You can easily get lost in the world of sales terminology. Similar terms can be challenging when trying to understand their key differences. Both sales enablement and sales training play an essential role in ensuring successful outcomes and encouraging service providers or sellers.
As opposed to a completely separate entity, sales enablement strategies are an upgrade from sales training. Sales enablement can empower your sales representatives by providing vital tools and strategies by bridging the gap between marketing and sales.
Table of Contents
What Is Sales Enablement?
Rooting back to traditional sales training, sales enablement is a more evolved hybrid. It aims to increase productivity through sales adoption, implementation, and optimization through a systemic approach. The result will be a positive buyer experience because your sales team will begin to operate effectively and efficiently.
To achieve this, sales enablement mainly focuses on:
Adoption of technology
Due to constraints in resources or time, you may have some useful sources of technology that you have failed to integrate. There is a wide range of analytical tools and applications in the market necessitated by the need to calibrate the cohesiveness of marketing and sales increases.
For instance, you can get A Detailed Comparison of Seismic vs Highspot vs Showpad vs Bigtincan report to help you make better decisions. You can easily manage interactions with clients and implement social selling techniques through CRM systems and social media platforms.
Sales system performance
You will most likely find defunct processes or holes that need a little tweak or even a full reconstruction if you audit your current CRM or any other sales management platform. This is important in developing a synergistic and healthy sales-marketing environment.
Most marketers agree that the top challenge they face is proving the ROI of marketing. However, they can boost and quantify marketing ROI by focusing on the sales lifecycle.
Implementation of central content library
A major challenge for marketers is the failure to use content created for sales. Your reps should easily find supporting training materials and gain information about the organization’s services and products. You will notice an improvement in sales opportunities if you strategically align your resources and actions.
Data analytics
Is your sales department receiving good leads? You should receive some insight into your operations’ positive and negative processes from an effective sales system. With sales enablement, you can analyze the information and make adjustments.
What Is Sales Training?
Typically, sales training entails product training and process training.
Product training
Product training ensures that your sales reps are experts on your service or product and knowledgeable enough to drive their pitch.
You can use marketing tools such as overview cards and product videos to provide quick reference rather than copious amounts of detailed information. However, you should ensure that your marketing materials are effectively transitioned and easily accessible.
Process training
Once your team is familiar with your product or service and the marketing content, they should learn how to navigate the market. Your process should be streamlined and properly communicated to users, especially if you have multiple system integrations or using a CRM.
When these systems are not adopted and implemented, you might experience disconnects between marketing and sales.
- You should consider sales training if;
- You have new sales reps who need to learn the basics of sales
- You have a specific and measurable issue you want to solve
- You have an upcoming event, e.g. a product launch
Sales enablement and sales training overlap in their objectives. However, their approaches are fundamentally different. Sales training emphasizes shifting behavior and attitude using trainers.
On the other hand, enablement shows reps about every aspect of the sales process. Enablement aims at improving reps’ performance by developing a scalable and repeatable system.
