Sales and marketing teams suffer from a common curse in the digital marketing age: information overload. It doesn’t help sales reps and marketing teams when buyers are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of messages on a daily basis. That’s why it’s become critical to make each touchpoint count.

Sales enablement has one purpose: Making the right message hit home at the most opportune time – when we are there, face-to-face with our prospects.

To show you how sales enablement can improve your sales process, here are five factors to keep in mind.

1.     Begin with Quality Leads
In today’s marketing landscape, a list of contacts with which to execute batch-and-blast campaigns is no longer an option for companies that want to stay ahead. That’s why enabling technology like marketing automation is so important. Marketing automation works to identify low quality leads and execute nurturing programs to nurture them. Furthermore, it helps to identify the best prospects and put them in the hands of sales reps at the most opportune time. We all want leads, but what’s even more important is to pass off to sales the most sales-ready ones.

2. Knowledge Is Power
A generic approach doesn’t work. Marketing automation is moving away from treating all customers the same way and towards tailored approaches for different personas. Your sales team needs to understand the specific needs of the customer– what motivates them to buy and how they move along through the decision making process. That kind of information will enable your team to meet the immediate challenges of buyers.

3.     Keep Top of Mind Awareness
You can’t let prospects forget about you. Sales enablement means having the flexibility to reinforce your message just often enough to keep your solution top-of-mind. Moreover, in larger companies, the decision to buy doesn’t rest with just one person. There’s an internal discussion that takes place. That’s why we need to enable our sales force so that they can be prepared for all objections.

4.     Preparation
“I’m afraid that I will have to get back to you on that one.” When your representative can’t answer that vital question it sends the wrong message. Sales enablement means that the right answer is never further away than a few swipes on the tablet.

5.     Closed-loop Marketing
A key element of sales enablement is the ability of the sales team to come back with more information from the prospect. What worked, what didn’t…What page was viewed on the PPT and what page didn’t resonate. When sales reps come back with this kind of data, it helps marketers create more refined campaigns for future presentations.

What kind of methods are you using to empower your sales reps?