Picture your sales team delivering deal after deal, humming like a well-oiled machine. Shorter sales cycles, increased productivity, and seamless alignment with other departments become the norm. While this may seem like a pipe dream, an effective sales enablement strategy can bring you closer to this ideal than you may think.
A well-constructed sales enablement strategy increases efficiency, drives revenue growth, and prioritizes customer retention. If you haven’t perfected your sales enablement strategy yet, now is the time to refine it. Explore what makes an effective strategy and learn how to build one that empowers your sales team to succeed.
Elements of a good sales enablement strategy
A good sales enablement strategy supports the sales team with tools and processes that help them perform at peak velocity. That includes software tools, cross-functional communication, product documentation, and anything else your sales team uses to do their jobs. Effective sales enablement empowers your team and motivates them to close more sales, which is especially important in the face of employee drag.
According to Gartner, “drag” is the feeling of demotivation away from work, and 83% of sellers experience high or medium drag. If your sales team struggles with drag, they’ll be unfocused at work and less likely to take initiative, collaborate with other teams, and convert sales prospects—all of which impacts your bottom line. To drive results, you need highly engaged sales team members who are motivated to get the win.
Vague, unactionable manager feedback and administrative burden are two of the most common factors Gartner identified as contributing to drag. A good sales enablement strategy counters drag with a variety of techniques:
Consistent team training with specific, actionable feedback from sales managers
Easily accessible resources, such as price lists, whitepapers, case studies, and buyer personas
Real-time performance metrics for every point in the sales cycle
Customer tracking and engagement, mapped to the buyer’s journey
Streamlined communication tools
It’s not only salespeople who benefit from sales enablement strategies. A Sales Enablement PRO report by Highspot found that companies with sales enablement strategies had win rates nine percentage points higher than companies without them.
Companies found the greatest success when putting customers at the center of those sales enablement strategies. Sales engagement technology contributes to that success, and companies using it are 46% more likely to have increased their win rate.
Sales engagement technology personalizes the customer experience and provides easy access to critical resources they need to make decisions during the buying process. Engagement technology includes interactive elements like digital sales rooms, but it can also be as easy as creating personalized video messaging with a sales video tool like Loom.
Loom’s screen recorder comes packed with more than a suite of video editing tools. You can record both your screen and your webcam so that prospecting videos include your face, body language, and tone of voice.
Plus, features like Variables can save you time in your sales outreach by helping you personalize communication without recording an individual video for each customer. Using Loom’s Variables feature, you can record one video and then replace the personalizing variables like first names or company titles with AI.
So, you can swap out the name “Jack” for the name “Jill” without recording a new video. The new name will read in your voice, all thanks to the power of AI.
Loom also integrates with your existing sales tools like Salesforce and easily embeds into emails and customer service tools like Zendesk. Use Loom’s video analytics and Engagement Insights to hone your overall sales enablement strategy.
6 key elements for an impactful sales enablement strategy
If you’re building a sales enablement strategy from the ground up, there are six elements to factor into your design.
1. Reliable data and analytics
Data is at the heart of any good strategy because it guides your sales enablement efforts. Your team should actively monitor and analyze performance metrics and share these insights across teams, no matter where your data lives.
For example, if the data reflects a particularly high number of customer complaints, you may need to address a deeper issue. Are sales team members presenting accurate information? Is the communication timeline too long? Do customers have access to support content post-purchase?
Loom can help you create and streamline support content. Your team can easily access sales enablement resources in their Loom Library to keep up to date on product knowledge and SOPs.
They can record demos, explainer videos, or personalized introductions and send them through multiple channels. Plus, Loom AI eases the editing burden by generating captions, segmenting longer videos into chapters, and even deleting filler words and pauses in your video recording. The result? Customers receive polished, professional resources every time.
2. Well-integrated tech stack
Your average company might have a tech stack, but that doesn’t mean all the tools play well together.
Well-integrated software platforms can seamlessly transfer information to various stakeholders and increase visibility. Before you add any new platform to your tech stack, ensure it works with the other tools you use daily.
Integration is particularly important for data sharing. Since data guides strategic decision-making, you need the ability to easily share and integrate data insights into all the parts of your sales enablement process. For example, your CRM needs to integrate with your sales forecasting tools, and both need to work with your business intelligence tools to give you a holistic view of sales performance.
3. Regular team training
The best tools in the world won’t do much good if your team doesn’t know how to use them. Regular employee training ensures that your team knows what tools and information they can access and how to integrate the insights into their daily work.
Your tech stack should also support you here. Sales training doesn’t always have to be an in-person meeting or a day-long seminar. Messaging platforms like Slack, or video training software like Loom, are easy ways to give your sales enablement team asynchronous training and consistent reminders about best practices. Fill your Loom Library with bite-sized clips and SOPs so your sales team can autonomously refresh their skills and product knowledge.
4. Cross-functional collaboration
Despite the name, sales enablement strategies affect more than just sales teams. Any customer-facing team can benefit from a sales enablement strategy since everyone is working toward the same goals of driving sales, boosting revenue, and increasing customer retention.
Sales enablement strategies especially affect marketing and customer service teams, making cross-functional collaboration necessary. Siloed teams can’t share information, brainstorm problems, and align their focus toward the same goals.
If you don’t have consistent interaction between teams, you’ll need to find ways to build it. That might be through scheduled training sessions, established processes with built-in checkpoints, or team activities. Aside from the more formal methods, you can also support team communication with tools like Slack or Teams and more engaging and dynamic messaging tools like Loom.
Loom lets team members record asynchronous video messaging for easy, convenient collaboration. It’s a great way to encourage team interaction without adding more meetings to the calendar. Loom also lets you include files and links so sales team members can find the right resources straight from each video.
5. Ongoing monitoring and revision
No strategy is perfect. Ongoing monitoring and revision are essential parts of a long-term sales enablement strategy. Build regular check-ins into your plan to ensure your team can stay on top of changes and adapt quickly.
For example, establish a recurring monthly meeting—or monthly update recorded with Loom—for higher-level sales leaders and marketing managers. Define which KPIs you’ll discuss, including conversion rate, sales cycle length, and win rate.
Compare sales performance to the objectives mapped in your established sales enablement strategy to assess which parts generate results and which elements you should adjust. Here are a few situations to monitor:
The marketing team may need to create additional visual assets.
Customers may need frequently asked questions answered with a series of Loom recordings.
The sales team may need to reference new product features for a high-value buyer persona.
The frequency of email follow-up in your sales cadence may need to be more frequent, or simply more engaging.
Follow up these meetings with team-wide communication to deliver key takeaways and announce any changes.
How to build a sales enablement strategy for your team
Once you’re ready to start building, follow these five key steps to assemble and sustain your sales enablement strategy:
1. Understand your existing process
Ideally, data and analytics guide most decision-making for sales enablement strategies, but there are some things you won’t find in the numbers.
Before you dive headfirst into development, make sure you understand how existing sales processes function. Talk to sales team members, sales leaders, and executive leadership. Involve members of other customer-facing teams, like marketing and customer service. Get a holistic view of current methods before you make sweeping changes.
2. Establish goals and KPIs
Once you understand your sales team’s current position, you can identify what needs to change.
Define the goals of your sales enablement strategy and the metrics your team will meet to accomplish them. Do you need a shorter sales cycle? How much shorter, and how long will it take to get there? Your win rate may be too low. How high should it be? What’s your expected timeline?
Use the SMART format to make your goals more tactical.
3. Get buy-in from leadership
Sales enablement strategies aren’t free. You’ll need a budget for sales enablement software, and potentially new hires or compensation changes. You’ll also need to use resources from other teams as support. None of that will happen without buy-in from executive leadership.
Once again, data should be your guide here. Demonstrate what’s not working within your current sales process and show how your enablement strategy will address these pain points. Give concrete timelines and KPIs and detail how leadership can monitor progress through the improved tech stack. Leadership teams need visibility into the process and confidence in the project's business impact before they’ll support it.
4. Assign ownership
Sales team members can’t be the only ones supporting a sales enablement strategy over the long term. Stakeholders on other internal teams must own various parts of the process. Define who will own which parts of the strategy and get buy-in from those other teams before you attempt to implement your sales enablement plan.
Many teams create a sales enablement charter to finalize who owns what and explain how the program will run. A charter details a few different things:
The overall goal of the sales enablement strategy
Priority areas the team will focus on
Any known challenges or obstacles
Metrics for success
Team roles and responsibilities, including communication processes
Everyone involved in your sales enablement strategy should have access to the charter, but it’s especially important for higher-level sales managers to read and monitor. They’re the ones responsible for delivering department-wide sales outcomes.
6. Create a monitoring plan
To ensure the sales enablement strategy works and hits its benchmarks, you’ll need to conduct short- and long-term monitoring. Decide in advance how often you’ll report on progress, which metrics you’ll pay the most attention to, and how you’ll communicate findings and obstacles to other stakeholders.
Implementing your sales enablement strategy
Sales enablement strategies have many moving parts. Implementation likely won’t happen in one fell swoop, but here are a few tips to make it easier.
Develop a rollout plan
A rollout plan will specify which changes will happen and when. This gives both leadership and internal teams transparency into the implementation process, letting your sales team members know what parts of their workflow will change.
Conduct regular team training
Not everyone loves change, and implementing a sales enablement strategy often involves tons of it. Your sales team might face some obstacles as they adapt. You might need to change various tools used in your tech stack, or you may need to introduce team collaboration processes that didn’t exist before.
A team training program can help with managing change. Your team should understand each new tool or process as it’s introduced and have clear expectations for using these resources.
You can use Loom to create custom training videos and distribute them to your team. Loom lets you record both yourself and your screen to humanize asynchronous training. You can also check Loom’s Insights Hub to view analytics and confirm that everyone has watched mandatory training videos.
Give specific, ongoing feedback
Since vague, unactionable feedback is a source of drag for sales employees, make sure your team gets specific feedback throughout the strategy rollout and beyond. Regular coaching can help struggling performers and identify high-performing employees who can be role models for other team members.
If you have a remote team that works asynchronously, delivering coaching and feedback might be harder. Loom videos make it easy to walk employees through the steps of a task or annotate images to point out areas for improvement. Loom can also convert videos to SOP documents so you can create a comprehensive knowledge base for the sales team and reduce future mistakes.
Loom supports an effective sales enablement strategy
Loom enables sales teams to create personalized, on-demand video content to humanize the sales process and engage customers.
When your sales enablement strategy includes a knowledge base brimming with resources, clearly defined goals, and robust tools for team alignment, your sales team can confidently tackle the sales pipeline. They can establish credibility and trust with prospects and existing customers with polished, engaging sales assets and customized Loom videos that add a personal touch.
Elevate your sales enablement strategy with Loom.
