Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
Struggling to meet sales targets is a common pain point for many businesses. We all want better leads and a more competent sales team.
But the obstacle often lies in the strategy.
Enter sales enablement—a strategy that's no longer just an option but a necessity for competitive businesses. In fact, there has been a 20% year-on-year increase in sales enablement adoption among businesses.
Sales enablement works. But we're here to show you how to make it work for you. In this post, we'll guide you through 8 actionable sales enablement strategies to attract high-quality leads and empower your team.
Sales enablement is the tactical use of processes, content and technology designed to streamline and improve the efficacy of sales teams.
Think of it as the wind under the wings of your sales team. It provides sales reps with not only the necessary training and materials but also the support needed for successful customer engagement and conversions.
Sales enablement can include a wide variety of content and activities. These range from crafting compelling sales enablement content like battlecards, case studies, videos and more to providing comprehensive sales training.
Implementing a sales enablement strategy can transform your sales process. Here are a few key benefits of having an effective sales enablement strategy:
By incorporating these benefits into your sales strategy, your team will be better equipped to engage with leads effectively, close more deals and drive business growth.
A well-rounded sales enablement framework and strategy includes key components focused on empowering and streamlining your sales team's tasks.
Integrating these elements can help your sales reps reach their goals faster.
Here are some of those components.
At the heart of sales enablement lies the creation of targeted, relevant content. This includes sales scripts, presentations, case studies and more.
With the right type of sales enablement content tailored to your audience's needs, your team can better engage, inform and convert leads. Moreover, it helps ensure every sales interaction is impactful.
Robust and ongoing training for your sales team is an underrated aspect of strong sales enablement organizational strategies.
Sales enablement training involves not just initial onboarding but continuous education to keep your sales team updated with the latest industry trends, practices and sales methodologies.
By investing in your team's development, you're ensuring they have the knowledge and skills to connect and close deals more efficiently.
To continually refine and improve your sales strategies, it's vital to track performance and gather feedback. This data-driven approach allows you to understand what works and what doesn't, enabling you to tailor your strategies accordingly.
By analyzing metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates and customer feedback, you can continuously fine-tune your sales tactics and ultimately improve your team's overall performance.
Leveraging the right technology is critical for streamlining your sales process. This involves selecting and implementing a suite of tools that work seamlessly together, such as CRM systems, sales automation tools and communication platforms.
By building a technology stack that supports your sales process, you're not only increasing efficiency but also providing your team with the edge they need to succeed in a competitive market.
Pro Tip: With Visme, you can incorporate all of the above components into your sales enablement techniques and strategies. With templates across 40+ categories to create sales content, eLearning export formats, analytics, integrations and more, it's a one-stop solution for making your sales strategy more cohesive and impactful.
A sales enablement strategy is only as good as its framework. A sales enablement framework is the structure or process you’ll need to execute your strategy. While a sales enablement strategy addresses the "what" and "why," a sales enablement framework is more focused on the "how" of enabling sales.
Through a sales enablement framework, you’ll be able to outline the specific steps and components needed for a successful sales enablement strategy. And when you utilize both, you can choose the right tools and create a realistic measure of success for your team.
You can use this Sales Enablement Framework Report to not only create your framework but also measure its effectiveness over time and make recommendations on how to improve your sales enablement strategy.
This template comes with a bold color block against muted but modern tones and imagery to grab your reader's attention and professionally lay out the details needed for your framework. It hosts a range of sections, such as an executive summary, methodology, sales cycle length, content usage and more. You can use the template as is or customize it to match your sales enablement goals.
You can customize this template above, find an alternative report template or use Visme’s AI Document Generator to create one to your liking. Visme AI can generate sales enablement plan templates, reports, presentations and so much more. With Visme your content creation is never limited.’
Next to a sales enablement framework, you can also use sales enablement reports to track the progress of sales enablement efforts. Use this annual sales enablement report to track your performance.
Designed with a colorful yet minimalistic layout that catches the eye, this report contains four main sections: an executive summary, methodology, sales performance, and recommendations.
You can add more sections as needed, as this template offers a spacious layout to accommodate more fonts, charts, graphics, tables, video content, and colorful icons, adding a stylish touch to your findings.
Alternatively, you can import your data from Salesforce, Google Sheets, HubSpot, or Excel to populate your chart. Visme offers a smooth and easy integration with these apps and more, so you don’t have to worry about coding or being too tech-savvy.
If you're still brainstorming ideas or would like to create a quick documented report to keep track of things on a day-to-day basis or share with internal stakeholders or others in your department, you can utilize the one-page sales enablement report template.
With its bold and dark tones, this one-pager sales enablement report offers a contemporary and professional design. It includes an executive summary, a comparison of conversion rates, key achievements, a sales growth comparison, and next steps. With dark undertones and bright neon lights, it effectively highlights key metrics and guides the eye from segment to segment.
Feel free to change the colors of this template in the Visme Editor. You can choose from a selection of recommended color palettes or tap into the power of Visme’s AI-powered Brand Wizard.
