Sales Enablement Tools

Reaching the consumer and converting a prospect to a consumer during the sales cycle has never been more critical, but it has also never been more difficult. The long-drawn lines between traditional sales and marketing teams are blurring more and more with every new sales enablement software that is released. This has caused many leaders to ask if everyone correctly knows what the shared definition of sales enablement is. Sales enablement solutions are a dime a dozen in the market right now, but understanding what they are and what you need them for can go a long way to making the right choice and helping your team Do Better Work. To help cut down on some of the noise surrounding sales enablement tools, we have gathered information surrounding sales enablement materials to ensure that your sales team is benefitting from all this attention so you can continue being…enabled.

Sales Enablement Definition

Let’s start by taking a stab at what we think the sales enablement definition is. According to the smart people at Forrester Research, “sales enablement is the bridge between go-to-market strategy and tactical execution.” Breaking that down a bit further, sales enablement is a set of tools that allows your sales team to actually implement a plan to bring your product to the customers. As we’ve discussed before, sales enablement best practices would be to provide an amazing content management solution to your sales team so you can pass that along to clients and prospective customers during the sales process. In fact, teams that bring in content from all over the company and their industry are better equipped to do close more deals. Sound like a tall task? Don’t be discouraged yet, it’s not that hard. Sales enablement tools examples can range wildly depending on how much you’re looking to spend on software or your sales activity. Sales enablement apps may seem like easy and quick ways to get started, but if your company is planning on growing, “free” might not provide the key features your sales reps need.

Sales Enablement Best Practices

In a world where everyone wants to say they can enable your sales team to work better, sell more, and grow your company, it’s important to follow a few practices to keep things in order. First, and usually the largest room for improvement, is employee training. Not just in one area either. Sales employees need to be fluent in everything about the product. This can come in many different forms, but before you go adding too many tools to the toolbox, it’s important to understand the importance of employee training and the objectives surrounding it.

Objectives of Training

If picking a sales enablement system and distributing it to your team fixed everyone’s problems, there wouldn’t be much of a problem to begin with. The truth is, training is just as important to sales enablement as the tool itself. The importance of training can’t be stated enough when it comes to equipping your employees with the knowledge that they need to achieve their sales goals. It’s kind of like training for a 5k or training for a half marathon, you can buy new shoes, a fitness tracker, and all the headbands you can wear, but it won’t replace actually training yourself running. Simplify as much as you can while keeping it relevant to the work that you are doing as a company within your four walls. Throwing as many sales training courses and other training tools in the toolbox only leads to confusion and lost work. Bringing in outside information and opinions can be useful to a point, but integrating internal information into sales enablement increases output almost every time. To do this, you would need to invest in an online training software that you have control of. Lessonly is one such platform that allows for easy lesson creation with in-depth reporting on your entire company’s learning. However, Lessonly makes online training software something that employees actually want to instead of something they dread. When you place the focus on the learner during employee training, engagement goes up and everyone wins.

Types of Training

If you are planning on investing in sales training courses to help with sales enablement, it’s important to know the different types of training that can be implemented. No, we’re not talking about online safety training or online fitness training. Training meaning the development of your most important asset, your employees. When deciding on which type of training you need and how you plan on getting there, know that every program can work differently and might not be the right fit for two separate teams.

Personal training – Plenty of workplaces assign online personal training to employees to help learn the product, the company, and the sales process. These online training courses usually serve to increase product knowledge and sales skills.
Leadership training – Leadership training is usually more personal, away from the rest of the employees and focused on tools and skills to manage an entire team and keep them moving in the same direction.
Employee development – These types of employee training are more in-depth and are usually focused on making individual team members better at a certain topic or skill. Developing employees often takes place through additional training and coaching.

Lessonly excels in giving employees and administrators alike the autonomy to learn at their own pace. Nailing the essential knowledge can be knocked out pretty quickly with the right training software. Here you can create lessons with training quotes that can be serious or funny, depending on your company culture. We never lock down content and make your employees sit on a slide for a certain amount of time to “ensure” that they read it. Micro-managing your team in such a way is one of our three things that will not enable sales. By giving your employees the time and tools to learn the best way that works for them, you equip them with the knowledge they need to be able to excel in their position. There will be training peaks and valleys, but that’s how the process works. Lessonly allows the learner to work through these at their own pace and gives sales team leaders the ability to achieve their job title and lead.

