Sales Enablement Strategy: The Guide to Success in 2024 

The traditional sales enablement strategy is incomplete – it simply ignores post-sales cycles. In today’s Customer-led-growth era, Sales Enablement strategies can’t avoid the potential that post-sales data brings to upselling and cross-selling ops. How can companies adjust their Sales enablement strategy in 2024 and beyond? Let’s dive into it.

Why Do You Need a Good Sales Enablement Strategy?

Sales enablement is a cross-functional strategic practice aimed at enhancing sales outcomes and productivity through the delivery of integrated content, training, and coaching. An effective sales enablement strategy significantly influences time allocated to selling, success rates, and deal magnitude. It basically aligns sales teams and technology behind a common goal: sales success.

Just as even the greatest golfers can enhance their performance with better clubs, superior training, and a deeper understanding of the courses they play, the same principle applies to sales enablement. A highly skilled sales representative can benefit significantly from the right support and structure.

Sales enablement strategies and solutions need to revolve around the buyer’s perspective, with the ultimate aim of aiding sales professionals in identifying the right prospects and effectively engaging them throughout the customer journey. The primary objective is to eliminate any obstacles that could impede smooth interactions and create a seamless buying experience.

A good sales enablement strategy helps with:

• Creating a single source of truth for all sales resources and verticals
• Improving cross-department communication to empower sales reps
• Aligning marketing, enablement, operations, and sales teams on messaging or different messaging angles   
• Providing marketing insights to optimize ops and close deals

As per Seismic’s 2023 Value of Enablement Report, an overwhelming majority (82%) of revenue leaders admitted to using some kind of sales revenue technology, with another 88% claiming that it helps them get better results.  

Creating a Sales Enablement Strategy

Before even getting started, you need to understand where your company stands in the grand scheme of things. Your current status should determine your sales enablement strategy. Not doing so can prove to be counterproductive.

Businesses and companies typically fall into four maturity levels:

• Laggards: With these types of startups where the tech-stacks are lean, sales enablement usually involves informal processes that focus on the sales function with ad-hoc tweaks and changes to the strategy. 
• Novices: Sales enablement processes start becoming more defined here, with the main focus being on sales and marketing funnels. Basic metrics and reporting enter the picture. The go-to-market tech stack also grows.
• Performers: Sales enablement now becomes a cross-functional operation. The go-to-market tech stack integration starts becoming a thing, with companies now focusing on customer data harvesting and sharing.
• Visionaries: With these types of companies, having a sound sales enablement strategy is top priority. A well-integrated go-to-market tech stack and seamless data sharing are now mandatory requirements.

Let’s start off with the pre-sales fundamentals:

1. Define and establish your core business requirements
2. Conduct a through ICP research and decide what personas you are targeting 
3. Perform a comprehensive market research and collect prospect feedback
4. Work on persona-based messaging and create content assets accordingly

But what about post-sales? Customer retention, expansion and growth is part of the revenue game too. But the truth is, customer growth opportunities are being missed. 

Your sales enablement strategy should cover the post-sales side too.

• Analyze customer communication data from all channels
• Build advocate lists based on real time sentiment and map new opportunities 
• Map relationships in those accounts and build post-sales strategies

Only connecting the dots on the post-sales sides of things will help you turn your sales enablement strategy into a revenue enablement one. But covering so many bases in real-time manually is impossible. This is where AI can come to the rescue.

Related: How to Effectively Build Your Modern CS Tech Stack

AI is Turning Sales Enablement into Revenue Enablement

AI-tech is turning out to be a true gamechanger. 

It can turn customer communication data into true sales intelligence on upsell and cross-sell opps, automatically. It can optimize your sales enablement strategy for post-sales challenges. Our Customer Expansion: Identifying Untapped Opportunities report showed that identifying customers’ pain or identifying customers that are satisfied and likely to expand are today’s top challenges. 

With automated AI-generated insights and information, sales reps are less distracted and their communications are always in the right context. They no longer need to wait for CS teams to report on CSQLs, or dig in order to retrieve relevant information while on a call. With all important information available with just a few clicks, AI-powered solutions are perfect “sales assistants”. 

Sales teams can now:

• Trust the data they see – Use accurate and real-time communication data to get the true customer status, without filters or missing pieces. 
• Reduce sales burnouts – Improve the entire seller experience, providing teams with accurate data to optimize processes and allowing them to interact smoothly with other personas within the organization to reduce friction.
• Secure deals faster – Having access to more customer data and sentiment in real-time can help sales reps act (and react) faster to market and account changes. 
• Enjoy better alignment – Weekly communication can focus on the sales strategy on accounts rather than investigation of the events and pains of the accounts. 
• Focus on the buyer’s journey – Having access to all customer data helps look at the bigger picture. Sales enablement is no longer about just pushing prospects through an obsolete sales funnel. It’s about creating a journey.

Integrating AI into Your Sales Enablement Strategy 

AI-tech can boost your sales enablement strategy, transforming it into revenue enablement with its 360 approach. These plug-and-play platforms usually come with centralized and user-friendly dashboards for easy usage. Their automated features also help accelerate deal velocity – sales pros can now actually focus on listening rather than taking notes or filling in cumbersome reports.

Other key benefits include:

• Reducing the impact of the human factor – Sales pros can have great minds, but even they have their limitations when it comes to handling millions of data points in unbiased fashion, while also performing their daily tasks.
• Eliminating friction points – With accurate customer data being fed into CRMs in real-time, transparency and visibility also improve. This means that Sales and CSMs can collaborate better and aim for joint growth metrics.
• Improved response times – When it comes to sales, timing is everything. AI-tech helps set up alerts and notifications based on specific use cases, with AI prompts that can be fine-tuned based on prospect and lead information.

Leading customer intelligence solutions can also harness the power of ChatGPT to assist with context-driven communication assistants. Writing emails can now be fully automated, freeing up sales teams to indulge in growth opportunities. 

AI adoption in sales has risen by 76% since 2018. Don’t get left behind.