Seven steps to successfully implement sales enablement tools

Highspot recently published reports from three leading analyst firms listing 52 companies with sales enablement technologies. Clearly, sales enablement capabilities are top of mind for many companies these days. Marketing & sales organizations are pouring more money than ever into these types of capabilities, so how do you ensure you achieve an ROI reach the goals you set for your new tool?

Concentrix Catalyst outlines the roadmap for a successful sales enablement technology implementation.

Seven steps to successfully implement sales enablement tools

1. Define the scope: Setting the “right” scope makes or breaks sales enablement implementations. Focus on initially solving for your most critical sales pain points. This will help to drive usage and adoption by creating efficiencies where your sales team has the greatest need.
2. Define the roles

• Content Owners: Owns content development – identifying and addressing content gaps and opportunities
• Sales Enablement Owner: Owns strategy, manages projects and monitors metrics related to seller productivity and deal velocity
• Sales Enablement Capability Owner: Responsible for ownership of tools and systems

3. Conduct an assessment: Develop and inventory of your content and map it against your end to end customer journey from interest to contract. Determine the value of your existing content and identify key gaps. Typically, during this step, companies discover that 80% of their content is hitting the top of the funnel, with minimum content to support them during the sales process.
4. Design the strategy: Build the process to map to the Buying Journey. Focus on developing the buyer experience by aligning content to all of the key sales touch points across the entire buyer journey. Allow sales to easily find and leverage content by Integrating it into your current CRM tool.
5. Launch and land: Train sales teams on the buying process stages, how to identify them, and what content to use in each situation. Identify champions who will be the experts on your sales enablement tool. These individuals can lead the efforts for sales adoption and performance monitoring.
6. Drive adoption: There is no ROI without usage. Build KPIs around content performance and usage. Conduct sales interviews with power users & laggards to identify best practices and roadblocks. Broadcast key capabilities and the impact to seller success.
7. Evaluate and refine: Conduct monthly review sessions to look at productivity success, content performance, and discuss how to improve or extend your implementation.  Based on feedback and metrics, make adjustments to optimize content and continue to build efficiencies and increased productivity.

Sales enablement tools provide a variety of capabilities to optimize the way that your sales team engages with customers and closes deals.  If you are considering a sales enablement platform for your organization to improve sales performance, we encourage you to utilize our roadmap as guidance in ensuring the utmost success in your investment. Please contact us for more information.

To learn more about why investing in sales enablement is critical for your business, download our ebook Making the case for sales enablement.