Sales Training vs Sales Enablement: The Key Differences

Sales has come a long way since the days of trawling through the phone book and pitching products instead of solutions. But, no matter how cutting edge your business, service, or website seems, without a strong sales team behind it, you could seriously be missing out. 

Successful sales teams generate new B2B leads, build relationships with existing customers, and increase revenue and engagement. So, the power of your sales team should never be underestimated.

So, if you’re looking for the best tools to create high-quality content for your sales team, you need to understand the difference between sales training and sales enablement. Thankfully, we’ve done the research for you!

Sales Enablement and Sales Training: Understanding the Differences

Sales training is the process of educating and ‘upskilling’ your sales team, whereas sales enablement provides B2B sales teams with the resources needed to convert more leads and close more deals. But it’s important to remember that one doesn’t work without the other’s support. The common link here is to become more effective at selling and ultimately increase revenue.

There are many ways to increase leads and earnings. For instance, tech businesses targeting B2B customers in Singapore might use a custom Singapore domain to gain more business opportunities and build a stronger brand identity. Coupled with robust sales enablement and sales training, you’re on to a winning combination.

Custom domains offer a fantastic way to boost your website SEO (search engine optimization) too, as it’s more tricky to rank with a free domain name. For this reason, you may want to consider getting a custom domain via OpenLegacy.

Sales Enablement Examples 

The best B2B sales enablement systems are being used to unify marketing and sales lead funnels. They also boost sales efficiency targets and cross-selling and upselling opportunities, while nurturing perceptive buyer interactions at the same time.

To provide a clearer picture, we’ve listed some key sales enablement examples below.

Sales Enablement Content

Having the right content at your fingertips will save your sales team valuable time and effort, while quickly educating B2B leads about your product or service. Concise sales enablement content will empower your sales team to close deals faster too.

Prime examples of sales enablement content are:

• Case studies
• Customer success stories
• Pricing options

Knowledge Enablement

Knowledge enablement ensures the most important information is readily available to your sales team, to help them build relationships and successfully close the deal. Examples include:

• Product information
• Company statistics
• Sales scripts / detailed infographics

Sales Enablement Tools

The best sales enablement tools connect the dots between marketing, content and sales cycles. Hubspot, Salesforce, and Sharepoint all offer compatible sales enablement solutions tailored to the tech industry.

Allowing for intelligent AI and automation processes, proactive CRM databases are being used to make tech company sales teams more productive. Sales enablement tools offer a variety of intuitive B2B features, including:

• Content analytics
• Sales gamification
• Sales automation

The Key Pillars of Sales Enablement

Of course, the sweet spot for any business is an increase in revenue. But what other benefits are there to implementing a modern sales enablement strategy? Combine the following key pillars of sales enablement to make your overall sales process more efficient and vibrant.

Training and Coaching

From learning how to fax with a computer to devising action plans and advising salespeople, there are many ways to improve your sales performance.

Examples: Real-time tools for B2B software sales reps that fully demonstrate the value of the product. Sales strategy and tactic training.

Benefits: Boosts motivation, builds productive relationships within the business and across departments, and positively impacts on self-confidence and wellness.

When it comes to efficiency, OpenLegacy cloud integration has become the ‘go-to’ solution for savvy tech companies in search of an efficient automated sales enablement process. Used to optimize business processes and eliminate hard-to-access data silos, good cloud-based sales training makes B2B sales training viable.

Sales Optimization Strategy

Did you know personalization can lead to a 20% increase in user engagement in B2B marketing? Amongst a range of impressive features, in a similar fashion to how a country-code domain personalizes the experience to a particular geographic region (e.g. domain Qatar for customers of a company based in that country), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data can help to create a more personalized customer experience all round.

Examples: CRM automation tools, e.g. prospect follow-up, quote generation, meeting scheduling. Testing different points in the sales process.

Benefits: Higher conversion rates and better quality prospects shorter sales cycles

Sales Collateral

With around 40% of B2B companies consuming three to five pieces of content before even engaging with a sales rep, engaging content has never been more important to technology companies seeking exponential growth, revenue and sales.

