Getting Started with Sales Enablement
53m
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B2B Enablement
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Podcast Summary
Sales Enablement is an important piece of any company's sales technology stack and getting started can look like a daunting task.
Companies who have implemented a Sales Enablement strategy outperform their competitors by a remarkable margin (Aberdeen Group)
In this podcast, we'll review a series of steps to get you and your team started with your journey.
Key Topics of the Podcast
- Who Owns It? Build Your Team - Put the right team and leaders in charge, your team is one of the most important driving factors for your Sales Enablement strategy
- Set Clear Goals & Requirements - Taking the time to analyze your company tribulations will go a long way to helping you build a sales enablement strategy that's specifically tailored to your pain points.
- Defining Key Metrics - Identify metrics that help measure the success of your project and activities
- Content Management & Organization - You don't know what you don't know. Gathering your content together and arranging it into categories like brochures, graphics, fact sheets, videos, etc. will help you identify where your deficiencies lie
- Implement a Sales Enablement Platform - Using your Goals and User Requirements, choose a platform that fits your needs + Train your teams
Resources and Links from the Podcast
Copy of the Presentation Slide Deck
Sales Enablement BluePrint
User Specification Requirement
Sales Enablement Checklist
Klyck.io Website
What is Sales Enablement
Paul Tkach's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paultkach/
Rebecca Spary's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaspary/
Dave Karr's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekarr/
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Who Owns It? Build Your Team
- Put the right leader in charge
- Ensure you choose some to lead your SE efforts, someone who has visibility into both sales/marketing efforts and can work towards aligning your teams
- Because sales enablement is more associated with the revenue-generating side of the business, we typically see the responsibility held there (Sales or Marketing leaders)
- Identify receivers & supporters
- The most likely receivers are the sales team (inside sales, outside sales, and distributors) and the most likely supporters are the marketing team
- Define respective roles and responsibilities for your Sales Enablement team to ensure your efforts are aligned going forward
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Set Clear Goals & Requirements
- Assess your current state and understand the challenges that your teams/organization are facing
- Taking the time to analyze your company tribulations will go a long way to helping you build a sales enablement strategy that's specifically tailored to your pain points.
- Establish simple but clear goals & objectives that you are trying to achieve, these typically pair with the challenges you are facing (Centralize content for teams to access, collect analytics on content engagement to understand utilization...etc)
- Collect input from stakeholders (Users/Teams) to help understand needs
- Start by deciding upon two to three reasonable goals for your sales enablement project
- These can include – but aren't limited to - better sales and marketing alignment, determining sales training needs, and insight into customer engagement
- Create a blueprint with action items to make sure you are meeting your goals and outcomes. Sometimes when embarking on a new project, it's easy to get caught up in the smaller details while losing sight of the bigger picture. By creating a blueprint and referring back to it often, you can keep your focus on smaller achievable objectives that will guide you towards your ultimate goal
- Setting goals will also help to keep your team engaged and motivated
- Establish a User Requirements Guide
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Defining Your Key Metrics
- Identify metrics that help measure the success of your project and activities
- Choose clear KPI's that help measure your goals/objectives
- Some examples of typical sales enablement metrics are: number of sales team logins to the app, number of presentations created by sales, number of content shares by sales, number of opens and engagements by prospects, number of content views by prospects, etc.
- If you have your sales enablement system connected to your CRM, you can easily start to track ROI and deal influence metrics as well. This can be done by correlating prospect engagements with closed deals and revenue dollars.
- Once you get clear on the results you want to achieve in each area, you can drill down to determine the activity and effectiveness measures which drive these outcomes.
- Remember, revenue results are important, but you can't manage them at the start of the project. However, you can manage the activity and effectiveness of your people in order to achieve those results. Starting small and measuring leading indicators is the best way to get started.
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Content Management & Organization
- You don't know what you don't know. Gathering your content together and arranging it into categories like brochures, graphics, fact sheets, videos, etc. will help you identify where your deficiencies lie
- Aggregate and identify the sales and marketing content you want teams to use
- Develop a strong understanding of how you want to organize your content for teams to access, one of the best ways to do this is to align your content with your buyers journey
- Develop the categorization for your content including a set of filters or tags (Most SE tools will include this)
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Implement a Sales Enablement Platform
- Using your Goals and User Requirements, choose a platform that fits your needs
- Ensure that the technology/platform you choose has an understanding of your goals and can help support them (Customer Success/Support)
- Get the support of the end users - Being a dictator and demanding that your sales and marketing teams start using a new tool may have adverse effects
- Encouraging these teams to come to the table with their thoughts and ideas will go a long way to helping them embrace the idea of changing their process.
