How to Build Sales Enablement Sellers Will Actually Use

Sales enablement is key to successful selling, regardless of your industry or target market segments. It sounds obvious, yet through my 20+ year product marketing career I’ve seen those conducting an enablement program often forget why it’s needed: to enable sellers to efficiently and consistently win deals. 

When I think back on the most effective and successful sales enablement sessions, all share a few key aspects.

1. Present a Message and Customer Value Proposition That Is Clear, Focused, and Easily Repeatable

Too often an enablement program – and the resulting customer pitches – end up being a laundry list of product features. Instead of focusing on the technical what or how, stress the why. Why should a customer purchase the product? Focus on the value or ROI the customer receives and the problems you are solving for the customer.

• Best Practice:  Keep the primary enablement pitch straight-forward and concise, focusing on no-more than three positive outcomes for customers. Provide an equally concise pitch deck that is equally concise (maximum 10-12 slides maximum) that sellers can fine-tune for their specific customer. 

If your positioning is still being shaped by feature velocity rather than strategic differentiation, this post on product positioning strategy is worth a read before your next enablement.

2. Identify and Confirm the Target Audiences of Users and Key Decision-Makers

It’s critical to help sellers identify and cultivate internal allies, but also to understand the purchase processes within their customers (aka who they’re really selling to). Sellers frequently focus on the users of their product or service, only to find out that they don’t own the budget or can’t make key purchase decisions. 

• Best Practice: Adopt a set of clearly defined, simple personas to help your sellers identify who has the buying power within the customer’s organization.

Note that these personas shouldn’t go into significant detail on use cases. These should come in supplemental materials or follow-up sessions – see the section below.

3. Provide Additional Resources for Sellers

The core message and pitch-deck are essential for a successful sales enablement, but it doesn’t stop there. You need additional resources available –both content that can be shared and access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – for the seller and the customer who is ready to learn more. Most importantly, sellers need to be able to easily find these materials. If it takes them more they can’t find it in less than 15 seconds, they’ll assume it doesn’t exist. Keeping those resources current is just as important as creating them. This post on product marketing asset management covers how to build a system that prevents materials from going stale.

• Best Practice: Prior to the enablement, create content and specific sales plays to support various sales motions. This will allow different sellers to leverage different motions, playbooks, and supporting materials based on their own unique area(s) of focus, customer maturity, and stage of the customer buying journey.

Even with additional resources available, not every question will be covered. One effective approach I’ve seen – and employed myself – is to schedule “office hours” in the days & weeks following an enablement to answer additional questions or discuss parameters of specific deals. 

4. Create Buy-In and Leverage Front-Line Sales Managers (Prior to Enablement Events)

Front line sales managers are a tremendous resource and ally for product marketers conducting sales enablements. Front line managers are not only instrumental in reiterating the information provided during an enablement. As experienced sellers themselves, they’re an invaluable sounding board for what does and doesn’t work with both customers and sellers. 

• Best Practice: Cultivate your own “advisory board” of sales leaders and review enablements with them for the critical and key insights prior. 

5. Provide “Air Cover” by Sharing Your Higher-Level Corporate Strategy, Including Marketing Campaigns

The point here is to show sellers there is organizational support behind their ongoing efforts – or “air cover” for their “boots-on-ground” sales efforts. This can be a few minutes in the overall enablement, but is key to helping sellers understand the organization’s overall business strategy and frame the context of the specific enablement. At the very least, it reinforces that  the organization has their back. This is particularly important for annual SKOs or major product launch enablements, where strategies and priorities may be changing or evolving dramatically.

• Best Practice: Share any significant marketing campaigns – whether full-blown, omni-channel brand campaigns or even simple lead gen efforts with sellers. If you are introducing a major brand campaign or significant product launch, this is the perfect time to preview exciting creative and media plans. Seize the opportunity to excite and hype your sellers!

6. Spend Some Time on Your Internal Deal Approval Process

This might be the least exciting part of an enablement, but it’s important to touch on. Take a few minutes to explain, clarify, or simply reinforce the key steps required to get deals approved and closed. Nothing is more frustrating for a seller –or your customer – than unexpected roadbumps or last-minute friction in getting a deal closed. 

• Best Practice: Outline the standard approval process clearly,  then walk through the paths for exception handling and approvals. Trust me, there are always exceptions to even the most straightforward (at least to the product marketers!) pricing and packaging guidelines. Make it easy for sellers to know exactly where to go and what to do when those situations arise.

7. Emphasize “What’s in It” for the Sellers

The most effective sales enablements also speak to the sellers themselves and address what’s in it for them. Sellers are typically highly motivated, incentive driven people. Just as you expect them  to explain how your product or service solves a customer’s problem, you need to explain how this effort  helps solve sellers’ #1 problem: getting paid. 

• Best Practice: Conclude your enablement by clearly showing them how whatever you are enabling them on will impact their pocket book.

8. Keep It High Energy, Interesting, and Fun

Even if attendance is mandatory, your sellers shouldn’t experience your enablement as detention or tedious traffic school. It should feel like a dynamic opportunity to learn, grow, and walk away better equipped to perform their roles. 

Most importantly, enablement shouldn’t be treated by sellers or product marketers as a one-time event. It’s a springboard to an ongoing dialog and feedback loop. Successful organizations spend as much – or more – time reinforcing and optimizing what was delivered as they do creating the initial enablement. 

At the end of the day, that’s what product marketing is all about: helping optimize the performance of your business.

Contact us to explore how Aventi Group can help you build a sales enablement strategy that drives measurable business impact.

Written By

Mark Maxwell

Mark Maxwell is a product marketing consultant and experienced product leader who specializes in "zero-to-one" product launches and sales enablements. A veteran of both startups and publicly traded companies, he's held roles spanning product marketing, product management, business development, and general administration at Yahoo!, Adobe, Military.com, and Ooma, Inc., to name a few. When he's not helping craft messaging, thought leadership, and sales enablement programs, he enjoys playing the guitar, raising dahlias, and traveling the world with his wife and three sons.