Examples: Adverts, flyers, product catalogs, white papers, infographics, FAQs.

Benefits: Demonstrates professionalism and expertise, increases trust, fuels buyer curiosity, and increases conversions.

Marketing and Sales Team Adjustment

Restructure your team by aligning marketing and sales teams. This will enable both teams to share common goals, strategize together and create joint KPIs. Incorporating effective email outreach campaigns can significantly enhance your sales enablement efforts, as these campaigns provide a direct and personalized way to engage potential customers.

Examples: Getting the sales team to read the company blog (remember, it’s best to host this on a custom domain, such as an .ae domain from OnlyDomains if your company is based in the United Arab Emirates). Sales teams provide feedback to the marketing team. 

Benefits: Leverage negotiations, resonate with audiences, and improve forecast accuracy.

Intuitive Sales Technology

With a real emphasis on the word ‘intuitive’, choosing the right technology and training for your specific industry is key. Whether it’s improving signal reliability with VoIP for small business or specialist CRM Software for technology companies, exhaustive research is needed to find the best tech platform for your sales team.

Examples: HubSpot Sales Hub. AI sales tools, e.g. chatbots and predictive analytics programs.

Benefits: Automation eliminates repetitive tasks, gives reps more time to sell, streamlines proposals and reports, and boosts productivity.

The Key Pillars of Sales Training 

Putting an effective sales training program in place can help you gain many exciting benefits, such as closing more deals and enhancing communication skills and productivity within your sales team. With this in mind, here are the key pillars of sales training, followed by some working examples to provide absolute clarity.

Define Sales Training Objectives

Defining the specific results and metrics you want your sales training program to achieve will help to create the best course content for existing and future sales teams. By pinpointing your sales training goals you can focus on delivering the outcomes that are important to your business, as well as improving hiring resources and the way sales training is delivered.

Pick the Correct Medium of Delivery

Choosing the right content in the correct format for your sales team is another key pillar to consider. A successful training format is practical, interactive, and accessible to all adult learners, and will equip your sales team with the skills and knowledge to achieve notable results in no time.

Company Values and Culture

When it’s time to expand your sales team, it’s important for new employees to fully understand your company culture and values from the outset. Providing constructive feedback and post-training coaching will also get the most out of your sales team, while also raising performance, confidence, and commitment.

Sales Training Examples

Inside Sales Training AKA Selling Remotely

In a highly competitive market, most B2B and tech companies fit into this popular sales category. It’s interesting to note that nearly half of all fast-growing tech companies use inside sales.

Examples: Selling by phone call, email or online.
Benefits: Quicker response time to leads, more time to sell, easier scalability, provides B2B customers with an alternative way to research and buy.

Outside Sales Training AKA Field Sales

Field sales travel to visit clients in person, which means they end up spending most of their time off-site. Virtual instructor-led sales training removes logistical barriers and opens up learning to an infinite audience.

Examples: Face-to-face meetings and sales appointments.
Benefits: Stronger customer relationships, better impact on customers, more direct source of customer data and feedback.

Digital Sales Training

It can’t be ignored that 90% of organizations use some form of eLearning in their training programs today. Using ‘how-to’ videos, online assessments, workflow tools, and more, online courses are often more effective at retaining learners throughout the duration of the course.

Examples: Video conference, Interactive Online Learning Simulation, and webinars.
Benefits: Cultivates a winning sales environment.

Sales Coaching Programs

According to the latest study by the Corporate Executive Board, sales reps who receive effective coaching are 19% more likely to be satisfied with their job than those who don’t receive any coaching.

Examples: Former salespeople looking for more leadership experience.

Benefits: Better collaboration across teams and lead retention.

The Takeaway

In such a fast-paced world, understanding the difference between sales enablement and sales training could mean success or failure for your business. Effectively allowing sales team’s to convert as many prospects as possible, sales enablement and training should be at the forefront of any tech company’s mind.By focusing on the right training topics and appointing empowering sales coaching techniques, you can look forward to an evolving sales team with all bases covered to capture more leads and create a prosperous selling cycle.