Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
Selling is hard work. Even the most savvy salespeople need the right tools, resources and motivation.
Enter sales enablement—a series of strategies that can help your salespeople succeed!
Having an effective sales enablement strategy doesn’t just improve your sales process. It equips your sales team with everything they need to work better, faster and smarter.
Teams that get it right close more deals and improve the bottom line. About 76% of companies that deploy sales enablement see a 6-20% increase in sales. Interesting, isn’t it?
If you’re buzzing to ramp up your sales enablement efforts, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’ll share 11 sales enablement best practices to increase your sales success. Gear up for a sales strategy makeover that will supercharge your sales success!
Sales enablement is the strategic process of giving your sales team the resources, information and tools needed to close more deals. These resources may include software, content and information that helps your sales team sell better.
Effective sales enablement improves your team’s productivity and efficiency in driving sales. It also enhances the customer experience and increases revenue for your business.
Sales enablement isn’t the sole responsibility of the sales team. It’s a process that requires collaboration, fluidity and alignment between sales, marketing, product and customer support teams. When cross-functional teams align on sales enablement, they are 182% more likely to knock executive expectations out of the park!
The best sales enablement strategies or tools you need will vary depending on your industry—B2B, B2C or DTC. For example, the B2B industry has complex sales cycles. The sales enablement for this requires in-depth educational content, relationship building, account-based marketing and more customization and personalization in sales content.
Now you know what sales enablement is all about and its perks.
In this section, we’ll share 11 sales enablement best practices to help your sales team increase productivity, drive revenue growth and ultimately achieve success in your sales efforts.
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The journey is as important as the destination. If you want your salespeople to close deals, they need to understand your buyer's journey.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of your buyer’s journey helps you figure out how they make purchasing decisions.
To do this, you need to define customer experiences. Start by identifying the stages your customers go through from start to finish. The beginning point is typically when they first hear about your company. This could be via social media, your website, advertisements or word of mouth.
Next, create a journey map to visualize how customers interact with you. From hearing about your company to when they decide to buy from you, this may involve several touchpoints, such as:
Customer journeys aren’t the same for every company or industry.
For example, the steps in this design app are different from the project management tool below.
Once you understand your buyer’s journey, you’re better equipped to
This includes materials for awareness, consideration and decision-making phases.
Effectively map out and gain insights into your customer journey using this template.
You can personalize it to fit your specific customer journey. Additionally, share it with your sales team to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior.
When investing in sales enablement, you need to set goals. Setting goals doesn't just provide a roadmap for your efforts. It helps you define what success looks like.
When setting goals, understand how sales enablement efforts contribute to the organization's revenue targets, market share, customer satisfaction, or other key performance indicators.
Be sure to make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART). For example, when enabling your sales team, your goal could be to:
Once you've set SMART goals, you can effectively create an enablement strategy that ensures your team can consistently achieve them.
Streamline your goal-setting process with this template. You can easily customize every part of this template by swapping colors and fonts to match your brand. Feel free to include interactive elements to make it engaging.
The entire sales process—whether inbound or outbound—relies on good content.
Arm your salespeople with high-quality, relevant and engaging sales materials. They'll need it throughout the sales process to address customer concerns, answer questions and ultimately close deals.
Why does it matter? Sales enablement content amplifies your sales team's efforts. It empowers your team to engage with prospects and nudge them towards conversion.
Creating sales enablement content can be daunting without the required tools. That’s why we recommend using Visme. It has a comprehensive library of templates for creating any type of internal or client-facing content you can think of. You’ll also find templates and tools that help with onboard training and boost sales rep productivity.
As we discuss more about sales enablement content, we’ll share links to these templates so you can empower your team to close more deals.
This type of content is used to build the skills and knowledge of salespeople. It empowers sales reps to engage clients and handle objections and other unique situations.
Examples of internal content are:
External content engages clients and equips them with the knowledge to commit to a purchase. These materials answer client questions, showcase your product benefits and value propositions, educate prospects, justify the purchase and make them feel confident in their decision.
Some key examples of key external sales enablement content are:
When creating content, don’t just do it for the sake of it. Start by identifying your buyer's pain points and then tailor your content to address them. Secondly, your sales material should be tailored to your customers' needs at different stages of their purchase journey, whether it’s the TOFU, MOFU or BOFU.
The third thing you’ll have to keep in mind is that everyone loves good content. Your sales materials should be interactive, engaging and valuable to your readers. Otherwise, you’ll miss an opportunity to nudge prospects closer to the bottom of the funnel.
This infographic below shares what type of sales enablement content you should create at different stages of the sales and marketing funnel.
Matt, a satisfied Visme customer, had this to say about the Visme platform:
Manager of Partnership Marketing
Sales enablement training is the key to unlocking the full potential of your salespeople.
By giving them the tools and knowledge to prospect, nurture and close deals with larger margins and opportunity sizes, this training can significantly boost sales performance.
