BEST PRACTICES IN

SALES ENABLEMENT

Volume One

Faster Sales Start Here

2

Sales enablement pros meet fresh challenges and opportunities every day. This guide is intended to help them make the most of both.

Our Best Practices Guides share practical insights for businesses seeking to improve their sales enablement activities. Based on our experience with many types of customers, we provide a range of suggestions for those new to sales enablement as well as for seasoned executives who wish to optimize their current investments. At the conclusion of our Best Practices series, readers will be better-equipped to drive higher sales performance through more effective and efficient sales enablement.

In Best Practices Volume 1, we share perspectives on getting started, from subject and role definition to responsibilities, strategies, and tactics. The goal of Volume 1 is to equip sales enablement pros to make informed pre-deployment decisions. Volume 2 covers multiple phases of solution development and deployment and Volume 3 focuses on optimization and proven leadership techniques.

The sales enablement landscape is changing fast, and with it the discipline itself. Rising investment levels and innovation have brought new tools to sales enablement practitioners and leaders alike. At the same time, companies are focused more intently than ever on the importance of sales enablement to business success. The bar is rising, and with these Best Practices Guides, you’ll be ready.

Welcome to the Highspot Best Practices Series

Volume 2

PUT YOUR SALES CONTENT TO WORKMapping Your Content

Launching Your Technology

Training Your Team

Evangelizing Your Solution

Operating Your Platform

Volume 3

TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESSOptimizing Your Platform

Leading Your Sales Enablement Org

Looking to the Future

Volume 1

FASTER SALES START HEREDefinition and Principles

Scoping Your Role

Focusing on Alignment

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

4

Definition and Principles

Before diving into best practices, we think it is helpful to start with a definition of sales enablement, and the related principles underlying customer success. Here’s our definition:

DefinitionSales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips sales teams to have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey.

Let’s break this down and step through the three defining principles.

Starting point

5

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #1 | Commit to a sales enablement process.

Sales Enablement is a process. We realize that process can be a polarizing term. In the eyes of salespeople, process is often experienced as a distraction from time spent selling to customers. Among marketers, it’s a speed bump on the road to rapid execution. Still, lacking a well-managed process, the best sales enablement plans—and with them the content that teams work so hard to produce—fall short of expectations.

When we use the term process, we are referring to a structure for coherently organizing, finding, sharing, customizing, and analyzing content. Establishing such a structure requires input from multiple teams, clear expectations and accountabilities, and a plan to execute on sales enablement goals.

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #2 | Know and involve your sales team.Second, sales teams are the focus of sales enablement efforts. They are the primary reason businesses invest in sales enablement, and they are the essential stakeholders. Working alongside marketers, sales teams can dramatically improve the quality of their customer engagements as a result of sales enablement.

We focus on sales teams because they need every edge available. They move fast, think fast, and require access to content wherever business takes them. Keeping this top-of-mind throughout every aspect of content management, publishing, and engagement is essential to getting the most out of your sales enablement investments.

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #3 | Engagement leads to sales.

Third, sales enablement improves performance by helping reps have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey.

Every salesperson knows engagement = opportunity. To win deals, sales content strategy and execution must be precise, data-driven, and in the format most useful to your target audience. There’s no time for prolonged content searches, presentation disconnects, dropped mails, or untrackable conversations.

What about technology?

Technology should be considered a springboard. As we’ve seen time and again, without strong process, focus, and intention, the benefits of sales enablement technology are inherently limited. Our best practices are built upon this foundation.

Now that we’ve summarized the core principles of sales enablement, it’s time to get to work.

ADDITIONAL READINGBuilding Towards a

Sales Enablement Win: Where do I Start?

Definition and Principles

6

Quality content is at the heart of sales enablement. It fuels conversations, helps convert leads, and is an important competitive advantage for teams who know how to manage, distribute, and measure it.

If you’re new to sales enablement, chances are you’re developing a perspective on the role of content in your organization. If you’re an established pro, you’re likely seeking to optimize your content strategy. In either case, it’s useful to begin (or return to) two key questions:

QUESTION 1: What matters to my organization?

Sales is the top-line growth engine of every business and accelerating sales is the North Star of sales enablement. It’s what matters most. What differs from company to company are the means by which sales are pursued, and the primary obstacles to improving your results.

