In this episode of B2B Enablement, Paul Tkach joins to talk about sales enablement best practices and the value it can bring to B2B organizations. He shares insights and tips on how your business can use sales enablement to help improve sales and marketing alignment, increase ROI on marketing content, and deliver powerful customer insight data.
Introduction: Paul Tkach, Director of Business Development at Klyck.io (Time stamped at 1:00)
Paul has been with Klyck since its inception and has been on both the sales and customer success sides. He helps companies with their sales enablement deployment and projects. Over the last few years, he's been working to implement sales enablement solutions both locally and globally.
What is sales enablement? What is the difference between sales enablement as a function in a business and sales enablement as software? (Time stamped at 2:20)
Sales enablement enables teams to sell your products more effectively and efficiently. As a function, there are a couple of different teams and stakeholders (sales, marketing, and customer success) involved to help achieve the main goal. It's about teams coming together to figure out what empowers them to sell to your customers. In terms of sales enablement as software, it combines what's needed (training users, streamlined digital content, team alignment, collecting data) to do that into a single platform
How does sales enablement bring sales and marketing together? (Time stamped at 5:33)
There is a major disconnect between sales and marketing teams right now. Sales might not know what content is available and marketing doesn't know what content sales teams are using on the frontlines. Sales enablement allows marketing teams to know what content is being used and sales teams to know what content exists.
How does sales enablement fit in with new selling resultant from COVID-19? (Time stamped at 9:25)
Gone is the handshake. Teams are being forced to use technology that they haven't had to use before. Even before COVID, the sales landscape was changing drastically. Buyers are so much more informed than they were before. Buyers are looking at five or more pieces of content before even interacting with a seller or trusted advisor. Sellers need to have the information on hand to field questions, cross-sell, and/or up-sell.
How does sales enablement fit into how customer interactions are changing and the way that salespeople are changing? How has sales enablement changed the game? (Time stamped at 11:40)
There are two benefits: personalization and analytics/customer engagement data. Sales enablement allows you to personalize messages for every step of the buyer's journey. It also helps align the content you present with where the buyer is in their journey. When content is shared, analytics and data provide insight into how to focus follow-ups with more accurate information. You can see how often content has been opened, which content has been viewed the most, and how long they looked at each piece. This gives the seller an idea of when best to reach out again and what to focus on. Data fuels personalization. Sales can see customer engagement and marketing can see what's working and what's being looked at the most and can continue making more of it. Plus, from an administrative/managerial level, you can see what's being shared and adjust training to focus on what works or change processes depending on what's building up to opportunities.
How can sales enablement improve employee training? (Time stamped at 17:00)
Sales enablement allows you to have all of your training content in one place in your platform. Teams can navigate through that content based on filters or keywords and be onboarded faster. Using Conversations – a package of content together on a certain topic – provides a holistic view of a product or service and also includes coaches that have sold the product successfully. They can share best practices or tips via a document or recording. Identifying buyer personas empowers teams so they know who they are meeting with. They help sellers know what questions to ask and what topics are most relevant to the buyer.
How do industry leaders in sales and marketing use data created from sales interactions? How is sales enablement empowering that data creation and analysis? (Time stamped at 22:00)
The data can help identify who the best performers in the company are and what content they're using. Then they can help train the rest of the team, or provide a video or document that explains a little about their best practices and habits. Marketing can see how content is performing. They can see that a piece of content has been used X number of times and led to X number of opportunities and then they can make more of that kind of content. Marketing can see where they got the best return on investment from a content perspective. The data collected provides sales and marketing alignment.
Take-aways (Time stamped at 26:20)
Resources and links from this episode:
Klyck's Sales Enablement Best Practices eBook: Download the eBook here
What is Sales Enablement, A Beginners Guide: Link to the article
Paul Tkach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paultkach/
Dave Karr: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekarr/
Klyck.io Website: www.klyck.io