Why and how to implement a sales support strategy?

Do you know anything about sales aids? The concept is gaining in popularity and experts are constantly extolling its virtues, but it's sometimes misunderstood. So what is it really?

It's not just another technological gadget - far from it! Sales enablement is a global strategy, an art of war, that stimulates the potential of every salesperson. Its objective? To enable our teams to highlight the uniqueness and strength of our products in a clear, coherent and convincing way.

If we want to stay in the race and outperform the competition, we need to be at the top of our game. We take you on a (re)discovery of sales support, a key concept for improving our performance and successfully implementing our sales strategy.

Definition of sales aid

Sales enablement encompasses everything that enables us to sell more, better and faster. It's a multi-faceted concept, encompassing technologies, tools and practices. Above all, it's a global strategy, implemented throughout the company. We tell you all about it!

What is sales support?

Sales enablement is like the fuel of our sales engine. Simply put, it's a set of processes, practices, technologies and tools designed to improve the results and productivity of our sales team.

According to Collectif d'aide à la vente, 60% of companies surveyed have been implementing this strategy for less than 3 years.

It's a fairly recent phenomenon, and each company has its own definition. But essentially it's a strategy for improving the techniques and tools available to salespeople, so that they are better informed and more effective.

This strategic approach brings together everything salespeople need for successful selling.

This translates differently, depending on the company's objectives. In general, it is based on the sharing of knowledge and the circulation of information between different departments. It enables salespeople to appropriate and master the company's discourse, adapting marketing content to the context of a sale. Sales people are able to mobilize the elements they need in a fluid way, enabling them to remain the driving force throughout the sales cycle.

Sales enablement aligns company departments towards a common goal: optimizing the sales cycle. Marketing, operations, customer service: all these stakeholders have a role to play in delivering relevant, high-quality sales content. Their aim is to help sales people get to know their customers and prospects better, and improve their relationship with them, in order to sell more effectively.

Sales enablement encompasses the company's entire sales organization, as well as the training and tools made available to sales staff. But it doesn't stop there! It's not a question of proposing a single tool: it's a set of processes.

Why use it?

Our ultimate goal, however you define sales support, is to make us true selling machines. We do everything in our power to deliver the perfect customer experience. Because a satisfied customer is a loyal customer, who tells others about us and helps to increase our sales.

When properly executed, this strategy has a clear impact on various indicators: time spent on a sale, success rate and average basket. It's a tremendous growth driver for companies!

By optimizing our sales efficiency, sales support helps to increase sales and improve profitability. According to Forrester, 75% of B2B sales teams will have a sales function by 2021.

But it's not just about increasing sales figures.

The real aim of sales enablement is to optimize the interaction between sales reps and customers. It's an approach that aims to understand customers' needs and expectations in depth, in order to offer them an exceptional experience.

Our customers are constantly in demand, and are spoilt for choice when it comes to the solutions we offer. That's why we have to redouble our efforts to capture their attention, win their trust and close the sale!

Sales enablement is the key to meeting this challenge. It enables us to know who our customers are, anticipate their needs and offer them an unforgettable shopping experience. We can adapt our approach and our discourse to make them more relevant and convincing.

It's what sets us apart from the competition and enables us to build strong, lasting relationships with our customers.

So why use sales support? Simply because it's a win-win investment for us, our company and our customers.

What are the advantages of sales support?

Adopting sales support is like turning on the turbo. For us, it means being better prepared, more efficient and better aligned with our customers' expectations. For the company, it means increased sales and greater customer satisfaction.

Improve sales team performance

For starters, sales support gives our sales team a serious performance boost. How do we do it? By providing us with the tools and resources we need to focus on what we do best: selling.

Sales enablement equips us with the valuable resources we need to drive sales forward. No more hours wasted searching for information or creating sales materials from scratch! Everything is at your fingertips, ready to use.

This means we can spend more time interacting with our customers and closing sales. And because we're better prepared and more efficient, our conversion rate improves. In short, it's a win-win situation for us and for the company!

This strategy also (often) includes training courses to help us improve our skills and expertise. They represent a real goldmine to help us perform better. In particular, training enables us to :

• Learn new sales techniques
• Keep abreast of the latest market trends
• Understand the specific features of our products

It's a real secret weapon when it comes to supporting change management programs, for example! It enables sales people to position themselves quickly on a new product or service.

This strategy has also accelerated sales team motivation. By giving us the tools and skills we need to excel, it boosts our self-confidence and job satisfaction.

Better meet customer needs

Ah, our customers! They're at the heart of our business, and Sales Support is here to help us serve them better. So, how exactly does it work?

First of all, sales support helps us to understand them better.

It puts tools at our disposal, to be more effective in our interactions: CRM to manage our customer relationships, analysis tools to understand their buying behavior and track the history of our interactions with them, find out their preferences and anticipate their needs, etc.

Gone are the days when we had to rely on guesswork or impressions. Today, we have concrete data to guide our actions!

Secondly, sales support gives us the means to personalize our approach.

Thanks to a wide range of easily adaptable sales aids, we can create customized presentations for every customer. Whether it's to highlight a particular product, present a relevant case study or illustrate the benefits of our offer, we have everything we need to convince our customers.

Finally, sales support enables us to be more responsive.

Because we have all the relevant information at our fingertips, we can quickly answer our customers' questions, solve their problems and offer them appropriate solutions. It's a way of showing them that we're there for them, ready to act and determined to satisfy them.