Best practices companies take into account varying points of view on sales challenges. They identify nuances in how sales enablement can help and work across teams to consolidate the highest-impact steps to reaching sales goals.

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

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A few suggestions for identifying what matters:

Best Practice 1

INTERVIEW YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

This includes sales, marketing (corporate and field), business leadership, sales operations, and of course, sales enablement colleagues. Ask them where their key problems are, as well as where untapped opportunities reside. Then cross-check with your own assessment and continue refining. This will help identify what is (and should be) within the scope of your role.

Here are three suggestions for short-listing the priorities that will most effectively drive tangible business results.

1. What makes your job hard? The idea here is to start broad and understand the challenges facing your sellers. Try to avoid jumping to sales enablement before evaluating answers to this central question.

2. Ask “Why?” five consecutive times. This time-honored technique for identifying the root cause of an issue remains as valid as ever and is as simple as it sounds. For example:

3. Ask your counterparts for at least three suggestions on how their team might improve through effective sales enablement. Be prepared for ideas ranging from technology to strategy, process, people, and more. This will be important raw material as you develop your priorities and next steps.

Contentmanagement system and processes are

substandard

Why?

Content ispoorly

organized

Why?

Sales reps couldn’t find the content they need

Why?

Sales didn’t have the right content

Why?

Sales conversionsnot on track

Why?

Revenue is lower than expected

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

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QUESTION 2: How do my priorities map to those of my organization?

As a sales enablement leader, you want to make the biggest possible improvements. Sometimes this requires educating your own organization on the order and relative importance of certain problems. For example, if the problem you’re being asked to solve is too small, raise expectations; if too large, divide it into bite-sized chunks. A key to successful sales enablement, like any other business activity, is to consider how your activities can have an optimal impact on company growth and allocate resources to their maximum benefit.

In addition, just as sales enablement technology has evolved from legacy to modern systems, so too the ability of sales enablement teams to meet sales challenges also tends to improve over time. The secret is combining what fits into the role naturally alongside what the organization is prioritizing. Here are a few suggestions for resolving both:

Best Practice 2

PUT YOUR CHALLENGES IN CONTEXT

The more objective and data-driven your answers, the better your resulting plan of attack will be. For example, ask yourself and your team:

• Is the problem we’re being asked to solve recurring or new, broad or narrow?

• How will solving it positively impact my sales and marketing colleagues, as well as my company?

• Is it reasonable for sales enablement to be asked to solve this problem?

• Is this problem being measured, and can we track improvement?

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

When scoping your role, place a premium on

asking good questions.

Your answers will form the basis of your

business plan.

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65% of content is unused.

37% because it’s not relevant.

28% because it can’t be found.Source: SIrius Decisions

KEY STATISTIC

Best Practice 3

PREP YOUR PRIORITIES AND KPIS

Frame your team’s priorities and content activity performance in as much granularity as possible. Then present them, email them, print them, update them, and hold yourself accountable to them. As a leader and collaborator, candor should be one of your defining characteristics, as should a keen awareness of how every action you take drives sales.

Suggestions for prepping your KPIs:

• Review your current status: where your proposed KPIs are today relative to where they need to be.

• Know where to find the raw data for your KPIs and how often it’s refreshed. Ideally you have full access to all the data points you need.

• Ensure your KPIs align with your company targets. If not, adjust accordingly. One of the last things you want is to actively pursue goals outside the primary focus areas of your sales and marketing teams. For example, KPIs aligned with revenue and conversions should be prioritized; those aligned with PR, less so.

Here’s an example of KPIs coupled with team priorities:

As your KPIs and priorities are assembled, keep in mind that business results are prone to overestimates of correlation and it’s often hard to identify variables with the greatest impact. Also remember that results can be trailing. You may not see an attributable outcome until a year (or more) after an investment has been made.

Reference KPI examples and modify to your

unique goals.

Solution Health Achieve average monthly platform usage of at least 80% within 6 months of launch.

Content UsageIncrease new sales content usage rate to greater than 75% within 12 months of installing a new sales enablement platform.

Business ResultsIncrease sales conversion rate among qualified leads from 20% to 30% within the next 12 months.

Grow revenue by 10% over budget within the next 12 months.

ADDITIONAL READINGMeasurement Chapters in

The Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

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Best Practice 4

GATHER CONTINUAL FEEDBACK

This is the qualitative component of sales enablement. Set up a system for collecting feedback from across your organization, starting with your sales team. Your approach should emphasize where you can improve and how to continue pushing the envelope.

For example, here are four questions to keep in your back pocket:

• What sales enablement activities have gone well and should be continued?

• What activities have gone poorly and should be shut down?

• How would you rank the top five opportunities sales enablement can help you seize?

• How could the solution be improved?

Consider running end-user surveys of how your sales enablement initiatives are performing. Request verbatims, suggestions, and detailed insights on how sales enablement tools, techniques, and personnel can help drive more of what your organization needs. Regularly share feedback, positive and negative, with the project team working on the solution.

ADDITIONAL READING7 Steps to Getting Started

with Sales Enablement

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

11

Business content quality is measured by its ability to attract and retain target customers. Any sales enablement platform is only as good as its ability to deliver the highest-performing content to those targets. Best practices companies appreciate the bridges necessary to make high-performing content and technology a reality.

Today, as ever, competing interests are at work between sales and marketing teams. On the sales side, a common refrain is that marketing content is seldom applicable to precisely what’s needed. And on the marketing side, longstanding disputes over content effectiveness result in poor ROI. If you’re working in sales enablement and not yet acquainted with these positions, you will be soon. If you are, you likely appreciate the advantages of bringing both sides together through more effective sales enablement.

One significant source of problems is that marketing often doesn’t follow the buyer’s journey to its conclusion. Despite endless chatter about the importance of being a “Revenue Marketer,” most of the time marketing’s involvement—and interest—evaporates once the lead and marketing content is handed off to sales. The result is that marketing loses visibility into the needs of the customer and the sales team.

Another problem is that sales doesn’t offer sufficient feedback on customer engagement. (The need for insights is a two-way street!) Correcting this issue is incredibly low-hanging fruit for sales enablement, whose job is to improve cross-team alignment for the benefit of higher sales conversions.

Focusing on Alignment

Modern sales enablement technology helps align

sales and marketing teams for improved

content performance.

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Sales-enabled sellers are 52% better at understanding what

content to use, when to use it, and who to use it with.

Source: Aberdeen Group

KEY STATISTIC

Focusing on AlignmentConsider the following best practices to bridge your own gaps between sales and marketing:

Best Practice 5

INVESTIGATE CURRENT CONTENT USAGE

Get a handle on what’s getting used (and not), what’s working (and not), where sales is making their own content instead of relying upon marketing. Document and repeat. Also be sure to compare prevailing content utilization rates with your original expectations. Modern Sales Enablement technology can measure content usage and customer engagement, and break it down by sales team, geo, product line and many other filters. The results will probably surprise you.

Best Practice 6

DEFINE OWNERSHIP AND ACCOUNTABILITIES

This is at the heart of every successful sales enablement solution. For example, sales enablement leaders must hold themselves accountable for successfully implementing a platform capable of delivering the content management, customer engagement, analytics, and sales training content their organization needs. Their counterparts in sales must commit to the processes and technology that make the system work for them. And marketing must be on the hook for achieving high engagement and better-than-benchmark ROI.

Best Practice 7

SHARE CROSS-TEAM METRICS

Start with data. Leverage your technology platform to measure what content is performing well, which sales pitches are working, and how customers are engaging with sales content. Then work with the appropriate sales reps to understand qualitatively why some content outperforms the rest. Then share your learnings across teams to improve the performance of the whole organization.

For example, you’ll elevate your chances of delivering what they need and moving your business in a productive direction together. For example, if research indicates case studies are effective at driving engagement and sales is focused on enterprise-level revenue, marketing can develop more case studies and sales enablement can help marketing elevate the visibility of case studies via recommended content.

Marketing Sales Enablement Sales

Develop effective content as measured by engagement and impact on revenue.

Drive success in content management, customer engagement, performance analytics, and sales training content.

Commit to infuse sales enablement processes and technology in day-to-day business.