- A sales enablement tool is designed to help, not hinder
- Make sure that you have someone in the organization who is capable of leading training for those teams. You'll want to create a thorough training strategy so that teams are not only trained on how to use the sales enablement tool, but also understand the process of sales enablement in the organization
The episode Getting Started with Sales Enablement from the podcast B2B Enablement has a duration of
53:44. It was first published
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[00:28:00] How has the funnel changed? How has that to hybrid selling?
Resources
LinkedIn Profile – Josh Wagner
Website – Shift Paradigm
Podcast – Love Selling Hate Sales
LinkedIn Profile – Dave Karr
Website – Klyck.io
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Resources
LinkedIn Profile – Sam Moss
Website – 1Click Agency
Podcast – B2B Made Simple
LinkedIn Profile – Dave Karr
Website – Klyck.io
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Podcast Summary
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Resources
LinkedIn Profile – John Horn
Website – StubGroup
LinkedIn Profile – Dave Karr
Website – Klyck.io
Website – HubSpot
Website – Lucky Orange
Website – Hotjar
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Podcast Summary
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Resources
LinkedIn Profile – Nick Amabile
Website – DAS42
LinkedIn Profile – Dave Karr
Website – Klyck.io
DAS42 Article – What Structure is Right for my Data Analytics Team
Klyck Article - The Power of Data and Sales Enablement
Using Video Marketing at Every Stage of the Buying Cycle
In this episode of B2B Enablement, we're going to be talking about video marketing and how you can use it throughout the entire journey for your customers. Whether you're looking to create content for the awareness stage of the buying cycle, or for use later in the funnel, video is a powerful tool.
Podcast Summary and Timestamps - Links and Resources Located at the Bottom
[00:01:21] Introduction: Drew Franklin, Marketing Communications Manager at Altec
- 10+ years of experience in the marketing arena – primarily B2B and manufacturing and tech sectors
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- Communications manager at Altec leading the content team
[00:02:14] Getting Started
- Video is not a fad, it is one of the best tools to drive engagement
- You can easily start creating videos today if you have a computer or mobile phone with a camera
- Start from there and scale up, you don't need to buy expensive or fancy equipment to get started
- Use what you have – don't forget, there are also free tools at your disposal like Vidyard to help
[00:06:00] Production and Tools
- Start where you can with what you have
- Consider mics, lights, and cameras to help create a better environment when creating content
- Links to Drew's suggestions can be found in the resources section at the bottom of these notes
[00:12:20] Content Distribution
- Create content once and distribute forever by dividing that content up into multiple formats (IE Webinar can be spliced into audio clips and also a brochure)
- Empower your reps to post videos on social
- Get your message out organically using traditional mediums where you customers are (LinkedIn, other social platforms, google…etc)
[00:17:00] Importance of Video & How it Can Be Effective
- Video can be diversely used for a range of different use cases
- Not only for marketing – sales, customer service, customer success, everyone can use it
[00:18:00] Personalization
- When possible, create personalized videos to increase engagement and response rates
- Do some research on a specific individual or posts that they've done on LinkedIn and try and drive some engagement – can be difficult if you try to scale up because you're creating videos at 1:1 ratio for each prospect
- When you need to use video to scale, consider using what you already have (webinars, podcasts, etc.) and chop it up into small chunks for your sales reps to use as touch points in their outreach
[00:29:00] Distribution Tools
- Three main tools you need
- Video creation software (eg. Vidyard or Wistia)
- Sales engagement software to distribute the videos (eg. SalesLoft or email)
- Sales enablement software to track content engagement (eg. Klyck.io)
[00:38:30] Scripts and Messaging
- Ask questions – assumptions are dangerous
- Don't make a video assuming something about your prospect, ensure you know them so you can tailor your content to them
- Try asking questions that lead to answering pain points
- Messaging can be a case-by-case situation
[00:44:30] Hardware and Infrastructure
- Drew shares a host of tips, tricks, and suggestions on how to select and use video hardware. From basic setups, to more advanced production rigs, he shares his thoughts on what you need to be successful.
- List of hardware resources is included below.
Resources and Links from the Podcast
Video Audio & Lighting Kit – Starter Budget
Video Audio & Lighting Kit – Next Level
Video Audio & Lighting Kit – Professional Level
Wistia – Down and Dirty DIY Lighting Kit
Wistia – Editing Basics for Business Video
Predictable Revenue – Chain of Relevance
Klyck.io Podcast - Video Marketing - Why B2B Businesses Need a Strategy
Klyck.io - Sales Enablement
Tools and Software
Canva
Descript
Adobe Premiere
SalesLoft
Vidyard
LinkedIn Profiles for our Guests
Drew Franklin's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewdfranklin/
Paul Tkach's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paultkach/
Dave Karr's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekarr/
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