Engaged buyers are worth their weight in gold: they’re dialed in, asking questions and paying attention. They’re the prospects who progress 10 times faster to a deal.
If only every prospect were like that.
The thing is, dealing with engaged buyers isn’t a matter of chance. In fact, your sales teams have a lot of control over this. If you find the right moments to interact, the right content to share—and avoid spamming people—you can significantly dial up engagement.
It takes an integrated approach to make it happen. But what does that really mean? It means you need a salesforce prepared to engage with buyers, a way to create and measure engaging content experiences, and a way to capture and use customer insights to continually guide the whole process. We call this the revenue enablement flywheel: a rich feedback loop that builds in ongoing improvement.
The revenue enablement flywheel
We used to talk about a sales enablement flywheel, but a revenue enablement approach goes far beyond sales readiness or content management, with four pillars that feed into each other:
Sales content management
Your sales team should be able to find the content they need—in the right version—in seconds, no matter the topic or format. But that’s just the beginning. Relevance fuels engagement, so you need to be able to tag and share content, measure its performance, and give your sellers insights into how their buying teams are using it to tailor their pitches and actions. Embedding your management system in your other enablement platforms makes this easy.
Sales readiness
When your sellers listen deeply to your clients and tailor conversations and content to their needs, you’ll see defenses go down—and engagement go up. But your sellers need the confidence and knowledge to move past scripted and rigid interactions. Unifying sales readiness coaching, training and preparation with your enablement platform means you get more data to measure the effectiveness of specific trainings and development strategies.
Sales effectiveness
A flywheel approach lets you create powerful moments that earn buyer attention and trust. Every interaction is an opportunity—if your revenue team can deliver the right message and information to the right person at the right time. But that takes deep insight. Building a revenue enablement stack lets you get data-driven insights to improve messaging relevance, upselling and sales effectiveness.
Buyer engagement
Whether you’re talking in the moment or sending content, buyers respond to personalized experiences. While you must prepare your sellers to deliver customized pitches and relevant content—the sales readiness and effectiveness pillars—you also need the right technology to enable a truly engaging experience. From getting live demos to sharing your content with their stakeholders, buyers want interesting, easy-to-navigate experiences. That may mean offering guided selling tools like mind maps and visual navigation layers, offering personalized video introductions to tee up demo videos, or curating and contextualizing all the content you shared throughout the sales cycle.
Rich data underpins every one of these pillars. Data drives insight, but first, you gotta get the data. Sharing content and tracking interactions like meetings in a sales enablement platform lets you consistently capture data that help your sellers better serve them and respond to opportunities. It also provides aggregated insights into the supports that fuel performance—from marketing to training and coaching—while helping you spot sales cycle trends.
And then …
The flywheel comes full circle. You have the insight to approach sales scientifically, using data to inform selling patterns, improve content, know when to share it, and more. Your organization can move past hunches into data-driven optimization.
It’s a virtuous circle: Better-prepared salespeople > Deeper engagements > More insight > Repeat until you tire of winning. (When will that be? Should we hold our breath?)
OK, that got a little heavy
We just hit you with a whole lotta theory, but you can’t wing enablement. Don’t worry, we’ll return to our usual shenanigans soon enough. In the meantime, why not check out some of our tasty (and more lighthearted) posts:
