Tips for Sales Enablement in startups 

Hiring and onboarding great sales people is time consuming and expensive, so here are some tips that will help you on board new sales people faster and make them more successful, so they stay longer.   

Link your content to the customer buying journey and sales process 

There is a need for sales content to support the sales people in all parts of the customer buying journey and your sales process.  

We recommend that you map your requirements for customer facing content as well as internal training content to these processes. This way you can quickly identify where there might be gaps in your current content and where you can improve the content.  

You can start the exercise by using a table in a document as illustrated below. As an example you might identify that in the qualify phase you can improve the training for how to identify the typical stakeholders for each solution you sell. And for the develop phase you need to create a ROI calculator. 

In SalesValue you can build this as a Sales playbook, as illustrated below. This allows you to make it interactive and presented in relevant context. The playbook also allows you to link content to specific activities in your customers buying journey and your sales process.  

Make it pop up where and when your sales team needs it 

The amount of information and content that is produced increases constantly and your sales team is bombarded with information, tasks and requirements.  

Therefor we recommend that sales enablement is not an one-time effort like a training session, but an ongoing process that is part of the daily activities of the sales team.  

To achieve this we recommend changing the skills development content into bite sized chunks, that can be easily read or watched when needed. As in the illustration the SPIN Selling methodology is summarized in a PDF document and specific SPIN selling questions for our solution is documented in a presentation. Both can easily be read when the sales person has an opportunity at this specific stage.  

To get the most value from the content and training we also recommend, that you make it easily available to your sales team and ideally filtered based on the relevant context. This means that when the opportunity are in the propose phase the sales person might be looking for a contract template and training for how to run a negotiation. This content should then be easily available to him.  

SalesValue works as a plugin to your CRM system, and uses the context from e.g. an opportunity or account, to present the most relevant and recommended content to the sales person directly in the CRM system, as illustrated below.  

Use the gold stored in your organization

Most startups are short on time and resources, which means that you most likely don't have a huge staff that can produce all the content that you need. And even if you do, studies shows that when marketing creates content for sales people it is often not used. 60% of the marketing content is not used according this article in Forbes.  

A better way is therefore to use the gold stored in your organization. Your sales people have most likely already produced a lot of great content that fitted there need. You should reuse this gold mine of knowledge. 

The problem is that it is often not shared, because the sales people don't have time to share it, don't know where to share it and there is not a system to turn all the content into knowledge. SalesValue solves this in a unique way by automating the knowledge sharing, and using machine learning and AI to make the content into knowledge. 

When you combine this automatic knowledge sharing with the Sales Playbook you can quickly identify where you already have content you can use or where you have content that can be improve or made generic. 

Likewise when you identify areas where you need to develop new content, you can consider to leverage the knowledge of your sales team and motivate them at the same time, by involving them in the development of the content. Read more about how to motivate your sales team in this blog. 

More to come 

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In following blogposts we will give tips on how to build specific parts of the content, e.g. how to develop a good ROI calculator.