Simply add your website URL and watch the Brand Wizard create a brand kit with your company's fonts, colors, logo, and more. It's all easily accessible with every project to help you maintain brand consistency across reports.
Around 76% of organizations report a sales boost of 6% to 20% as a direct result of implementing sales enablement strategies. The right strategy can boost your sales by aligning your company's resources in the perfect direction.
But what sales enablement strategies are ideal for your business? Here are some of the best and proven sales enablement strategies your business can start executing today.
A sales playbook is the foundation of your sales enablement tech stack. It is a guide for your sales team that shares sales strategies, tactics and best practices.
Having one central playbook where reps can easily find messaging, visuals, presentations, and other sales collateral is key. It gets your whole team aligned and makes selling more consistent.
Some key elements to include:
Creating a sales playbook can look a bit daunting. But there is an easier way. You can use tools like Visme to easily create an online sales playbook with interactive visuals. For example, take a look at this elegant corporate sales playbook template you can readily use to jumpstart your sales playbook creation.
Clearly defining each stage of your unique sales cycle is critical for enabling effective selling. Map out the journey your prospects go through—from initial contact to closing deals. This will help your sales team fully understand the trends in the buyer’s journey.
When sales reps understand the required steps and buyer actions at each phase, they can tailor their messaging and sales collateral accordingly. While mapping, you can outline required sales activities and outreach, key buyer actions, necessary collateral for deal advancement and recommended messaging framework.
To quickly start documenting your sales process, you can take advantage of the vast library of templates available on Visme. For instance, you can equip your sales reps with this intuitive customer journey infographic template.
You can be even more efficient if you use Visme’s Workflow Management feature. While creating multiple templates to document your sales process, you can keep a tab on deadlines and focus on creating the ideal sales content.
Read this article to learn how you can create an effective sales process that closes more sales.
Too often, sales teams take a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to outreach and messaging. You should get to know your most common and desired prospects inside out—their company size, role types, challenges, tech stack, purchasing process and more.
With this intel, sales reps can tailor outreach across all channels to really resonate with each target account. When messaging feels personalized, prospects pay attention.
Do comprehensive research and brainstorming to find your ideal customer profile (ICP). When finished, you can use Visme to display your ICP in a clear manner. You can instantly use the following customer persona template if you are targeting tech-focused managers and leadership, such as a Chief Technical Officer.
Consistent coaching and training ensures reps fully understand your offerings, market and core sales skills so they can pitch effectively.
Apart from onboarding new hires, ongoing enablement training should include:
Make training sessions memorable for your sales reps by bringing in sales experts or growth consultants to conduct masterclasses.
From sales pitch presentations to infographics, one of the key assets you can use in training is a visually intriguing training manual. Take a look at this sleek corporate training manual template below to get you started.
You can also make your training sessions more engaging by incorporating interactive visuals and assessments with Visme. For instance, you can create an engaging and interactive learning experience by adding interactive popups and hover effects to your training manuals.
Whether it is an onboarding manual, skills seminar, or microlearning module, interactive visuals in Visme transform sales training into something sales reps find genuinely compelling and useful for selling success.
Use this checklist to streamline your team’s onboarding process.
When it's time for final pitches and demos, nothing beats custom presentations tailored specifically to each prospect's situation. The main goal of presentations is to generate sales leads and conversions.
But prospects don’t want generic slide decks. They want to see how you’ll solve their unique problems.
So how do you go about making engaging pitch decks that deliver your solutions in a crystal clear way? The best path is to use a sales content creation tool like Visme.
Visme has hundreds of professionally designed presentation templates for sales managers, covering every business need imaginable.
Here is a sales presentation template to get you started.
Even better is that you can take advantage of Visme’s AI Image Generator and AI Image Edit Tools to smartly generate and edit images to put on your pitch deck without needing professional help. This will add another layer to your customized presentations and help you create the perfect impression you need with your prospects and leads.
After you have crafted a stunning presentation, you can publish and share your work with your prospects.
Shining a spotlight on the customers you've helped achieve success is hugely effective for converting prospects. Outline their situation, challenges faced, and quantifiable results achieved after partnering with you.
Try to curate a detailed case study for every major customer segment. Some major outlines the case study should have are:
Make sure to back up stats and facts cited in the case study with credible data sources. Compelling success stories and ROI stats go a long way in convincing prospects to buy.
Visme has an extensive library of case studies templates you can tap into. Use the multi-paged case study templates below to get started.
Alternatively, use this case study one pager to showcase social proof and boost credibility.
Take advantage of Visme’s library of icons, stock photos and videos to embellish your case study.
If you are having trouble articulating your company’s solution in the case study, you can use Visme’s AI Text Generator to overcome your writer’s block. You can also customize it to align it with your brand voice.
Sales enablement is all about you assisting your sales team. A good initial outreach is one of the most essential parts of an effective sales strategy.