Beyond improving your team's efficiency, training equips them with the skills they need to succeed and drive revenue growth for your business. Companies that offer comprehensive training enjoy up to a 12% increase in win rates. Another study shows the ROI for sales training is as high as 353%.
Sales enablement training activities can be split into pre-training, during training and after training.
When it comes to creating training materials, Visme is your go-to resource. In Visme’s library, you’ll find customizable templates for creating customer personas, handbooks, videos, training manuals, sales playbooks, sales decks, presentations, sales battlecards, sales scripts, training worksheets and lots more.
When delivering your training, aim to make it as engaging and interactive as possible. There are many different ways you can achieve that. For example, increase the training’s effectiveness by using real-life examples, practice sessions, discussion and feedback. Interactive content formats like videos, interactive modules, quizzes, polls and surveys are also effective.
After delivering the training, your job is far from over. Constantly review, measure and analyze the impact of the training program. This helps you figure out whether there are more gaps or other aspects of the training to improve on.
We’ve created an in-depth guide about creating sales enablement training. The article breaks down the key components and steps that’ll help you conduct winning sales enablement training in your company.
Customer insights are key to any good sales enablement framework. But feedback from your sales reps is just as important.
Getting feedback and insights from salespeople can help you understand their challenges. It also helps you tweak your sales strategy to help them overcome these hurdles.
Start by establishing feedback loops that help you collect relevant data and feedback from many sources.
Here are sales enablement examples for collecting feedback. You can collect feedback via multiple sources.
Ensure to collect feedback from all sales cycle stages: before, during and after. Once you have collected feedback, you can start identifying areas that need improvement, like:
Host brainstorming sessions and one-on-one discussions with team members to tackle challenges and share suggestions.
Going forward, make the changes necessary to improve your salespeople’s workflow.
You may need to adjust things like your sales tactics, training efforts and sales resources.
Feedback loops are continuous. So monitor the changes and see if and how they contribute to your sales team’s success.
Keep communication clear and streamline the process of receiving feedback with Visme Forms. You can use Visme’s Feedback Forms to make dynamic feedback forms that can engage your audience and encourage them to provide valuable feedback.
Visme also offers survey templates that let you collect feedback from your salespeople. These forms are also customizable, so you can make sure they fit your needs.
Have you ever tried selling without the right tools? It’s like trying to ride a bike without pedals—it takes a lot of effort, but you’re not going to get very far.
So how can you expect your sales team to do the same without having the right tools and technologies to enable their best work?
Tools and technologies can give your salespeople an edge throughout the sales process, from prospecting to closing the sale and the follow-up.
For example, tools like Visme are valuable for creating and managing marketing materials and sales collateral. Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho CRM are great customer relationship management software for managing customer interactions, tracking sales leads and getting insights into customer behavior.
But that’s just the half of it. Sales enablement tools also include a wide range of technologies and platforms, like:
Again, the perfect combination of sales enablement tools depends on the specific needs and goals of your sales team.
When choosing sales enablement platforms, consider factors like the ROI they will bring to your company in terms of sales efficiency, conversion rates and overall performance.
Also, look at other factors such as scalability, ability to integrate with existing tools, user-friendliness, analytics and reporting capabilities.
In this article, we’ve taken a deep dive into the 18 best sales enablement tools to achieve peak performance and drive unparalleled success.
For salespeople, having more time means closing more deals. But the hard truth is that sales often include repetitive, boring and time-consuming tasks.
For example, data entry, lead scoring, follow-ups, invoicing and payment reminders are a few areas that can take a good chunk of time away from your sales team.
The good news is that automation can help. Think of it as an assistant that helps you handle sales operations without sacrificing efficiency, personalization and human touch. Beyond handling repetitive tasks, automation frees up your sales team's time so they can focus on strategic activities, relationship-building and other high-impact sales efforts.
According to a study, automation increases sales productivity by up to 14.5% and conversions by a whopping 77%.
When it comes to automation tools, you have several options. CRM can automate data entry. Other automation software can help with
The AI document generator streamlines the process of creating internal and external sales enablement content like whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, brochures, training content and any other sales materials you need.
You can use the AI presentation maker to whip up stunning sales decks, webinar presentations, sales presentations or even an onboarding presentation for your team members.
The AI report writer is tailor-made for reporting and analytics. Just type in your prompt, provide context, select your preferred template and watch the tool generate your first draft in seconds.
Even if you don’t need a document, Visme’s AI text generator can boost your creative fuel. You can use it to generate high-quality and professional messaging, articles and marketing copy. The tool is also handy for editing tasks. You can edit, proofread, lengthen, summarize and switch tones for your text. Try out any AI tools and watch your sales team be more productive than ever.
For successful sales enablement, your sales team shouldn’t work alone. You need to unify other teams like product, marketing, sales and customer support toward a shared goal. Then, clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders and they will contribute to the set goals.
Host cross-functional team meetings to shine a spotlight on each team's role, plans and successes. That way, team members know each other's roles, needs and pain points. It will also highlight how teams can collaborate better and reduce work duplication.
