Sales enablement is about empowering entrepreneurs and salespeople alike to engage the buyer. This is sales enablement 101. The buying experience needs to be at the center of all of your selling efforts. Make sure that you understand who your buyer is and the journey they are on. Next, be sure to create your sales assets and training for the buying experience.
Let’s explore these two items that are so important to the success of your business.
Your Buyer and their Journey
Understanding who your buyer is and the journey they are on takes the ability to spend a “day in the life” of your buyer. By doing this, you gain invaluable insights that enable you to engage with and help your buyer.
Let’s define the buyers’ journey. Basically, any time a person wants to purchase something, whether it’s for themselves (B2C) or on behalf of a business (B2B), they go through stages of considering the potential purchase.
The stages are:
- Awareness stage: Realization that a problem exists or the need is there.
- Consideration stage: Researching available options and solutions.
- Decision stage: Choosing a product or service.
For example, if your buyers are homeowners, they are not needing to refinance their mortgage, they need to save money. There is a difference, and by understanding your buyers’ needs, you are able to create engaging and relevant communications that will help your buyer on their journey.
As an entrepreneur and a consumer, what is your buying journey? Think about it and document your own journey. Then ask yourself, how does what I offer, help a business or person? It is always helpful to speak to existing customers and ask them questions around what were their pain points and the reasons why they chose to purchase from you to resolve the pain points. This will help you develop your “buyer persona” which will enable you to create targeted communications and sales assets. Remember, you need to design your selling process according to what your buyer needs are, not what you want to sell them.
Sales Assets and Training
When you interact with your buyer, this is referred to as a touchpoint. Touchpoints consist of a combination of content and communication. Content takes many forms, from brochures to presentations to email templates, and call scripts. Communication takes place by using the phone, email, in-person meetings, and social media.
Your primary focus is the buyer and what information they need to make a good decision. Engaging and educational materials that can be used in both print and digital are your sales assets.
These include the following;
- Case Studies/Press Releases
- Product/Service Sheets
- Presentation Folders
- Testimonials
- Slide Deck
- Explainer Video
- Interactive/Static Brochures
Sales training programs are delivered through a range of in-person and online channels, including video conferencing, webinars, videos, ebooks, and podcasts. Often, as an entrepreneur, you are the expert in your offering, but may not have a good understanding of the sales and marketing end of growing a business or the importance of customer engagement. This is the reason training is necessary to enable your efforts in creating a sustainable business.
When I speak to entrepreneurs and small business owners, I hear this all of the time; “I’m not in sales” or “I do not understand why I should be on social media.” More and more buyers are Millenials and Gen Xer’s, they are tech-savvy and independent in their research for purchases of any kind. If you are not engaging them with relevant information or not where they are looking for this information, you are not going to grow your business. That is a simple truth.
Like anything in life that you want to get good at or have a better understanding of, you learn by being taught. Whether that is self-learning going through a training program or working one on one with someone, it is what we do to improve ourselves. The sales and marketing end of your business is no different than any other area that you need to have a firm understanding of… and it is probably the most important. For the simple fact that without sales, you do not have a business, you have a hobby.
