5 Ways to Strengthen Your B2B Sales Enablement Strategy

Sales growth. It’s the key to your bottom line but impossible without good strategy. Sales enablement strategies can provide your sales teams the tools they need to meet revenue goals. Yeah, sales enablement is kind of a big deal.  So it takes careful planning to ensure your strategies are perfectly set up, are able to ebb and flow, and position your teams to make the sale.

For business to business (B2B) teams and long-term sales cycles, sales enablement is even more important. Without a good plan, you risk losing the sale and potentially months of work. These five tips will help you strengthen your sales strategies and position your teams for success. 

1. Map the Buyer Journey

Good sales enablement strategies start with understanding the buyer journey. From the top of the funnel to the bottom, you’ll want to understand the buyer’s motivations, position and pain points. Take a look at past sales wins - what worked and how? Are there holes or roadblocks where leads get lost or drop off? Identify them, map them out and find new solutions. 

Depending on the complexity of your product base and sales process, you may have several buyer journeys. And to complicate things further, leads could jump journeys multiple times throughout the process based on their needs and actions. (So that’s why they call it complex sales!) But if you map out the segments correctly, you’ll be able to understand exactly what the prospect needs and when they need it. The best part? The sales teams will know exactly what actions are needed to close the sale. 

2. Build Your Toolbelt

In the B2B world, our leads are well informed before they even enter the top of the sale funnel. That means sales strategies have to extend beyond features and price points. Quality content is important to the buyer and you need to be ready to supply. 

Build your sales enablement toolbelt with actions (we call them plays) that foster connection, inform the buyer, explain solutions, and position you as the expert in solving pain points. That means sharing articles from industry experts, sharing battlecards directly comparing you to your competitors, or even asking their advice in their area of expertise.

3. Make it a Buyer-Driven Sales Process

Buyer-first mindsets are key to long-term sales cycles and B2B revenue. Your leads are educated and can smell dated sales pitches a mile away. Instead of focusing on the pitches, focus back on the buyer by explaining solutions to their problems. 

One of the easiest ways to do this is to understand the difference of benefits vs. features. For instance, your product might help automate processes - a key feature. That automation helps your customer free up their time - a fantastic benefit. Leads don’t really care about the automation, but they do care about getting the benefit of more time. When you switch the focus to benefits, your process becomes buyer-driven and more successful. 

4. Engage with Analytics

Actions within the sales enablement process should be backed by analytics. There should be tangible evidence that they work! Look at analytics throughout the journey for every action or play. What leads to sales and what doesn’t? You can get really in-depth here with stats but make sure you’re looking at data that’s useful and not overwhelming. 

Are leads reading the whitepapers you send? Are they watching the webinars? Are they sharing webinars with decision makers? Which action leads to the most sales? 

5. Position Sales for Success

Journeys, check. Tools, check. Buyer-first mindset, check. Analytics, check. What could be missing? Positioning your sales team for success involves taking a good hard look at who is doing what and when. Is Sally Sales-a-Lot your best player at building deep relationships? If so, maybe she shouldn’t be working at the top of the funnel. Inside sales teams should bring people in, but deep relationship building should be saved for further along the journey. If Alex Analytics Master is struggling with buyer-first connection, maybe he’ll shine at the top of the funnel, helping move leads into the journey or segment that’s right for them. 

Strategy planning for B2B and complex sales is essential for meeting revenue goals. Luckily, a few simple steps can help you build a sales enablement strategy that closes the loop. Learn more about positioning your sales team for success.