Best Practices for Scaling Sales Enablement in a Global Market

Success can be very subjective. Standards may differ from one person to another. What’s good for you might not align with someone else’s. That’s why it's important to assess if you are on the same footing as the people you are working with.

This is where sales enablement comes into the picture. With tight competition among B2B companies, it’s no longer just about equipping your sales team with the right tools and resources. There’s more to that.

Fortunately, you have come to the right page. Here, we are going to unpack the best practices for scaling sales enablement. With this comprehensive guide, we hope to help you assess your existing processes, effectively measure impact, and devise strategies to drive consistent sales growth.

Ready?

But First, What Do You Mean by Sales Enablement?

Strategy. Initiative. Discipline. System. These are the key concepts that encapsulate the essence of sales enablement—a strategic approach to equip sellers with initiative and discipline through training, coaching, and supplementary tools and resources for them to systematically drive in prospective buyers.

Sales enablement is the bigger umbrella that covers all activities, processes, and information design that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions—a crucial stage and highly valuable process that can result in strengthened B2B partnerships.

No, this is not just that one-time training or onboarding session. For you to arrive at the same standard of success for the company, you have to take a lasting approach—of continuous learning, regularly updating, and consistently reinforcing guidelines.

Now, this leads us to the most important part: how?

Here are the Best Practices for Scaling Sales Enablement

Through the years, the best practices for scaling sales enablement have been revised, updated, and polished—in short, they have undergone a massive restructuring to meet the needs of team members, streamline processes, and adapt to the changing market.

However, some practices have stayed and proven themselves effective. These include:

• Identifying the problem. To start with, of course, you have to pinpoint which areas in your sales process need enablement. Where is the problem? What is the problem?

There’s no use wasting time and energy restructuring everything when the already established processes are stable and working. Find the gap in your team’s performance, such as lack of product knowledge, inconsistent messaging, alignment between departments, or inefficient processes.

Identifying the problem helps you develop a targeted strategy to address it. Not only will you save a great amount of time, money, and effort, but you also get to understand why certain areas are underperforming—what caused the issue and what could be done to alleviate it.

• Setting SMART Goals. Much like the goals that you have, sales enablement goals should also be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Keep it simple and easy to internalize. In most cases, the realization of the goals is hindered by abstract and vague objectives—no wonder the team is having a hard time staying focused and getting motivated.

After identifying what’s wrong with your sales enablement, itemize the steps that need to be taken—specific steps that are doable within the given timeframe. By having the same goal, you can put together all the actionable strategies that you can do individually and as a team.

You can also make a tracker to see the progress towards the goal set. A bit of pressure can be a little helpful. So, even if some team members are working remotely, like your sales team in other countries, they will find ways to contribute and stick to the agreed set of goals. They'll come up with creative solutions to resolve concerns, such as using the best VPN with free trials if there are geo-restrictions. This keeps everyone aligned and productive, no matter where they are.

• Aligning sales and marketing teams. You’ve probably seen or heard those grumbles about the alignment of sales and marketing in the organization. The marketing department would say that sales are not using their materials properly, while those in sales also complain that the leads they are getting are no good. And like a ping pong ball, the blame goes back and forth.

But we could not let this keep going if the goal is to lead in the global market. To scale sales enablement, aligning sales operations and marketing teams is essential. Some ways to resolve this include identifying discrepancies in goals and strategies, establishing clear interdepartmental communication between teams, and regularly reviewing and updating shared objectives.

As one of the perennial problems in the organization, this entails time, adjustment, and deep understanding. Challenging but definitely possible. This part can be included in your SMART goals. What specific steps can be taken to resolve this? What would be the key indicator that this has been finally resolved? Be specific.

• Simplifying access to content. Have you considered that one reason for the lack of significant sales improvement might be that reps spend too much time searching for available materials to use? We are now in an age where time is of utmost importance to people. How can you fully enable your team members when accessing important information requires a lot of steps to follow—or isn’t even made available to them at all, leading to numerous inquiries and sometimes escalating concerns to higher positions when this could have been addressed immediately?

Remember that customers need quick responses—and the faster they get the necessary information, the faster deals get sealed. One way to streamline this is to set up a centralized content repository that is well-organized, searchable, and easily accessible. Integrate the sales process. Regularly audit the content to remove outdated materials. When doing this, don’t forget to also involve some of your reps—you’ll totally appreciate the input they’ll share.

And the list could go on. As you implement the best practices for scaling sales enablement, you will personally discover other strategies that can be helpful to your team—some will be uniquely suited to your type of business, while others might not be as beneficial and can be eliminated.

Whatever works for you, as long as these practices enhance your sales process and drive your team's success, keep refining and adapting—this is the best practice that you can implement to scale sales enablement in a global market. To see how ClientPoint can help you with both sales enablement and sales pipeline management, please schedule a consult and demo with one of our experts.