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Best Practice 8

MAP EXPECTATIONS TO THE MATURITY LEVEL OF YOUR COMPANY

If you’re still working on a sales enablement strategy and lack a detailed execution plan, you’ll need to take that into account. All-up, overextending expectations for a team and company unable to accommodate them is sure to result in underwhelming results. Better to move deliberately and with high quality, than too fast and risk skipping key steps.

At most companies, sales enablement evolves in stages, from reactive to managed to data-driven to optimized. This mirrors technical advances from legacy to modern sales enablement. Your job is to know where you are on this continuum, and what your next steps should be. Here’s an illustration of the defining characteristics of each stage:

It is also where the competitive advantages of effective sales enablement become increasingly distinct.

Data-Driven

Managed

Content is scattered across systems

Reps waste time searching for content

Poor alignment

No content ROI

Single place for sales content

Publishers can version and manage

Fewer content gaps

Publishers improve content quality based on analysis

Seller get feedback on customer engagement

Sales management can analyze pitches

Sellers are more effective

Tight alignment between sales and marketing

Continuous improvement based on data

Integrated systems & procedures

Improved conversion rates

Faster sales

Reactive

Managed

Data-Driven

Optimized

Requires Sales Enablement

Requires modern Sales Enablement

ADDITIONAL READINGHow to Structure Your

Sales Enablement Team

ADDITIONAL READINGThe Definitive Guide

to Sales Enablement, Maturity Model

Focusing on Alignment

14

Now that you’ve identified what’s critical and why, as well as success factors and the importance of alignment, it’s time to put it all together. Three important steps stand between you and launch, each with its own best practices.

STEP 1: Make a technology choice

The strategic advantage of quality content is directly related to the sales enablement platform used to manage, distribute, customize, and measure it. Lacking a powerful platform, sales enablement teams are unable to influence conversions to nearly the extent they otherwise might.

Technology can be an enabler—making reps more efficient and effective—or it can be an anchor—slowing down the sales process, inhibiting the flow of quality content and impeding best practices. Make sure you select a technology that not only enables but also scales and helps improve performance as you grow.

Here’s how we suggest thinking about this vital decision.

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

Three essential steps to an effective launch.

15

Best Practice 9

CAST A WIDE NET FOR POTENTIAL VENDORS

Learn more about vendors you consider leaders in the sales enablement field, as well as lesser-knowns with more specialized offerings. We recommend a three-step approach:

1. Clearly identify the priorities of your project and technology needs.

2. Assign a weighted score to each of the priorities, given higher priority needs a bigger score. 

3. Then assess how vendors perform in each of your priority categories through deep demonstrations and Proof-of-Value (POV) projects.

As you review potential vendors, we also recommend preparing key questions mapping to your top priorities. For example:

• How does your sales enablement platform integrate with platforms such as Salesforce?

• What are the top three features of your content management system?

• What makes you different from other sales enablement vendors who claim to deliver similar functionality and benefits?

• How is content performance measured on your platform?

• What options are available for users to share content with other users on your platform, as well as prospects?

• What is your pricing structure?

• How quickly can a new customer expect to be up and running on your platform?

Best Practice 10

REFERENCE ANALYST REPORTS

In a market as dynamic as sales enablement, independent research and analysis can add valuable perspective. Because Identifying the right analysts and finding their various online resources is not always easy, here’s a short list of analysts from leading firms that have sales enablement as an important part of their practice. In addition to reports and consultations available exclusively to their clients, many analysts share insights publicly via LinkedIn, Twitter, and their blog.

• Sirius Decisions1

• Forrester

• Gartner2

• CSO Insights

ADDITIONAL READINGDirectory of Sales

Enablement Analysts

Sample questions for short-listing vendors.

1 Sales enablement information can be found in the Sales Asset Management category.2 Sales enablement information can be found in the Digital Asset Management for Sales category.

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

16

Best Practice 11

REQUEST THE COLLATERAL YOU NEED

Make certain your vendor provides material you need to have an informed discussion with your organization and draft an accurate timetable for deployment. Ask for marketing material, ROI calculators, testimonials, on-demand content, and any other resources that might help your team reach the best possible decision for you.

Best Practice 12

GO DEEP ON DEMOS THAT MAP TO YOUR NEEDS

Request vendors demo their product and illustrate every aspect of their offer, from content management to customer engagement, analytics, machine learning, partner integrations, and more. Any vendor with a modern sales enablement solution should be delighted to touch upon each of these points.