In short, sales support processes enable us to place our customers at the heart of our sales approach. And since we all know that customer satisfaction is the key to commercial success, this translates into increased sales, greater loyalty and more referrals. In other words, it's a virtuous circle for the company.

How do you set up a sales support program?

So, how do we get sales support to work for us? We start with a phase of introspection: first and foremost, we need to know where we're starting from and where we want to go! We determine our needs and objectives before choosing the right tools.

We'll tell you all about it!

Strategy implementation milestones

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1. Reports and analyses

No matter what anyone says, the world of sales is data-driven. Our enablement programs need to mobilize the right data, without drowning salespeople in a ton of irrelevant information.

Turn your data into real business assets by creating systems.

Standardize reporting between teams. Define fundamental data and make it available to all teams. This could be sales activity, demos delivered, leads generated, opportunities won or lost, and so on.

Reporting on this relevant data saves sales staff valuable time, enabling them to repeat what's already working.

Next, carry out a sales process audit. What can be improved? This will enable you to take stock and better guide your sales force on the actions they should implement, or on the contrary, those they should abandon.

This step is crucial in assessing the effectiveness of our strategies. We regularly monitor where we are, what's working and what can be improved. Based on these results, we adjust our strategy.

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2. Organizing content to optimize sales

As mentioned above, a sales aid the program allows you to (among other things) personalize the sales experience for your prospects. But to do this, you need to organize all the content at your disposal.

And this content comes to us mainly from two sources: data (which we collected and organized in the previous step) and marketing content.

Important information: it's essential to carry out a complete audit of available content. Centralize all relevant elements, which may include:

• Case studies
• White papers and ebooks produced in-house
• Your demo decks
• All information on prices
• Your internal content libraries (e.g. Google Doc or your CRM)

Don't forget to check the production date of this content: if it's obsolete, it may not be relevant to reference it!

What's more, if there's one piece of content you need to produce regularly, it's a case study. Nothing has more impact on a prospect's psyche than proof that your solution delivers what it promises!

What tools and resources do you need?

To be successful in our program sales support, we need resources. Training, of course, but also the right tools. To reap the rewards of program sales support, you need to be prepared to invest time and a little money. But with the right organization, the effort is well worth it!

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1. The key to success: qualified human resources

It's essential to have a sales support team made up of competent, motivated professionals. This team is responsible for program design, implementation and follow-up.

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2. Appropriate training

Of course, sales support is not limited to sales training. But it's an essential element: the program can't be effective without proper training. And we want our team to be at the top of their game, don't we? So we've set up training courses on products, sales techniques, customer knowledge... We can tailor training to the specific needs of our team. We make sure that everyone is on the same wavelength and ready to give their best.

In fact, it's one of Modjo's raisons d'être. Our platform lets you create customized training courses based on analysis of salespeople's best practices.

Whereas just a few years ago, you had to sit next to sales reps for training. Today, thanks to conversational intelligence tools like Modjo, you're able to analyze hundreds of your teams' interactions on a massive scale, to identify only those moments worth sharing and duplicating (or not) for all sales reps.

To take things a step further, Léa Hennequart, Account Management Manager at Modjo, shares 5 tips for successful strategic sales support.

3. Technology tools

To facilitate the sales team's work and optimize its performance, it needs the right tools. Depending on our needs, this may include CRM software to track our customer interactions, training platforms to keep us learning, marketing automation tools or analytics tools to measure our performance.

In short: we choose the tools that match our needs and objectives. We can also opt for sales support platforms, which provide us with everything we need to implement an effective strategy.

These resources are all essential to the success of a sales support program. They enable the sales team to be more efficient and deliver a better customer experience, which translates into greater satisfaction, and therefore higher sales.

How profitable is sales support?

Clearly, you're not setting up a sales enablement program just for the fun of it. It's all about improving sales productivity, selling better and increasing company revenues.

So, to check that we're heading in the right direction and that the program is working, we measure our success in terms of return on investment. Because, let's face it: sales support is an investment. You invest time, money, human and technological resources. And if it's well managed, it should be extremely profitable.

The return on investment of a sales aid can be measured according to 3 factors:

• Improve sales performance

It's obvious: if the program is well designed, sales teams perform better. By training sales people and providing them with the tools and information they need, we reduce wasted time and increase their efficiency. This translates into higher sales, shorter sales cycles and improved conversion rates. And this return on investment is measured in euros.

• Customer satisfaction and loyalty

Thanks to sales aids, sales staff are better prepared to meet customers' needs and expectations. Customers are naturally more satisfied and therefore more loyal. And ultimately, customer lifetime value (CLV) increases. They can also spread the word, creating a virtuous circle within the company. In all cases, the return on investment is positive.

• Attracting talent

Finally, return on investment is also measured in terms of the attractiveness of the company. If we do well, we grow. And if we're growing, we need talent. Attracting them is one of the measures of success of our sales support strategy. If sales people know that they will be well taken care of, that they will become more efficient, productive and satisfied with what they deliver, they will want to join the adventure. As a result, a company that invests in sales support is often more attractive to sales talent. It helps attract and retain the best sales professionals!

You've got it: sales support is a strategic combination. The right people, the right technologies and the right tools, to create a flawless sales process.

By focusing on the buyer to deliver the best possible experience at every point of interaction, we improve our efficiency and increase our sales.

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