Sales enablement tools can be your best friend in the office and the perfect personal assistant. They remember the things you forget, give a helping hand with that mountain of follow-up emails you need to send, and keep tabs on what your most valuable prospects are getting up to.
Interactive dashboards can provide pipeline clarity, while automation workflows take care of those repetitive tasks that eat away at your time. You're likely to see a positive impact on day to day activities as a result, and your pipeline will be busy, well organised and profitable.
All good news! But where are the facts, I hear you ask.
Let's assume that the average salesperson works Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. I know, I bet some of you reading this are yelling out in disbelief that a salesperson can actually finish at a decent hour – trust me though, read on and you'll see how!
After some calculations, that works out to around 42.5hrs a week spent in the office. Now take away lunch breaks, coffee runs and water cooler gossip, and you have around 37.5hrs a week.
But where does most of that time go? Writing emails, putting together to-do lists, writing notes and undertaking general sales admin! I'm willing to bet you've all had at least one day this month where your hours seem to get frittered away on millions of minor tasks, and before you know it the office is emptying out.
What's more, the sales process is steadily becoming more complex, according to the most recent State of Sales Enablement study from Highspot. In fact, 64.5% of respondents claimed to be experiencing increasingly complex sales processes, with this trend most pronounced among large companies. This could mean even more steps in your sales funnel, and even more fiddly little tasks for you to contend with.
Luckily, sales enablement tools can help to tackle this issue and help your team concentrate on selling!
Sales enablement can take all those mundane daily tasks and automate them for you, and saving a heck of a lot of time and effort. This can also give you a ‘helicopter view’ of all your pipeline activity.
For instance, using HubSpot’s Sales tool gives me the ability to automate emails through sequences, templates and personalisation tools.
Imagine coming into the office with a pre-set ‘to-do’ list! As Six & Flow’s Business Development Manager, that’s exactly what I do – HubSpot generates a list of leads for me to call based on their activity and when they entered our CRM. I’m able to rank leads based on score to make sure those ‘hot’ leads aren’t missed, and set sequences to send to those I can’t reach on the phone, all with the click of a button – simple!
Prior to using sales enablement tools, I was manually writing emails on the back of every voicemail, phone conversation and outreach. They were all very similar, but I still wrote them from scratch every time. Now, using HubSpot’s template tool, I can personalise pre-set emails in half the time.
Another of my favourite tools within the HubSpot sales package is the meeting link tool. This does away with the back-and-forth of finding a free date in the diary, and replaces those annoying ping pong emails with a quick link to my diary that lets the recipient book a time that works for both of us. Just like this – ‘insert meeting link’.
In my own personal experience, the meeting link tool has increased conversion while decreasing sales cycle and unnecessary emails. What a result!
One of the biggest push backs I hear when talking to prospects about templates, sequences and automating the sales process is the fear of losing the personal touch. That doesn’t have to happen though - you can use personalised fields within templates and edit them slightly for each prospect, avoiding having to write the whole email fresh but maintaining plenty of flexibility.
Using the tools within sales enablement, you can stay on top of your pipeline and spend time doing what every sales or business development person is best at – selling!
As a result of this, Highspot found that companies with sales enablement tools reported revenue increases that surpassed those of their industry peers. More than 75% of respondents using sales enablement tools reported increased sales by their company over the past 12 months. Of these respondents, nearly 35% reported sales increases greater than 25%.
So, while sales enablement tools may involve some budget outlay, it looks likely that your business will see a healthy return on investment in the near future.
If you'd like to learn more about HubSpot's sales enablement tools, get in touch with Six & Flow. We're a platinum tier HubSpot partner agency, based in Manchester but working with clients all around the UK.