Best Practice 13

SELECT A MODERN PLATFORM WITH CLOSED-LOOP BENEFITS

This is incredibly important and one of the key attributes of leading sales enablement platforms. In this case a closed loop refers to an easily accessible information exchange. It represents the flow of data and insights not only from marketing to sales to customers, but also from customers to sales to marketing. Without a closed loop, information can’t flow, making it impossible to optimize content effectiveness and leaving the promise of sales enablement largely out of reach.

Marketing Sales Customers

End-to-End and Closed-Loop

KnowledgeTransferPipeline

Optimize thePipeline

Performance Analytics

Empowering marketers with visibility into sales content

utilization yields a 33% higher lead acceptance rate.

Source: Aberdeen Group

KEY STATISTIC

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

ADDITIONAL READINGFinding the Best Sales

Enablement Vendor

17

Best Practice 14

LOOK AHEAD AND KEEP SCALABILITY IN MIND

As your business grows, you’ll need your sales enablement platform to grow with it. Platforms ill-equipped to scale efficiently and effectively won’t be worth the headache. Additional questions to consider:

• What challenges will your organization face? 

• Once today’s problems are solved, what will be the next set?

• Are there limits on the number of users on the platform? Can you manage them efficiently?

• How does the number of users influence platform performance?

• Can the platform effectively handle large amounts of content?

• Are bigger companies running their business on it?

STEP 2: Build the project plan

Sales enablement is a catalyst. Unlike sales and marketing teams, with their established hierarchies and organizational structures, sales enablement is not yet a time-honored discipline. There are few training courses for how to do it correctly (which is one of the reasons we’ve written this guide). In addition, its benefits reflect both a reduction of negatives (unused content, lost time) as well as improvements in content quality and engagement (as evidenced by higher conversion rates).

The best sales enablement teams deliver significant sales upside while driving the costs of mismanaging and misallocating content resources to a minimum. One reason they’re able to generate outsized impact is that they get—and keep—the right people on the bus. They’re also uniformly clear on the problems they need to solve and the strategy and execution plans they’ll use to solve them.

More than 50% of companies that have committed to sales

enablement are increasing sales conversion rates by at least 10%

and a full 23% of companies have increased conversion rates

by over 20%.Source: Highspot

KEY STATISTIC

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

18

Here’s what we’ve found works for best-in-class companies.

Best Practice 15

ASSEMBLE A RACI MATRIX FOR KEY DECISIONS

RACI is a common approach toward allocating team roles, responsibilities, and expectations. For example, one person is typically Responsible (that would be you or whoever is leading your company’s sales enablement charge), a few are Accountable, several more are Consulted, and more still are Informed. We suggest keeping the group as tight as possible while preserving varied perspectives and working top-down. For example, in making key decisions about your sales enablement solution, the following might be the matrix:

• Responsible: Sales Enablement lead.

• Accountable: VP of Sales Enablement or VP of Marketing

• Consulted: VP of Sales, content creators, sales operations

• Informed: the broader sales enablement team, sales reps, and other senior marketers

Best Practice 16

DISTINGUISH SALES ENABLEMENT FROM SALES OPERATIONS

Because a separate sales enablement team is new to many businesses, it helps to clarify its place among other existing organizations, in particular sales operations. The following definition tends to be a good starting point:

“Generally, sales enablement focuses on on-boarding and certification, sales asset management, sales communications, and coaching and training skills. Sales operations, on the other hand, handles planning, territory optimization, compensation, sales analytics and technology.”

- Sirius Decisions

In general, sales enablement focuses on activities earlier in the buying cycle and sales operations on later-stage essentials:

ADDITIONAL READINGDiscovering the Best Sales

Enablement Tools and Software

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

SolutionMapping

Prove/Concept

SolutionProposal Negotiate CLOSEDiscovery

Sales Enablement

Sales Operations

19

To be successful—and have the greatest positive impact on sales performance—these two teams need to work in lock step to root out inefficiencies and continuously drive process improvement.

Here are four steps designed to help align your sales enablement and sales operations teams: 

1. Talk it out. Get sales enablement and sales operations leaders together to discuss common goals and expectations. Audit deliverables. Is duplicate work occurring? Does one side feel very strongly about why it should or shouldn’t do something? Open and honest dialogue early in the process will lead to better results down the line.

2. Write it out. Create a roles and responsibilities (R&R) document that clearly outlines what each organization does, where there’s overlap, if any, how to provide constructive feedback to each team—and be sure to assign KPIs. Leadership buy-in of this document is critical for long-term success.

3. Roll it out. Share the R&R document with members of both teams: Have a joint meeting as well 1:1 discussions, deliver via email and other company communication vehicles, and be sure to let all other ancillary teams know how you’ve organized. You’ll need to reiterate the message every so often to help encourage teamwork and prevent unnecessarily territory wars.

4. Work it. These are evolving roles as market dynamics and technology are constantly changing the demands on the sales organizations.  These two teams need to work together to enable, support, hone and optimize sales teams to greater productivity. Good communication and collaboration is key, but small gains in sales effectiveness when scaled across a global team can have huge impact on business growth.

In summary, clear delineation of responsibilities is critical to helping both teams deliver their best work.

Best Practice 17

CREATE A TIMELINE AND DETAILED REPORTING STRUCTURE

Sounds straightforward but like most activities, fortune favors the prepared. Your timeline should progress from today through solution maturity and include detailed milestones. This means looking 3-12 months ahead, depending upon resources, experience, and company size. As you share your plan, be sure to point out key decision points and how you’ll measure success. This will help focus your discussions and the executive feedback you receive along the way.

For example:

ADDITIONAL READINGHow to Structure Your

Sales Enablement Team

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

T+ 4 weeks

T+ 4 weeks

TechnologySelection

T+ 5 weeks

T+ 5 weeks

SolutionDesign

T+ 9 weeks

T+ 9 weeks

SolutionDevelopment

T+ 10 weeks

T+ 10 weeks

Deployment, Training, and Launch

T+ 14 weeks

T+ 14 weeks

MonthlyPerformance Review

Prioritiesand Scope

Today(T)

QuarterlyReport

T+ 22 weeks

then ongoing (at least every

12 weeks)

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STEP 3: Get executive sponsorship

High-performing sales enablement teams are change agents in the most profitable sense: they help their organization go farther and faster. This is precisely what executives love to see.

Hopefully by this point your executive team is up-to-date on your sales enablement initiatives. Or, if you’re the executive, you’re aware of what’s happening in your sales enablement ranks. Executive sponsorship remains essential to officially launching, funding, and expanding sales enablement investments, and it must be diligently managed.

Our best practices for executive sponsorship center on making sales enablement benefits concrete and measurable. In addition to the standard quant and qual metrics previously described, we recommend the following:

Best Practice 18

MAP YOUR TEAM CONTRIBUTIONS TO EXECUTIVE PRIORITIES

Identify what your executives care about and show how the sales enablement decisions you propose will be good for business. From strategic alignment to financial upside, illustrate what’s in it for them. When you do, be clear on risks, opportunity costs, and comparisons with the status quo. Also be sure to validate your perspective with analyst reports and other third-party data. For example:

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

Executive Profiles Sales Enablement Contributions

Increase Revenue • Align sales and marketing teams to deliver high-performing content.

• Outflank the competition by making content easier than ever to manage, find, share, customize, and analyze.

• Make your most recommended content easy to access and share from any device.

• Ensure content is available for every customer segment and stage of the buyer’s journey.

Lower Costs • Minimize seller time spent searching for content.

• Reduce investment in under-used and under-performing content.

• Eliminate time wasted on managing multiple content platforms.

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Best Practice 19

DEMOS OVER DECKS

To convince executives of the value of your recommended solution, line up demos. Busy people tend to prefer demos to slide decks because they’re often more grounded and less theoretical. This isn’t to say you should be slide-less; more that we recommend some combination of sight, sound, and motion (whether live or recorded) to accompany your recommendation. In all cases, showcase the product and the use cases it’s built to address. Here’s a short list of things to show during a demo:

• User interface

• How content is organized

• How users access content

• Updating and customizing content

• Pitching content directly from the platform (incl. email, webcasts, other)

• Integration of sales enablement technology with other platforms

• Measuring performance, including how the platform ties into 3rd party BI systems

Best Practice 20

GET CUSTOMER REFERENCES

Executives will be heavily influenced by successful use of the platform at companies they respect. Show how and why sample companies made their vendor selection, where their deployment has succeeded and fallen short, and decisions they’d like to make again. Ideally the vendors you’re evaluating also have relevant case studies packaged and ready for distribution.