Employee Training

Before your sales team became the hard workers that you know them to be now, they were new employees to your company. It’s critically important to onboard and train employees on your company and your culture before they can start being an enabled part of your sales team and company. Lessonly has a special place in our hearts for onboarding new hires and new employees. So much so that we made an employee training plan for best practices when you’re bringing on new people. In this employee training plan template, we show you a flowchart of common practices to make your workers feel driven, engaged, and most importantly — part of a larger team. Feel free to use these methods as a guideline for creating your own employee training programs. We are big fans of using animated .gifs and other light-hearted images within lessons to keep the feeling easy-going. Even if you are training your employees on difficult and heavy topics, having a fun picture to look back to during the midst of it can be extremely helpful. Having software specifically for employee training methods makes sense, but Lessonly really shines in that area while also providing your company a platform to learn other topics and lessons centered around business and sales.

Business Training

Sales is an integral part of business, and signing your sales team up for business training methods could help your team understand the ins and outs of their role in the process. Whether your team is selling B2B or B2C, the techniques learned from business training seminars are useful to help sales reps understand their customer, their needs, and how to articulate those. Giving the sales team a few lessons on the overall business strategy of the company makes it easier to understand why they are contacting a certain person or why to stay away from a certain industry when looking for prospects. This information isn’t always necessary to sales teams, but for those looking to invest in sales enablement tools, it’s a smart choice. Lessonly is the perfect fit for small business training, our software is personable, but scalable to grow alongside your company. Sales managers can easily create lessons that break down the sales process, sales prospects, or how to talk during a cold call. We encourage the use of multimedia in lessons and including a few business training videos certainly couldn’t hurt.

At companies of all sizes, Lessonly works even for management training. Bringing company leaders together and keeping the goal consistent across multiple departments is key to enabling sales across the entire company. But Lessonly works as more than a traditional learning management system or online training platform. Lessonly brings automated learning to the table for companies of all sizes, but it really shines for mid to large-sized companies. If your industry requires certifications of any kind, Lessonly can create scheduled and recurring assignments to ensure that your sales team gets up to speed and stays there. That’s sales enablement in a nutshell.

Sales Training Courses

One of the most direct ways to engage your team in sales enablement is to have sales training programs ready for them. This doesn’t have to mean sending the team off to sales training seminars out of the office. If you can afford these, that’s great, but know that there are other ways to train your sales team internally. Training your team on some common phrases that they might hear in connection with clients, popular sales skills from your industry, or what to say when you’re getting ready to close are all great course topics. But sales enablement means knowing more information than that. Keeping your sales team up on industry information through sales training doesn’t always have an immediate impact, but rather is an investment for down the road. And when you include input and information from other departments within your business, the sales team gets new perspectives on what they are selling and how they can do it better — which means more sales in the long run. Sales training courses online are a dime a dozen, but why not source information with context to your business, your customers, and your industry? That’s when sales enablement goes to the next level. You don’t have to rely on outside sales training companies to help get your team on the same page. It’s wasted time and money in today’s world. Implementing your own training system for sales courses is easier than ever in today’s tech landscape. Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has become more prominent than traditional training software. Instead of training someone on learning software to train your other employees, SaaS products put the power in your hands. You can make incredibly detailed lessons, all the way down to sales training courses for beginners. Lessonly allows companies to present their own sales training videos to distribute among employees, personalized and effective. By using Lessonly to create online sales training courses, assigning need-to-know lessons and training documents is easier than ever.

If you can write an email, you can create a lesson with Lessonly. We wanted to empower companies by offering a flexible SaaS solution that was focused around the learner. Management and administrators get to see how their employees are learning, and the learners get an interface and host of features that allow them to soak up as much sales knowledge as they can. Sales enablement doesn’t have to be an insurmountable mountain. Improve your team and company with Lessonly today.