.
Sales enablement tools are essential to your agency’s tech stack. For more information on building and maintaining a high-performance suite of solutions at your agency, check out our new Tech Stack Guide.
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