
What is Sales Enablement?
1. What is sales enablement?
How do you enable sales teams? Through resources, training, and ongoing learning and support. Resources may include content, tools, and other information that helps sell your products and services to customers.
Sales enablement sits inside of your business’ broader sales management strategy. At its best, enablement is part of a multi-pronged sales approach that includes coaching, technology, and other sales strategies. Technology, like a CRM solution, can easily integrate sales enablement into your reps’ and managers’ daily workflows, and provide organization-wide access to the latest enablement materials and resources.
CRM 101: What is CRM?
Why is sales enablement important?
Sales enablement gone bad, on the other hand, can have negative consequences. At the least, poor enablement is a distraction and waste of resources. But bad enablement can actually negatively impact your bottom line by driving poor sales performance, whether through using the wrong trainings, delivering out of date content, or leaning on the wrong strategic vision.
Sales enablement is more than just teaching your sales teams about your products, your value proposition, or even how to sell. It’s about enabling salespeople to bring in more business. Enablement helps by accelerating your sales teams’ credibility with your customers and building relationships that will strengthen over time.

Modern buyers are more informed and empowered than ever, and approaches to sales and marketing have to keep up with the times. They want more than a good product at a fair price — they’re looking to build a relationship with a sales rep they trust to provide the insight to help them with their purchasing decision. Selling has become more consultative and less transactional.
Sales enablement helps sales organizations keep up with evolving buyer expectations. Enablement gives your sales teams the tools and content they need to guide prospective customers through their buyers’ journeys. Digital technology makes it easy to create and adapt marketing materials to support new products and campaigns, and to distribute them anywhere and at any time. Between the prevalence of sophisticated buyers, increased competition, and the rise of the work-from-anywhere digital economy, sales enablement is a must-have.
Why should your marketing team care about sales enablement?
Most of the time, sales enablement is a joint venture between marketing and sales. Marketing teams provide sales reps with articles, videos, product guides, and a wealth of other content to help prospects and customers make informed buying decisions. Sales teams, in turn, give feedback to their colleagues in marketing to inform more effective content strategies going forward.
We’ll get a bit more into the specifics of how sales and marketing work together on enablement in the next section.
2. How do you succeed in sales enablement?
Goal Setting
Viewing sales enablement as a holistic part of greater organizational goals helps create company-wide alignment. It also helps create a broader sense of purpose for everyone involved in creating, delivering, and taking the enablement. Ideally, enablement should help sales reps develop new skills and fuel career growth while also supporting specific product, sales, and business goals.
Create strategic goals with V2MOM
Communication
Sales enablement leaders also need to embrace the role of lead scheduler, as mentioned above. This means communicating not only with their teams and salespeople, but also with product and marketing managers, regional sales leaders, and company leadership. Salespeople have plenty on their plates already without being told to chase every last assessment, certification, and 12-week course for vanity’s sake. Clear communication in this regard can help ensure that enablement activities are prioritized to fit in with the larger individual and company-wide journeys.
Time Management
Content Creation
Content Organization
Before you make anything new, take stock of the content you already have. Conduct a content audit to gather all of your company’s materials in one place, pulling from across your website, other public-facing channels, and internal marketing and enablement repositories. From there, you can start to identify holes, overlaps, and other needs in your content strategy.
You may be surprised at how much content is already on the company website, ready to be refreshed and repurposed. Investing in a sales content management system can really pay dividends when it comes to organizing existing content and planning new content strategies. Be sure to look for a system like Highspot that’s built specifically to support enablement, and not a content management system (CMS) designed for web publishing or other uses. Enablement-specific content management systems are designed with sales activities — including alignment across sales and marketing — specifically in mind.
Content Types

Common content types include:
- Case studies
- Customer stories
- Product demos
- Product slide decks
- Whitepapers
- Ebooks
- Pricing information
- Competitive intelligence briefs
- Videos
Content Distribution
Amongst the many benefits of digitizing your business is how much easier it is to share content electronically as compared to dealing only in printed sheets of paper. Hosting digital content in an online repository like Highspot, that’s designed to support enablement makes it just as easy to share a document with your sales team as it is to send a copy to a customer or promote it via social media.
When your content is online and accessible to your team, it’s ready to be used and repurposed whenever you need it. For example, a collection of content created for an enablement training can remain online and accessible by sales reps after the training. A rep already familiar with the documents might later share the right ones with a prospect during a sales meeting. Your marketing team might also share some of the content as part of a buyers’ journey, or repurpose it for a blog post teased via LinkedIn. Digital content distribution not only widens your possibilities, it makes it much easier to put them into motion.
Learning and Development
What does that mean for sales enablement? It means you need to fit your modality to your audience. Some of your sales reps — younger ones, in particular — may be fully comfortable with virtual training, self-paced learning, and navigating online content repositories to find the right content they need when they need it. Others might prefer, or just be used to, in-person learning and working with hard copies of training materials.
The trick is making it work for everyone. Particularly relevant is the question of how to make training work when in-person isn’t an option. Work to identify your team members’ learning styles and the best practices that work for everyone.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation speaks to the broader vision of leveraging technology to reimagine the way you do business. Just as individual training and sales initiatives work best when they align with broader team and company goals, technology used to power enablement is even more powerful when it’s part of a broader infrastructure that facilitates information sharing and collaboration across the whole organization.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Sales Enablement Plan
Remember, a sales enablement plan is a living document that’s meant to evolve over time. Revisit the plan regularly, and update as needed to keep your enablement efforts aligned with how your business — and your customer base — is changing over time.
Stakeholder Commitment
Sales Enablement Team
Here’s a pro tip regarding sales enablement: When possible, always have a salesperson or sales leader deliver your trainings and other enablement activities. Why? Other salespeople will listen more carefully to an experienced sales pro than to a “professional trainer” who might not have the same firsthand experience.
3. Sales enablement best practices
Size your enablement to fit your needs
Lead from the top and be open to feedback
Build a sum that’s more than its parts

Marketing
Customer Service
Customer Service offers robust options for after-sale support that sales teams can tout as part of the overall customer experience.
IT
Manufacturing
Sales enablement supported by company-wide collaboration puts your sales teams in the best position to succeed. Enablement efforts can help drive success across other parts of the organization, as well. For instance, measuring customer content engagement during the buying process can help your marketing team plan content strategy based on what’s working and what’s not. That, in turn, helps shape future efforts across marketing, enablement, and even service and IT, depending on the types of content being delivered.
When organizations break free from silos and approach initiatives with a team mindset, the ensuing sharing of information, ideas, and feedback benefits the company as a whole. Integrating your sales enablement efforts with the work other teams in your organization are doing is a prime example of creating this sort of virtuous cycle.
4. What tools are needed for sales enablement?
CRM
Salesforce Sales Enablement
Einstein Conversation Insights
Contract management software
CPQ

Content management
Events
You might not think of events as a tool, but they definitely are. Whether they’re in-person or virtual, or in the form of classroom-style trainings or more casual meetings, events are a key part of any enablement toolbox.
Email sequencing
Mobile sales enablement
Sales training
5. Stay Aligned with Sales Enablement
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