Remote collaboration efforts or in-person collaboration are critical to reaching sales targets.
Visme’s collaboration tool makes cross-department collaboration a breeze! Your teams can work together across every stage of the sales enablement process, from creating content to training to execution.
Not to mention, the Workflow feature takes project management to a whole new level. You can assign projects for teams to work on, create roles, track progress, set deadlines and effect corrections—all in one place.
If your teams use different platforms, like HubSpot and Salesforce, you can unify their efforts! Visme works alongside these popular apps, offering integration into many other third-party tools.
Your team can bring HubSpot files, images and documents into their Visme projects. After that, they can export the project to HubSpot to streamline their workflow.
For example, your marketing and sales teams can co-create sales collateral or sales enablement content and use it to drive sales in HubSpot.
Ongoing assessments are necessary to meet sales goals.
Keeping an eye on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) can inform you of areas that need improvement. It can help your team adapt, refine strategies and stay ahead of any competition.
Start by identifying the key metrics that align with your sales enablement goals. Start with metrics like:
Refer to your sales enablement plan to determine which metrics are more important and then tailor your metrics to reflect that.
Use CRM software and analytics tools to learn about customer behavior, sales performance and the effectiveness of your enablement strategy. Regularly collect and analyze this data. Make sure you’re doing so for each stage of the sales cycle.
Use KPIs to identify areas where you need improvement. Set benchmarks to measure success. Include sales targets, customer satisfaction and shortening the sales cycle.
Pull your data into reports and share them with stakeholders using Visme’s report maker. Transform your data into bar graphs, pie charts, diagrams, histograms and more. This will help you understand your data and make better sales decisions.
The journey of sales success is ongoing and requires constant evaluation and adjustment. Keep your focus on relevant metrics and KPIs. That way, you can boost your team’s productivity, effectiveness and sales success.
Visme has a template to help you track and analyze your annual sales performance. The template has everything you need to measure your sales, including important KPIs. It also breaks down sales by month, state and services and products provided.
Competitive enablement is sales enablement that focuses on enabling sales reps to win in close-run races against competitors.
Making the most of competitive intelligence puts your business ahead of the curve. For sales teams, it drives higher win rates and improves prospect relationships.
So, what insights do you get from competitive intelligence?
The intelligence-gathering process also uncovers your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and here's how you can use it to your advantage.
Some of the methods you can use to gather competitive intelligence are:
Sales enablement assets should never be set in stone. Here’s why:
Consumer needs and behaviors change
Sales trends change year over year
Compliance requirements may change (especially in regulated industries)
New products, features, or services find their way into your industry
Update your sales content, resources and tools to reflect these changes. That way, your team can stay ahead of the curve. Moreover, outdated content can make a business seem out of touch with the market.
How do you know when to update your sales enablement content?
Regularly seek feedback from your customers and sales team about how effective your existing assets are. You can also review industry reports, competitor activities and market analysis.
Another effective strategy is to network with other sales managers and professionals via webinars, podcasts, strategy sessions, etc. You’ll get fresh ideas and valuable insights from them.
Don’t forget to analyze sales enablement performance metrics. Conduct an audit to identify which materials are most effective, what needs improvement and which assets may be outdated.
When you have the information, develop a content calendar that outlines when sales enablement needs an update. Visme’s content calendar can help you keep your content organized.
Remember, nothing is above a refresh. In addition to the content types we shared earlier, you can update things like:
Make sure to incorporate new strategies, competitive intelligence and best practices. Also, update your sales methods and tools to help your sales team work more efficiently.
Your sales team can easily maintain regular updates to their content with the help of tools like Visme’s Dynamic Fields. It’s foolproof so anyone can use it to make changes to multiple projects, regardless of their skills.
Here are some of the frequently asked questions and answers when it comes to the best sales enablement best practices.
A good sales enablement strategy should capture all the key elements to support sales teams and contribute to business success. A great sales enablement program should have all of these characteristics.
Overall, a good sales enablement framework is dynamic, adaptable and focused on continuous improvement.
There are several core components of sales enablement, including:
These core components form the core of a cohesive and powerful sales enablement strategy. In fact, sales teams that deploy attract sales leads and drive sales over the top.
A sales enablement professional helps the sales team improve their sales success. They do this by:
All in all, the primary role of a sales enablement professional is to ensure sales teams have the tools, resources and support they need to be successful.
There you have it—eleven tried and true sales enablement best practices!
When implemented properly, these best practices can be a catalyst for acquiring more leads, conversions and sales.
However, you’ll need the right tools, technology and resources to pull it off. Of course, Visme has you covered.
Empower your sales team with tools, features and templates for creating different types of sales enablement content, including sales playbooks, product sell sheets, sales one-pagers, case studies, videos, sales presentations and more.
The best part? You can collaborate across different departments within Visme’s platform.
So, what are you waiting for? Head over to the template library or contact sales to discover how Visme can help you maximize sales success.
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