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

Demos rule.They’re essential to any informed perspective on

sales enablement.

ADDITIONAL READINGEvaluating Sales

Enablement Tools

22

The role of a sales enablement pro has never been more strategic or demanding. From orchestrating sales content to tracking engagement and pivoting focus at a moment’s notice, it’s a position requiring a unique combination of flexibility, empathy, and strategic thinking.

Whether or not Best Practices, Volume 1 is your intro to sales enablement or a refresh of familiar concepts, you should now be in better position to realize the potential of the tools and techniques that make sales enablement so valuable. We encourage you to apply as many of these Best Practices as possible and document your own along the way.

Before closing this volume and congratulating on a job well done, we think it’s beneficial to re-emphasize the importance of process. Not to scare anyone off (we realize process can do this), but to emphasize that structured thinking has a way of yielding recurring benefits and sales enablement is no exception. Three over-arching takeaways:

1. A strong sales enablement foundation is incredibly important. Know your audience, your charter, your priorities, your team, and your resources—and execute unrelentingly.

2. Focus on the gaps contributing to your biggest challenges. Close them with data-first thinking, document your learnings, and share your perspective across teams. As you do, you’ll elevate your accountability and demonstrate the type of sales enablement leadership every organization needs.

3. Technology is a catalyst for sales enablement success. It can help accomplish amazing results, but only if the platform you select and the process you follow align with what your business needs most.

Now that you’ve educated your teams on goals and roles, chosen your preferred technology partner, created an implementation plan and aligned key stakeholders, it’s time to look ahead to Best Practices Volume 2: Put Your Sales Content to Work. In this upcoming Volume, we’ll cover topics such as content mapping, launching your technology, training your team, evangelizing your solution, and operating your platform. Stay tuned.

Volume 1 Wrap-Up

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Principles

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #1 Commit to a sales enablement process

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #2 Know and involve your sales team

DEFINING PRINCIPLE #3 Engagement leads to sales

Scoping Your Sales Enablement Role

BEST PRACTICE 1 Interview your stakeholders

BEST PRACTICE 2 Put your challenges in context

BEST PRACTICE 3 Prep your priorities and KPIs

BEST PRACTICE 4 Gather continual feedback

Focusing on Alignment

BEST PRACTICE 5 Investigate current content usage

BEST PRACTICE 6 Define ownership and accountabilities

BEST PRACTICE 7 Share cross-team metrics

BEST PRACTICE 8 Map expectations to the maturity level of your company

Activating Your Sales Enablement Plan

Step 1: Make a technology choice

BEST PRACTICE 9 Cast a wide net for potential vendors

BEST PRACTICE 10 Reference analyst reports

BEST PRACTICE 11 Request the collateral you need

BEST PRACTICE 12 Go deep on demos that map to your needs

BEST PRACTICE 13 Select a modern platform with closed loop benefits

BEST PRACTICE 14 Look ahead and keep scalability in mind

Step 2: Build the project plan

BEST PRACTICE 15 Assemble a RACI matrix for key decisions

BEST PRACTICE 16 Distinguish sales enablement from sales operations

BEST PRACTICE 17 Create a timeline and detailed reporting structure

Step 3: Get executive sponsorship

BEST PRACTICE 18 Connect your team contributions to executive priorities

BEST PRACTICE 19 Demos over decks

BEST PRACTICE 20 Get customer references

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Highspot helps sales teams increase conversion rates and generate more revenue faster. From content management to pitching and analytics, Highspot delivers enterprise-ready features and platform integrations in a modern design competitors can’t match. Using Highspot, sales and marketing teams are able to stay connected to the best-performing content for each opportunity, measure and optimize their content, and engage with customers more effectively than ever before. With nearly 90% average monthly recurring usage, Highspot is the sales enablement industry’s most complete platform.

To learn more about Highspot or any of the topics covered here, we would be delighted to chat. We can be reached at highspot.com and sales@highspot.com.

About Highspot