Sales reps try to cast a wide net to book meetings and generate new pipelines. Make it easy for reps by giving them templates and tools to efficiently contact prospects.
Build a smart tech stack to equip them with the right instruments to optimize their reach. Provide draft emails, InMail messages, and outreach scripts that reps can reference to spark conversations across channels.
One key tool you can equip your sales team with is Visme Forms. Build memorable lead forms, signup forms, contact forms, email forms, email collectors, popup forms, feedback forms, and registration forms that drive up to 207% more conversions. Read the full case study.
You don’t even need to know how to code. Visme Forms isn't just easy to build. They’re designed to be engaging so your sales rep can strategically use them to drastically boost conversions.
Enabling sales is ultimately a cross-departmental effort. Close collaboration between sales and marketing teams ensures the right messaging and content for each stage is reaching prospects at the right time. This effort facilitates sales enablement marketing alignment under a shared umbrella.
Some ways to align these critical departments include:
Visme can be instrumental in synchronizing both teams. When creating sales content on Visme, you can use its design collaboration to foster transparent communication between both sales and marketing teams. That means teams can directly view, comment, and edit your content design, ensuring that everyone is on board with the same branding style.
You can also keep an eye on who visits your Visme sales content project with Visme’s Analytics. By tracking traffic between sales and marketing teams, you can continually improve your branding style while keeping everyone in the loop.
Now you know the best sales enable strategies, but how do you connect them with your audience? You equip your sales team with the right mix of enablement tech tools. This streamlines training, coaching, and content distribution.
Although there are different types of tools, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to sales enablement. Nevertheless, they are all designed to help you achieve one common goal: to help your sales team make more sales.
Here are some of the tools you can benefit from.
*Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of April 12, 2024. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.
Visme is a powerful content creation tool that can supercharge your sales enablement strategy. It specializes in interactive content that makes your sales materials more engaging and effective.
Here are the top features of Visme that are particularly beneficial for sales teams:
Hubspot is a popular software that is primarily designed as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. By providing visibility into customer relationship details, Hubspot enables the sales team to understand trends and take sales initiatives.
Other than a CRM, Hubspot also offers more features that can aid in sales enablement. These include scheduling meetings, deal pipeline control and email tracking. These added features equip the sales team with the proper information, helping them close deals faster.
Highspot offers an intuitive platform for managing sales content, training and coaching and analyzing customer engagement. Its comprehensive features allow sales teams to organize and personalize content efficiently and maintain relevance in every client interaction.
The platform also makes room for productivity through its training, coaching and onboarding enablement tools. Other features include guided selling, coaching collaboration, certification, live call execution and predictive content functionality.
Outreach is a cutting-edge automation SaaS designed to integrate seamlessly with your tech stack. It is a sales engagement platform that offers unique AI-powered analytics to help sales teams improve prospecting effectiveness and lead follow-up efficiency.
Outreach's main features include automatic email sequences, AI assistant, sales call dialer and analytics. All of its features are aimed at reducing communication hurdles between reps and prospects so that more deals can be closed at a faster rate.
Check out this detailed article on the best sales enablement tools your team can leverage to boost sales.
Implementing these sales enablement best practices sets your team up for success:
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about developing a winning sales enablement strategy:
While some organizations have dedicated sales enablement teams who take the lead, it is ultimately a joint responsibility of sales and marketing teams in most organizations. Enablement impacts both sales and marketing, so both teams bear tasks of creating content, training, and coaching programs in close cross-departmental alignment.
Sales operations focus on managing sales processes, analyzing data and reviewing technology to optimize sales efficiency.
Enablement is about equipping sales reps with the skills and tools to execute those optimized workflows effectively.
Both functions complement each other in a sales department.
As described earlier, sales enablement is about providing salespeople with the right tools and information to engage buyers. Their key functions are:
There are multiple methods for determining the impact of sales enablement efforts. This can range from objective indicators such as data from software and the company’s tech stack and subjective indicators such as customer feedback and internal surveys.
However, some of the most common KPIs for measuring sales enablement efforts are:
Sales readiness is sometimes used interchangeably with sales enablement. However, there is a nuanced difference between the two.
Sales enablement means providing sales reps with all the necessary tools and knowledge to make sales. Sales readiness, however, focuses more on the preparation of sales reps for real-world interactions, such as messaging and coaching.
One effective sales enablement tip is to tailor content and training to specific buyer personas and sales stages. Understanding your audience’s needs at each stage of the buying journey allows you to provide targeted resources that resonate with their challenges, fostering better engagement and conversion.
To create a sales enablement process, you’ll need to implement a few crucial steps, such as:
Implementing the right sales enablement strategies leads to more successful, productive sales reps and increased revenue. But putting these strategies into action requires the right tools.
Visme provides everything you need to execute sales enablement and make it a breeze. Check out Visme’s huge library of templates specifically designed for sales teams. You can create all kinds of sales content with stunning visuals to engage leads and convincingly convert them.
Looking to get started? Sign up to discover how Visme can help you boost your sales enablement efforts today.
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